Pauline Malefane, Ayanda Tikolo, and Siphosethu Juta in A Man of Good Hope (photograph by Keith Pattison)

The journey costs him ‘every last cent he had’, Asad tells us, and much more besides. His goal, like many a refugee before him, is to acquire transit papers for the United States, the fabled land of money, opportunity, and ‘the biggest trucks in the world’ (the young Asad’s naïveté extends to believing there are no guns in America, a line that draws bitter laughter from an audience all too familiar with that country’s history of gun violence).

Asad’s story, powerfully if schematically told in this production, is almost too harrowing for words. At age eight, he watches as militiamen gun down his mother. A year later, he finds himself nursing a woman shot in an attempted ‘honour’ killing (‘I had no choice,’ Asad tells someone who questions him, ‘she was just a person in trouble’). The woman adopts Asad as her son, but, in a pattern that will mark his life as a refugee, the two are wrenched apart by circumstance and violence. He finds and flees with various uncles and cousins, even marrying and bearing a child in Ethiopia, but he is ultimately separated from them all. If Asad as a boy (Siphosethu Hintsho) desires a truck, then money as a young man (Thandolwethu Mzembe), all the adult Asad (Ayanda Siyabonga Tikolo) wants is safety.

Ayanda Tikolo and Siphosethu Juta in A Man of Good Hope (photograph by Keith Pattison)

But even in prosperous, post-apartheid Johannesburg, where Asad finds work helping a cousin run a small shop, danger is omnipresent. A disagreement with an employee explodes into terrible violence. Enmity towards immigrants like Asad, a ‘non-pure blood’ Somali, is rife among black South Africans yet to see the benefits of the new racial equality. Asad, terrified of gangs and their targeting of supposedly wealthy white people, will only speak to Steinberg (portrayed, intriguingly, by actor–trumpeter Mandisi Dyantyis) in his car with its 360-degree views and promise of a rapid escape. ‘I am so tired of violence,’ Asad says at one point. When, in real life, Steinberg asked Asad to read the first draft of his book, he declined. ‘The story of his past,’ Steinberg writes in his program note, ‘was simply too sad.’ And yet Isango Ensemble’s adaptation – performed in English and Xhosa, a Nguni Bantu language with ‘click’ consonants – is far from grim.

As with their Flute, the action takes place on a steeply raked stage flanked by arrays of marimbas and pairs of bin-like drums. Weathered sheets of corrugated iron form the backdrop. Wooden doors and frames, wielded by the large ensemble of twenty-five, indicate the thresholds between worlds both small and large: countries, refugee camps, the shops and homes that Asad inhabits all too fleetingly.

Under the dynamic musical direction of Mandisi Dyantyis and Pauline Malefane, the score seamlessly weaves together percussive, infectiously joyous African choruses – inflected with the localised differences of the countries Asad travels through, and accompanied by Lungelo Ngamlana’s bracingly energetic choreography – and soaring, Western-style arias.

Ensemble members take it in turns to play the marimbas and drums – both of which are used to generate the play’s soundscape as well as its score – and shift in and out of minor roles with well-drilled speed and dextrousness. It is in these shifts that the play most benefits from the complexity of its source material, effectively dramatising the ease with which the oppressed can become the oppressor rather than painting a propagandistically straightforward picture of the refugee experience. There is additional pleasure in the diversity of the ensemble, which is not just ethnically heterogeneous but also displays a range of body types not often seen on our stages. 

The cast of A Man of Good Hope (photograph by Keith Pattison)

The trio of actors who play Asad are uniformly excellent, but it is Hintsho, the youngest, who stands out. Truthful, charismatic, and equally adept at acting, singing, and dancing, he is utterly credible and a joy to watch. Together, the three form a complex portrait of a likeable, empathetic man but one brutalised by almost unendurable hardship.

The ‘lesson’ is not that he is a saint – he treats some of the women in his life too poorly, and he is insufficiently immune to the moral blind spots engendered by familial ties, for that – but that no one should have to live a life of such fear and sorrow. Ultimately, despite his hucksterish élan, Asad emerges as a figure of stoicism rather than hope. For all its life-affirming verve, A Man of Good Hope is a work of more ambivalence than its title would suggest, and is all the more humane as a result.           

‘What about the other stories?’ Asad asks Steinberg at the conclusion of the play. ‘Will someone write them too?’ We may well ask the same question in our country as a government desperate to replay the sordid election victories of the past once again seeks to rob asylum seekers of their humanity.

A Man of Good Hope is being performed by the Young Vic and Isango Ensemble at the Royal Theatre as part of the Adelaide Festival 5–11 March 2019. Performance attended: March 5.