Shelves piled high with love, betrayal and immense fortitude
Some people’s lives read more like fiction than reality, and the price they often pay is intense suffering. Rika’s Rooms is a one woman play based on the life of the playwright Gail Louw’s own mother, whose extraordinary life is borne of vast historical events that traumatised swathes of humanity. Directed by Anthony Shrubsall, the play charts a story forged from the fire and rubble of Nazi Germany, the Jewish resistance to the British in Palestine and Apartheid South Africa.
Emma Wilkinson Wright plays the eponymous Rika across all stages of her life, from a frightened, bewildered Jewish child, to a beautiful young girl operating as an undercover agent for the Irgun, to an old woman with Alzheimer’s, hunched over with age. Her performance is jaw-dropping, as she metamorphoses through each change, somehow as believable with a ‘shining morning face’ as in ‘second childishness’. She also voices the other characters; the nurses in the care home, her lovers, her children, her husband’s family. This could feel gimmicky with another actor but through her skill Wilkinson Wright instead brings these ghosts from Rika’s past into the room.
Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease, and Louw doesn’t shy away from her portrayal of the painful unselfing of someone she loves. With the illness comes a reemergence of past trauma, as Rika becomes confused between past and present and ghosts feel more alive than warm flesh and blood. Wilkinson Wright brilliantly conveyed the lingering pain of Rika’s turbulent past – the fear of interrogation, of being watched, betrayed, and abandoned.
However, the balance between past and present felt off, as the moments portraying Rika’s present day felt overly focused on compared to her earlier life. The same scenes in the present played out again and again – and though in part effective in conveying the confusion of Rika’s narration as her world becomes unreliable it began to feel dramatically repetitive. Rika’s time in South Africa felt particularly underdeveloped, with a swift transition from her outrage at the racism and division to her lotus-eating – sipping tea, eating dainty biscuits and shouting at the servants, like all the other Johannesburg middle class white women.
The set was simple but effective – a stage littered with paraphernalia where the significance of individual items was gradually revealed. A smart leather bag given to a poor young woman that turned her head towards marrying the wrong man; a china cup in a dazzling hotel where that same young woman was wined and dined by a man she would help betray. After an experience of acute grief Rika talks of the emptiness she feels inside, with shelves stripped of belongings. However, within these caverns remains a spirit that can’t be quelled, a spirit to whom Wilkinson Wright does beautiful and unflinching justice.
Rika’s Rooms is at the Tabard Theatre until the 25th July. Tickets linked here.