Under the tree, the black nanny would console herself after having heard of her missing child. Up in the tree Lizzy the girl she attended would climb if she feared not having had papers or when she thought she spotted suspicious people inspecting he dad's property. Not having papers would infer not being a legal resident and from what the actress showed that meant getting beaten up by the security police. The syringa tree was a place for the child to steal away from her family while her parents worked at providing her a good education and granting her an eventual passage to the US. But she would remain tied as an Afrikaner to her roots in South Africa and to her connection to her nanny that raised her. The Syringa tree is a touching compelling one-person show on at the Centaur and there is a good reason why it has been successful.
The play is probably set at the time of the Soweto township uprisings that preceded the release of Mandela and caused much unnecessary bloodshed.
There may have been too much time spent understanding the child's fantasy about seeing spots in the beginning, it does nothing to introduce the public to the world that this child was about to witness, except for perhaps giving us a sense of how she retreated into a make believe world in order to escape some harsh realities. We see how the child
became part of the struggle of black equality by identifying with it at a young age and returning to visit her nanny towards the end. We vividly imagine through metaphors and occasional retreats to and from her favourite tree, how she was tied to her nanny and how she would be emotionally attached to her from when Sal's child fled the confines of their home to when the child was killed in the bloody township riots at 14. That was before apartheid was abolished.
The play was a wonderful one person performance, not because it has already been given acclaim but because one person convincingly paying not only different people, she also played both as a black and white actor through her suggestiveness as well as playing her older and younger selves. The actress was always pumped up and ready for a number of movements across stage without slacking off. She could have reduced her tempo in the transition between one character's lines and another especially when a group of people came to visit her house when she was a child but she made up for the speed by the variety of movements, her convincing tone and different accents that she pulled off.
