‘Once, in a forest, made tall by pale slender trees, not so far from the town that you felt lost, but not so near to it that you felt found, a small boy was at a picnic with his family. As the grown-ups ate and talked, the boy slipped away to the nearby stream to sail his paper boat.” 

Shrouded in the shadows of a forest, actor Lyle October delivers these opening lines to Hold Still, his voice pushing through the darkness of a hushed hall at the Baxter Theatre. This is the first of four monologues throughout the production, each spoken by one of the four characters. 

The story Oliver Feigel, his character, tells is a fable passed down through generations of the Feigel family, a tale shared in remembrance of the atrocity they have suffered, but forgoing the gritty details of violence and loss.

As the shadows clear, the audience is welcomed into the Feigel’s home in London where Oliver has a secret – one which holds his life, and the lives of those he loves, in the balance: the teenager is hiding his friend, Imran, who is facing deportation, in his bedroom.

In writing Hold Still, Nadia Davids reflected on her own time in London, and began to piece together the story of the Feigel family as they grapple with the immediate realities of exile and identity. 

“I was living in the UK at the time, and there was just the horror of seeing what became known as the European migrant crisis unfold, and watching all the images of parents piling children into boats, knowing the danger of the sea is less dangerous than the danger of the land, which is an impossible choice to make,” Davids, writer of Hold Still, told Maverick Life. 

“The interesting thing, for me, with the creative process is that I don’t always know why a story arrives, it seems to arrive unbidden, and this one came with remarkable clarity. 

“One of the ideas that came to me was, ‘what would happen if a young person had a friend of theirs in a house, and their parents were this progressive, educated, cosmopolitan left-wing couple? How would they respond?’ And it began to build from there.”

This is seen through the characters of Ben and Rosa Feigel, an interracial and intercultural couple living in London, as the play reflects on both of their experiences of displacement. Ben, the son of a Holocaust survivor, is a columnist and researcher well versed in issues of migrancy. Rosa, the daughter of apartheid freedom fighters who left South Africa when she was a child, works in the field of social policy. With their histories and their professions, they situate themselves as a forward-thinking family, but when Imran is discovered hiding in their son’s bedroom, the theoretical beliefs they each hold onto clash with the reality of their reactions. This presents the audience with a front-row seat to very real conversations. It is one thing to study, support and converse about a problem and a different thing altogether when the “problem” manifests in one’s own living room. And Oliver, albeit slightly naive about the world, struggles with this, not understanding his parent’s explosive, negative reactions; not understanding their fear of the consequences of harbouring a refugee who is facing deportation. Humans cannot be illegal, he exclaims. 

Nadia Davids and Jay Pather once again team up for the world premiere of her latest play, ‘Hold Still’, at the Baxter Theatre. Image: Mark Wessels.

Davids explained that a big impetus for Hold Still was her exploration of what it means to lose one’s home, along with the histories of dislocation that people carry. In the play, she then wrote these wonderings within the smaller, domestic space, “where interpersonal relationships are everything”. 

“We all walk into a space carrying our histories, and what happens when that explodes in some way?” Davids pondered. 

Through an intimate set design and outstanding visuals, Hold Still creates a space where ideologies collide as both the cast and the audience are forced to grapple with their own beliefs. 

Director Jay Pather’s use of simple yet striking visuals projected over the set transports the production into the middle of a forest, onto a train bound for Auschwitz and into a lonely boat in the middle of an endless sea. His use of light and shadow allows for each character’s story to be heard, and when the projections end, these memories collide back into the Feigel’s living room. 

“Pather has a stunning poetic vision coupled with an incredibly incisive political mind. Whatever he turns that mind to is going to be exciting, nuanced and theatrical. He brought these visual elements into the work which take it outside of just the realm of the domestic… and they fling us into the dangerous world, and what that might hold,” Davids said.

Tailyn Ramsamy as Imran (left), Andrew Buckland as Ben Feigel (centre) and Mwenya Kabwe as Rosa Feigel (right) in ‘Hold Still’ by Nadia Davids at the Baxter Theatre. Image: Mark Wessels.

As the production progresses, the audience is allowed into these impossible conversations, and is given a glimpse into the pain of Ben and Rosa’s pasts that has informed them. 

In each of their monologues, the couple pour out their fears and lived experiences as well as the hopes of parents who want so much more for their son, Oliver. Yet, in all they have done to make him brave and socially aware, they hide the truly painful parts of their own stories, barely sharing them with each other, fighting the history lest it creep in too close. The generational trauma of an escape from world war two is felt deeply within Ben. For Rosa, the fear of being a Black child in apartheid, whose parents are punished for their fight against the government time and time again, the trauma manifests in insomnia. Both are desperate to move away from what they have seen and learnt, and they keep these stories hidden from Oliver, allowing him to know only of the victories, not the horror. Towards the end of the play, Oliver accuses them of “peddling a fiction about how kind the world is”, feeling that they are hypocritically denying Imran the kindness that their lives have been changed by. 

However, their pasts come crashing into the fore in Imran, who has been told to leave England despite having lived there longer than he ever did in his home country. His experience is not a story, not one of Rosa and Ben’s memories, it is right now. 

“There are around 90 million displaced people today, and a huge if not the majority of them are from our continent. And so this fear, the idea of enforced movement and flight, is a story that we know. These are global conversations,” Davids explained. 

While these topics are difficult, they are handled by the cast with powerful grace, presenting a story written by Davids with heart, hope and even a little humour. DM/ML 

Hold Still runs at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town until 19 November.