This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

12th April 2008

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Sky’s The Limit is a new play devised by Helen Iskander and students from Wits University. Iskander is well-known for her work with husband and co-founder of the Fresco Theatre company, James Cunningham (Baobabs Don’t Grow Here, Jutro, Electric Juju), and this production bears the marks of her previous successes. But that’s not to say it is entirely successful.

The play is set in a block of flats – a “set” that is created through minimalist techniques such as chalking the stage with the stylised white outlines of a floor plan to indicate walls, doors, counters, cupboards and stairs (audiences may recognise this from, for instance, Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville and other “black box” theatre pieces). We soon realise that this layout is repeated on each of the six floors of the building, creating a generic space in which the occupants of the various apartments lead their separate lives.

Their spatial relationship is demonstrated in miniature through a model of the building, which changes as contents are added to or removed from each flat. This is an effective visual representation of the “vertical” axis that, initially, is the only thing connecting the characters: six storeys represent six stories.

In the penthouse are Estelle (Claudine Ullman) and Shane (Paul Gray), sex-crazed newlyweds whose marital bliss is interrupted and temporarily shattered by Gavin (Roberto Pombo) – a conman who weasels his way into their lives before stealing their money and worldly possessions. Below them is the well-meaning but clumsy and socially awkward Peter (Nicholas Welch), who has just moved into the building. He lives above Jenna (Alex-Ann Keppie), an agoraphobe whose only form of companionship is a missing cat and an anonymous online chatroom.

The characters who live below them engage with the world in the opposite way: they spend their lives talking to and shouting at others, but they repress their interiority. Zaara (Gulafsha Sayed) is estranged from her husband but can’t bring herself to tell her mother that her marriage is over. Lerato (Onthatile Matshidiso) is a workaholic advertising exec whose rushed yoga exercises and sedative cocktails can’t cure her insomnia – a result, we discover, of her guilt about putting her job ahead of her dying mother. Presiding over (or rather, under) all of them is Jacob the doorman, a stickler for procedure who is nonetheless bumbling and incompetent, and who is madly infatuated with Lerato.

With the exception of the newlyweds, these are sad and lonely people. Curiously, however, as they simultaneously inhabit their separate spaces (which are, in fact, the same space) and as they begin to clutter the stage, a sense of claustrophobia develops. The actors exchange props – Peter’s moving boxes become Shane and Estelle’s wedding gifts, which they duly unwrap – but the characters themselves do not interact, or they pass by one another without realising it. This is a “horizontal” axis of sorts, which exposes how odd it actually is that we don’t bump into other people more often.

I was reminded of the opening lines of the 2005 movie Crash, in which Don Cheadle’s character complains that Los Angeles has so many car accidents because people miss “the sense of touch”: “In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”

Everyone is walking in Sky’s The Limit – they walk past and around and near each other – but for much of the play they still don’t touch. Yet, as in Crash, their stories weave together and they are forced to interact. Sometimes the possibilities for interpersonal exchange are curtailed: Zaara plays loud music to “de-stress”, which only makes Lerato more stressed, resulting in a frenzied shouting match when they confront one another face to face. At other times, the communication barrier is overcome by the human need for recognition: Peter finds Jenna’s cat, which has given birth to kittens, and when he returns it to her they begin a relationship together.

The tone of the play (enhanced by apposite choices of music) is somewhere between the comic and the tragic; it affirms a sense of community, of human ties, but it also portrays the inevitable alienation of one individual from another. That is a difficult balance to find and, as is often the case with professional-student collaborations, at times this production lacks the execution needed to carry it off. There is a tendency to over-act, the mime is inconsistent and the use of puppets, while innovative, is not always convincing. Numerous sound and lighting cues slow the pace slightly. These aspects will no doubt be improved during the run and in future productions of the play.