Personal and political meet in powerful Yael Farber drama

Arts Week with Judy Murphy – judymurphy@ctribune.ie

She is renowned for creating drama that addresses big social and political issues, and has won awards internationally for this work, but South African-born director Yael Farber, who returns to Galway Arts Festival this year, says her primary role is to tell a good story and move people.

Her work for this year’s Festival is Mies Julie, Farber’s interpretation of August Strindberg’s 1880s classic play about class and gender, transported to a South African setting, where race is also added to the mix. 

In 2012 the production from South Africa’s Baxter Theatre in association with the South African State Theatre, won Best of Edinburgh Fringe Award, an Edinburgh Fringe First Award and an Edinburgh Herald Angel Award. Last December, Mies Julie was in The Guardian’s top ten best theatre picks of 2012 and The New York Times Top Ten Plays of 2012.

Yael is currently in Mumbai, India, where she is working with a group of Indian actors on a play based on the horrifying gang rape and subsequent death of a young woman, a medical student, in Delhi last year. The resulting play, Nirbhaya (Fearless) will premiere at Edinburgh in August.

She speaks quickly, but everything she says is measured – she is a woman who takes drama seriously and has done since her youth in Johannesburg.

“In making theatre I’m interested in just showing the tender human mess of it all, and don’t have grandiose notions about changing the world,” she explains.  “I have to be a very good storyteller and get good storytellers to join me because good theatre is about stories well told. They can be simple, but they have to be good.”

Theatre is a very powerful ritual and it links us back to our forefathers, she adds. “Telling people stories is a way of generating a capacity for empathy because it defies the myth that we are different.

“It works its magic if you bring magic to it, because the audience will give back what you give to it. My mandate is to make theatre that’s compelling and moves people.”

She certainly does that, as her previous production at Galway Arts Festival proved. Molora was adapted from the Greek tragedy, The Oresteia and based on South Africa’s Peace and Reconciliation Commission.

 Mies Julie too has won praise  everywhere it has played. And it was because of yet another work that Yael got a call from Indian actress Poorna Jagannathan last year following the death of the young Delhi woman, which affected Yael greatly, as it did so many people.

“Poorna had seen one of my works, Amajuba in New York,” the director explain. “I do two strands of work, testimonial or adaptations of classics and Amajuba was testimonial.”

The testimonial plays involve real people’s stories, recreated for theatre. It’s a powerful way of engaging with people and is the style she is adopting in India. Poorna who had been a victim of a sexual assault in her youth, told Yael that women in Mumbai were ready to talk about their experiences and invited her there. Otherwise, Yael would “never have assumed to arrive in India and tell that story”.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.