Work Cited process of loss and becoming who one is supposed to Simpson, Philip. “Noir and the Psycho Thriller.” A Companion be (hence the play text’s references to the notion of to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles J. Rzepka & Lee Horsley. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. pp. 187–97. individuation): “[f]or Persephone to become a wom- an,” Reznek explained in an interview on Morning Live (SABC), “she has to leave the mother … to become the Neil van Heerden person that she is”. The opening segment of the play [email protected] is titled “Demeter’s Dream”, while the last segment University of South Africa carries the weighty and beautiful title of “The terrible, Pretoria terrible noise”. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8631-6350 Reading a play is of course quite different from DOI: https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.57i1.7841 watching a live performance of the same play (espe- cially when the production makes use of video projec- tions), but Reznek’s text is intellectually stimulating, evocative and emotionally involving. Numerous black- I Turned Away and She Was Gone: A Play. and-white photographs provide the reader with a clear Jennie Reznek. idea of the set and the stage space, as well as of how Cape Town: Modjaji Books, 2019. 62 pp. Reznek—playing all the characters, including the Ac- ISBN 978-1-928215-70-7. tress performing the characters in the play—would occupy and perform in this space. The text is also in- Theatre performer, director and playwright Jennie structive and decisive in describing the actions and Reznek is a renowned and acclaimed presence on the movements that happen across the stage, and how the South African theatre scene. In her MA dissertation performer would engage with the available props and published in 2012, Reznek (3) writes that her study décor. explores her “obsession with teaching the physical the- Reading the play already provides a sense of the atre body over the past twenty-five years”; it follows intimacy the performed play would provide, and that that her plays and performances emphasise the central- it requires; an intimacy that makes it possible for a ity of the body in theatre. Having trained at the Diploma performer to communicate themes such ageing and the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, Reznek’s published arti- pervasive threat of abusive men to an audience in a safe cles and book chapters offer provocative discussions space. Discussing her play on Morning Live, Reznek talks of the value of Jacques Lecoq’s work for South African about how “audiences feel very engaged and very in- physical theatre pedagogies and for creative work, volved” in the play in part as a result of its use of space, particularly in how Lecoq infused her own creative and she discusses the myth of Persephone and Deme- projects at Magnet Theatre in Cape Town. Reznek is a ter as “[holding] many of the ideas we wanted to speak founding member of Magnet Theatre, which “has been about”. Reznek extracts from the myth the interrelat- associated with innovative attempts to give physical edness of women’s lives beyond the social descriptors expression to often unspoken or unrecorded memories of daughter, mother, grandmother: Hecate was the one and experiences” (Flockemann 134). to witness Kore’s abduction, an event that is adapted Reznek’s play I Turned Away and She Was Gone— for the play in a textual precursor to the #metoo move- published in 2019 but first performed in 2016—deals ment. Here, Reznek highlights how woman are caring with the body, memory and womanhood as these forc- for young children as well as for older women (Kore is es shape the lives of three South African women drawn abducted during the period that her mother Demeter is from pre-existing archetypes. These women represent caring for Hecate). Reznek manages to give each wom- not only a particular social role (mother, caretaker, an her due as a character, yet it is Demeter who remains nurturer) but offer narrative echoes of Greek mythol- the most central character as she binds the past and ogy: Demeter, Kore (later Persephone) and Hecate. the future together: while Kore pursues a burgeoning Or, as the play’s publisher’s summary describes it: sense of self that culminates in the construct of Perse- the women in the play as incarnations of women that phone and Hecate bemoans how she has been reframed haunt each other in various ways. These women co-ex- in her advanced age (“I was glorious once / Until you ist across temporalities while inhabiting trajectories reconfigured me as an this old hag”), it is Demeter who that honour each women’s individuation process. The wears the Janus-face towards what was and what will play text contains 16 episodes—or segments—of vary- be, caught between two women that she knows well, ing length that provide the thematic thread of the dual and not that well at all. In the end, this visually rich

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 57(1) • 2020 155 ISSN: 0041-476X E-SSN: 2309-9070 and poetic play presents the reader not with an apo- theosis but something altogether more rewarding and though-provoking: a thematically layered tale about women (and the bodies that make them) and the ne- cessity of surrendering into a seeming paradox of vul- nerability and strength. I Turned Away and She Was Gone was nominated for four Fleur du Cap Awards, including Best New South African Script, and was nominated for a Naledi Award for Best Cutting Edge Production.

Works Cited Flockemann, Miki. “Facing the Stranger in the Mirror: Staged Complicities in Recent South African Performances.” South African Theatre Journal vol. 25, no. 2, 2011, pp. 129–41. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2 011.636972. Reznek, Jennie. Interview with SABC Morning Live. YouTube. 13 Feb. 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Xv7wsMskPXQ. Accessed 8 Jan. 2020. _____. Moving Ideas about Moving Bodies: Teaching Physical Theatre as a Response to Violence and the Violated Body. MA Thesis. U Cape Town, 2012. https://open.uct.ac.za/ handle/11427/11377.

Chris Broodryk [email protected] University of Pretoria Pretoria ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0760-8663 DOI: https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.57i1.7823

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 57(1) • 2020 156 ISSN: 0041-476X E-SSN: 2309-9070