• 1 Lara Foot Newton also publishes under the name Lara Foot. This article uses Foot Newton because Arm (...)
• 2 In addition to the anti-apartheid plays mentioned earlier, Pieter-Dirk Uys’s works exemplify the cr (...)

1The role that humour can play in colonial resistance has been celebrated by many postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial authors. As Chinua Achebe opines in The Education of a British Protected Child, “[d]spossession is, of course, no laughing matter, no occasion for humor. And yet the amazing thing is that the dispossessed will often turn his powerlessness to good account and laugh, and thereby lift himself out of desolation and despair” (2009, 9). In South Africa, the tradition of audiences laughing back at dispossession and colonial violence in theatrical performances can be traced back to several iconic anti-apartheid plays, including Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon’s Woza Albert!; Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead; and Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona’s The Island. Laughter in these instances may be said to help humanize the dispossessed colonial subject because, as Achebe opines, “humor is quintessentially human” (9). Yet, the transition between apartheid and democracy in South Africa, marked by the 1994 national election, has modified the role that humour occupies in a deeply divided state. As post-apartheid plays such as Lara Foot Newton’s Reach (2009) reveal, humour is a tool that can help people overcome the divisions apartheid established between ethnicities, classes, genders, and generations.1 Whereas apartheid-era playwrights used humour to ridicule state violence and humanize victims, in many post-apartheid plays humour between characters hinges on shared experiences or joking as a means of exorcising anxieties and celebrating a united South African national identity.2

• 3 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is also referred to through the acronym TRC.

2Reviewers interpret Reach as a work that explores crises impacting reconciliation in the post-apartheid state. Introducing Reach in Armed Response: Plays from South Africa, David Peimer argues that it “is deeply ironic that, after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, both hope and abandonment should emerge as prevalent South African themes” (2009, xv).3 For Peimer, Reach “does not describe this development; it gets inside the very nerve of the tension inherent in these conflicting feelings” (xv). In a similar vein, Greg Homann’s introduction to At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa describes the play as a “story of trying to connect, of trying to narrow the divide between differing histories, generations and racial lines in an attempt to accept, acknowledge and reconcile the traumatic past” shared by the two central characters (2009, 18). Homann argues that Reach “is as much a reminder of the need for reconciliation as it is a warning that reconciliation is an ongoing process” (18). He views the bond between the two characters as verging on familial, noting by the conclusion that “they have become like mother and son.” (Homann 2009, 19). Expanding on this point, Homann asserts all the plays in his anthology “prioritise the significance of female figures,” suggesting that “mothers, aunts and grandmothers, often in surrogate roles,” are the ones “who have inspired our aspirations and instilled our moral sensibilities.” (19). This is true for Reach because the non-biological familial bond leads to reconciliation in the domestic space.

• 4 Lyn Graybill defines ubuntu in the following terms: “Ubuntu derives from the Xhosa expression ‘Umun (...)

3For Marcia Blumberg, Reach is one of two plays that “premiered in 2007, many years after the formal conclusion of the TRC, to examine how individuals still need to confront the pain of personal happenings instead of those that were dealt with in public forums” (2009, 246). Yvette Hutchison interprets the play as “asking what other things we need to ‘unthink’ in order to achieve ubuntu” (2013, 160).4 Catherine Powell’s master’s thesis is the most comprehensive study of the play to-date. For Powell, “Reach deals with questions of identity, alienation, and belonging” and “explores new ways to heal the wounds left by a continued legacy of violence” (2010, 23­; 34). She reads the personal interactions between the play’s characters as a microcosm of the “larger problems of reconciliation and healing in the new South Africa,” arguing acts of caring cultivate reconciliation (Powell, 34–35). Focusing on aspects of the play for which Powell provides cursory analysis, such as the role humour occupies, this article argues humour helps the two characters break stereotypes and construct a familial bond.

• 5 Foot Newton repeatedly uses a lighter tone or humour in plays exploring serious topics in post-apar (...)

5The play and playwright are canonical in the field of post-apartheid South African theatre, but Reach is of particular significance to contemporary South African drama due to the playwright’s exploration of humour as a potential means to redress crises in the new state.5 Foot Newton has won multiple awards, including a Fleur du Cap Award in 1992 and 2003 and a Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year Award in 1995 (University of Cape Town, 2025). She is the current CEO and Director of the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa (University of Cape Town, 2025). Many of her plays have circulated nationally as well as internationally, as is the case with Reach. The play was first performed in 2007 at the Theaterformen festival in Hanover, Germany. After its debut, it ran at the 2007 National Arts Festival. It then appeared at the Baxter Theatre and eventually moved to The Market Theatre, Johannesburg (Homann 2009b, 31). Near the end of 2007 Reach toured extensively in Sweden, staged at theatres in Uppsala, Umeå, and Stockholm (Homann, 31). It was then published twice in 2009, both in Peimer’s Armed Response: Plays from South Africa as Reach and Homann’s At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa under the title Reach!. Foot Newton then reworked the play into Solomon and Marion in 2013 and published it with Oberon. This article uses the Seagull Books edition, edited by Peimer, as the anthology’s international publisher reflects the global circulation of Reach and the way that theatrical stagings of reconciliation were performed within, and beyond, South Africa’s borders at the time. Peimer’s use of the phrase “plays from South Africa” in the subtitle of his anthology (emphasis added) embodies the same type of transnational circulation that Reach experienced in its debut.

• 6 My discussion of Otherness in this instance draws upon Homi K. Bhabha’s assertion that the Other is (...)
• 7 Foot Newton and Clare Stopford, the director of Reach’s debut, debated whether to cast Solomon as a (...)

6I approach the text as a state-of-the-nation play. In doing so, this article draws upon Nadine Holdsworth’s definition of a state-of-the-nation play as a work that “deploys representations of personal events” to serve “as a microcosm of the nation-state” (2010, 39). If one reads Reach in this way, each character’s distrust of the other becomes emblematic of the trauma extending from apartheid. For instance, Marion frequently views Solomon as Other.6 One such example is when Solomon’s unexpected arrival causes Marion to assume he is a burglar. She has been aware of his presence for several days, without making direct contact, and believes he is planning to kill her: “If you are here to murder me, just hurry up and get on with it. I can’t wait forever, you know” (Foot Newton 2009b, 132). Marion’s reaction is based on Solomon’s outward appearance. She explains her first impression of Solomon in a letter to her daughter, revealing that her preliminary distrust is grounded in the belief that he is “one of those awful tsotsiies [sic],” a dangerous criminal (Foot Newton 2009b, 131).7 As a theatrical device, the letter grants the audience access to Marion’s internal thoughts and biases towards Solomon.

• 8 Julie Berg and Wilfried Schärf corroborate this trend by studying crime statistics between 1994 and (...)

7Marion exemplifies the mindset that Ashraf Jamal describes as sustaining South Africa’s psychological imprisonment when she assumes Solomon is a tsotsi (2005, 17). Building on Albie Sachs’ argument in “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” Jamal reflects that, fifteen years after the publication of Sachs’ paper, the “South African imaginary has by no means overwhelmed, bypassed, or ignored the conditions for its continued oppression” (Jamal 2005, 17). Marion, in this instance, is unable to overcome her prejudices about Solomon’s difference and, as a result, fails to trust him or grasp his intent. At this point in the play, the audience is equally ignorant about his purpose. This provides the potential for them to make the same negative assumptions as Marion. Describing her uneasy relationship with Solomon, Peimer notes that the play is “located in a very concrete post-apartheid reality” (2009, xv). In this instance Marion’s fear reflects broad anxieties around violent crime and sexual violence in the early years of national independence. Helen Moffett’s study of sexual violence and the political transition from apartheid to democracy finds the “first ten years of the new state have seen a dramatic increase in sexual assaults on women, children and men” (Moffett 2006, 132).8 It is within this context that one should view Marion’s hesitation as emblematic of a larger population who remain anxious in their interactions with strangers due to a pervasive fear of violence.

• 9 It should be noted here that food and its connection with sustenance and bodily needs are the terra (...)

12The first example of Solomon connecting with Marion on a comic level occurs during his second visit to her home. Debating the limits of what they consider to be edible in each of their cultures – English and Xhosa – Marion tricks Solomon into believing that English South Africans regard pigs’ testicles as “a delicacy,” a deception she corrects by proclaiming “Just pulling your leg” (Foot Newton 2009b, 136). This joke is predicated on catching Solomon making assumptions about the “eccentric” cuisine that white South Africans eat (Foot Newton, 136). Solomon modifies this joke structure to reverse the humour, convincing Marion that he “once ate the eye of a cat,” a lie he tells to poke fun at white assumptions about Xhosa cuisine (Foot Newton, 136). Solomon laughs when Marion seeks clarification on the truthfulness of his statement. Solomon’s rejoinder to the joke, “We might be savage but we are not that bad,” underscores Marion’s ignorance of Xhosa culture by implying that, to believe such a lie, she must view him as “savage” and Other (Foot Newton, 136). In both cases the characters catch the other believing false stereotypes about food tastes.9

• 10 Beyond the shared codes that Reichl and Stein argue underpin comic exchanges, they note that “If we (...)

14However, this scene is a powerful instance where Solomon uses humour to close the distance between Xhosa culture and Marion’s position by subverting the Otherness generated by the stereotype. His action is a response to Marion’s claim: “There is a certain point, my boy, at which cultures will never collide,” showing that there is in fact a link between their cultures: humour (Foot Newton 2009b, 135). Dunphy and Emig’s argument that stereotyping prevents hybridisation does not reflect their overall view on humour, which they believe generally “resembles hybridity structurally in its modification and transfer of positions” (2010, 25). This is because humour rests on both a “difference (of positions, assumptions, and expectations),” but “also on similarity” (Dunphy & Emig 2010, 25). While different perspectives produce the incongruity from which humour often emerges, like Reichl and Stein (2005, 13), Dunphy and Emig contend the teller and listener must reach a similar understanding to view an exchange as comic (2010, 25).10 In this example, Solomon and Marion’s dialogical foregrounding of stereotypes, and the humour contained therein, constitutes a constructive act of mutual exchange. The joking lays bare the hidden stereotypes that each party holds towards the other and foregrounds their shared values as neither considers pigs’ testicles or cats’ eyes to be edible. Solomon’s joke about the cat’s eye is important because it moves from a moment of aggression, Solomon laughing at Marion’s prejudice, to a moment that ultimately unites the pair when Marion embraces Solomon’s reversal of her initial joke: “My goodness. A Sense of humor! That’s a luck!” (Foot Newton 2009b, 136). This moment segues into Marion inviting Solomon to tea and asking if Solomon has finished school, gestures that signal friendship through showing personal interest in Solomon’s life and sharing food and drink (2009b, 136).

• 11 Solomon associates the name of the paint with white people’s performance of affluence. He contends (...)

16Another significant example of transcultural humour develops during Solomon’s explanation of his dismissal from Woolworths. The comic story begins with Solomon derisively laughing at white upper-class behaviour but ends with another instance of cohesion. The laughter begins when Marion asks Solomon where he managed to find the paint he uses to restore her house. Solomon’s vague response, “[h]ardware,” prompts Marion to dig further, uncovering that Solomon took the paint without paying for it (Foot Newton 2009b, 140). Marion’s appreciation of the colour, admitting that at least he “borrowed a tasteful colour,” causes Solomon’s amusement because it reinforces his own stereotypes of white privilege (Foot Newton 2009b, 140). Solomon finds the situation humorous because he did not select the paint based on colour, but rather on cost: “I just chose the most expensive one. That’s how white people choose, isn’t it?” (Foot Newton 2009b, 141) Marion’s approval of the colour inadvertently reinforces Solomon’s stereotypical view of white citizens as affluent in this case.11

• 12 Part of the customer’s frustration hinges on their belief that Solomon is playing a joke on them: “ (...)

19Solomon’s dismissal from Woolworths is based on racial prejudices that deny the black South African his humanity and culture. As Solomon is unable to direct the white patron to hollandaise sauce, the customer becomes irate with him and questions whether he is an employee, lamenting: “this country’s going down the drain” (Foot Newton 2009b, 142).12 What makes this moment significant is that once again, the play explores differences and misconceptions between English and Xhosa culture through food. The customer’s frustration that Solomon is unable to direct her to the hollandaise sauce ignores his cultural difference and that it is not a staple of his own diet. Solomon’s failure to locate the item leads to his dismissal because the patron interprets his lack of knowledge as a sign of insolence (Foot Newton 2009b, 142). As such, the customer’s failure to empathize with Solomon, or his anxiety in this exchange, both illustrate a complete disregard for his culture and identity.

• 13 Foot Newton translates Sparza as “Corner shop” (2013, 9).

20Both Solomon and the white patron are aware of the power she wields. She speaks to his manager, and he is “fired the same day” (Foot Newton 2009b, 142). Recounting the circumstances around his dismissal for Marion, collective humour once again indicates how both Marion and Solomon understand the social codes of his predicament. Solomon makes the story comic by insulting the white patron at its conclusion. In an effort to possibly appease the customer, Solomon offers to help her save money by showing her where she can buy chickens at a more affordable price. While it is unclear if the insult was intentional in the moment, Solomon admitting the following: “I think I did it on purpose. I was unhappy there. Smiling at everyone, just like a clown,” in retrospect his offer is a subversive act that humiliates the patron (Foot Newton 2009b, 142); it does so by implying she is interested in saving money by shopping at a lower-cost shop. Woolworths has a higher social status than the “Sparza” to which Solomon proposes to take her (Foot Newton 2009b, 142).13 Marion is quick to see the humour in Solomon’s offer and understands the patron would never accept such a proposal, causing her to laugh at the insult. The stage directions note that Marion continues laughing throughout Solomon’s explanation (Foot Newton 2009b, 142).

• 14 Foot Newton translates the isiXhosa term “mlungu” as “white” in English (2009b, 142).
• 15 Karoo Moose is another of Foot Newton’s works that expands this comic story in Reach into a full-le (...)

23Appreciating the subversive act Solomon performs when he offers to show the white patron where she can buy chickens for twelve rand, Marion distances herself from the “mlungu” by confessing: “Hollandaise sauce – I’ve always thought it overrated” (Foot Newton 2009b, 142).14 It is through this comic story and others like it, such as Marion’s description of her husband’s painful flatulence and Solomon’s account of Thozama killing and eating a moose in the Karoo, that Reach shows humorous exchanges as building ties while also dispelling characters’ prejudices (Foot Newton 2009b, 156–57).15 Humour facilitates this exchange because, when sharing jokes that transgress social norms, “people who share laughter are co-conspirators in playful rule breaking, and such shared transgression, like other shared guilty pleasures, promotes a feeling of solidarity” (Smith 2015, 160). In the case of Reach the rules being broken through transcultural humour are the divisions historically established during apartheid which continue to divide the post-apartheid state. More importantly, the bond that develops through this joking allows Solomon to reveal that he witnessed Jonathan’s murder because, as Powell aptly identifies, “truth could not come without intimacy” in the play (2010, 46).

• 16 Craig Higginson’s Dream of the Dog, which is published alongside Reach! in Homann’s At the Stage: P (...)

24It is through this transcultural dialogue that both characters form a bond that develops along the lines of mother and child, perhaps due to their respective ages, life experiences, and Marion’s historic ties with Solomon’s grandmother. However, even in forming an affectionate bond, both characters must overcome the barriers of apartheid vocabulary to establish this relationship. Most explicitly, the tenuousness of this project is seen through Solomon’s misinterpretation of Marion’s endearing reference to him as “my boy” (Foot Newton 2009b, 138). Like other moments of cultural exchange in the play, the phrase is first understood as demeaning. Arguing that Marion is calling him “‘my boy’ just like your father called my father,” Solomon exposes the historically racist use of the term (Foot Newton 2009b, 138). In doing so, he identifies the oppressive ways “boy” was used to emphasize the subordinate position of black South African men in society (Foot Newton 2009b, 138). Solomon frames his argument in terms that identify the divergent histories between himself and the Banning family.16

• 17 In his reading of Farber’s Molora, Glenn Odom posits: “The continual replaying of the TRC’s mission (...)

29Although Marion’s ownership over her pain may be an expression of agency, her fixation on her lost son ultimately destroys the family, as Powell explains, because Marion “refused to grant an equal partnership in her grief” (2010, 44). And yet Marion’s description of the impact that Jonathan’s death had on her family indicates that Frank, her husband, also tried to deny her grief by sending her for electroshock therapy (Foot Newton 2009b, 161). Marion acknowledges how the therapy temporarily took her pain away, but “it comes back… and then you learn to keep it a secret” (Foot Newton 2009b, 161). This language further shifts Marion closer to the description of secret suffering described by Mtintso, as quoted in Oboe (2007, 67). However, unlike women at the TRC who were called upon by political and religious leaders to help consolidate “the national narrative of sacrifice and redemption” by underwriting “the TRC’s goal of reconciliation and nation building,” Marion is abandoned both by the nation and her family (Samuelson 2007, 161). The attempt to silence and contain Marion’s grief with electroshock therapy contrasts with the nation’s witnessing of grief and mourning performed publicly by mothers at the TRC. Jonathan’s death occurs outside the temporal limits of the TRC, an event which sought to “paint the most complete picture of the abuses that occurred between March 1, 1960, and May 10, 1994” (Krog 1998, vii). And yet, as Marion’s comments capture, Jonathan’s killing is a result of apartheid violence and structural inequality: “[t]his country has been breeding murderers for the past century” and “[i]f we can’t distribute the wealth, then at least we have succeeded in the equal distribution of violence” (Foot Newton 2009b, 160). In its exploration of how past violence impacts survivors and their search for resolution, Reach resembles many of the works staged around the time of the TRC in South Africa. As plays such as Reach, Fatima Dike’s The Return (2009), Yael Farber’s Molora (2008), or Craig Higginson’s Dream of the Dog illustrate, truth telling and reconciliation beyond the TRC are likely to occur outside the realm of national projects of remembering.17 Instead, reconciliation in these plays occurs through intimate moments of truth telling between loved ones, neighbours, or community members in domestic spaces such as kitchens or living rooms across the nation.

• 18 South Africa hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The stage directions note that: “South Africans see [i (...)

32The final passages of the play reveal the strong mother/son relationship between Marion and Solomon. Although gestures are made throughout Reach to indicate that they both care for the other, Solomon’s closing remarks concretize this relationship. They do so by exemplifying his effort to re-think and re-define apartheid terminology. Using a similar strategy employed by Marion earlier in the play, Solomon transforms traditionally oppressive terms into phrases of respect and care. Echoing Marion’s point about how “my boy” has multiple meanings beyond its historically racist use, Solomon points out that “Mies Marion” can also be a term “Of care. Of caring” (Foot Newton 2009b, 138; 164). In this instance Solomon uses Marion’s strategy of redefining apartheid expressions as terms of endearment to liberate a phrase Marion identifies as “old [and] subservient” (164). This action indicates both Solomon and Marion are strategically redefining terminology identified with hatred into gestures of love. The linguistic wordplay in this final moment also connects back to their earlier comic asides. In the final lines of the play Solomon notes that they require an extension cord to get the television to work so that they can watch the 2010 FIFA World Cup together.18 Marion suggests he should “borrow one,” recalling the earlier language Solomon had used to describe acquiring white paint (164). In both cases, the pair modify their use of language to signify a familial bond and a shared, personal understanding of specific terminology.

• 19 Mary Corrigall’s 2007 review of the performance, titled “Foot-Newton’s Desired Reality Falls Short (...)

33The pair’s construction of a non-biological cross-racial family suggests that propagating a love of difference, as Jamal suggests, may offer a route to unity that avoids displacing ethnic difference with an overwhelming emphasis on sameness (2005, 24). The final sequence where Marion agrees to watch the soccer tournament with Solomon implies that the two have reconciled without being artificially swayed by national narratives espousing unity. Furthermore, this act is not an acceptance of the nation’s call to stage performances of unity in its soccer stadiums, but rather a decision that shows Marion’s respect and curiosity for Solomon’s personal interests. This is because the two plan to celebrate the event privately in her home. Moments of shared laughter and humour aid the private reconciliation as it is through joking in the space of Marion’s home that the pair navigate their prejudices and dispel stereotypes, helping them to move beyond the jaundiced national conditions which are a legacy of apartheid thinking in order to foster love and compassion for each other in the new democracy. While the reconciliation between characters in Reach is presented as wholly successful, Foot Newton’s reworking of the play into Solomon and Marion suggests there was a need to modify the work for a changing political reality.19 And yet, humour seems to have remained a key component of artistic production in the period following the debut of Reach. In fact, just six years later, the 2015 National Arts Festival declared a genre, satire, as its Featured Artist of the Year (2015, 15). Part of the rationale the selection committee provided for this decision is that “[s]atire has the ability to contest boundaries,” works oppositional to stereotypes because it “allow[s] the audience to establish their own truths,” and is an art form that is “inter-culturally charged” (2015,15). Such statements align closely with the role of humour in Reach and foreground Foot Newton’s immense ability to both scrutinize the political realities of the state through her plays, but also anticipate emerging trends for the state and its creative producers alike. This makes Reach an important work in this playwright’s oeuvre and the overall field of contemporary South African drama.