Reviews & Responses

Marina Griebenow - Freelance Theatre Critic, Die Burger newspaper, Cape Town

 

PETERSEN EXPOSES PIECES OF HER LIFE 

‘This legislation is part of my personal history’. It seems like yesterday that actress Bo Petersen gave a blistering performance in Athol Fugard’s Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act in Theatre Arts in Observatory. It was fitting therefore that we gathered in exactly the same venue last Sunday for an excerpt from Pieces of Me, her biographical play, as both plays have the consequences of apartheid legislation as their point of departure.

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“The landscape of the play resonates on many levels for me, the brutal legislation is part of my personal history,” Petersen said in 2011 about her role in Statements. Those of us who read this particular remark then only fully understood its meaning when we saw Pieces of Me recently. 

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Benjamin Johannes Petersen, also known as Benny, was a coloured man who was classified as white in the apartheid years and lived the rest of his life as a white man. He graduated from university, worked as a manager for one of the large mining companies, married a white woman and had five children, among others the well-known actress Bo. They did not find their isolation from family and friends strange at that point. Everything revolved around their small family unit.

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Bo says that she only became aware of her father’s decision as a 19-year old when she went to visit the poet S.V. Petersen in Athlone, where he was working as a school principal. “S.V. Petersen was not related to us, though he grew up with my father and his family – the other Petersens. It was such a long time ago. My memory is that he was fascinated by my father, but I think politically he was on the other side of the Unity Movement. He didn’t give me much advice, but I think he understood my need to know,” she remembers.

 

In response to a question as to why she waited until now to tell her father’s story, she responds: “I really needed to wait. For my father in particular. For him to be safe. And he could really only be safe in death. I needed to protect my mother too, I guess. I have been writing these pieces all my life, trying to work out this new identity that I knew I had but somehow was still isolated from.

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“In Oslo last year I suddenly knew what I needed to do, courtesy of our ambassador, Delores Kotze. In a way, she was my midwife. The work is still in its very early stages, but in September we are going to refine and perform it at the Nordic Black Theatre in Oslo.”

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“It was very difficult for me to perform it a few nights ago with my family there, because I felt that there was so much at stake.”

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One remembers that in the excerpt that she performed, she explained that not all her siblings and even some of her newer family members were necessarily enamoured with her exposure of her father’s life and his far-reaching decision. His decision, obviously, also had an influence on their lives.

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“It was wonderful to have both my cousins, Christopher and Michael, at the performance. Christopher has been a wonderful cousin to me. I wish I had been a young cousin with him. But, here we are! His mother, Aunt Daphne, was a truly wonderful woman, as was Michael’s mother, Aunty Sarah. I felt that I had to do right by them.”

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Her memories of her father is of a generous and intelligent man with the most beautiful smile. “I just liked being still with him – sitting with him, just being in his presence. My father also taught me about human dignity and to speak up and speak out about injustices.

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“He was a great storyteller, but above all he loved my mother and all of us very much, and we loved him.”

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Apparently Petersen’s father regularly admonished them with the following famous quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “This above all – to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

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It could’ve been ironic, except that one knows that Benny Petersen had to have something within him to which he could remain true in order to endure, until the end of his days, the consequences of his torturous decision.

“Pieces of Me has been very emotional here, but it is a tribute to my father and to my mother – to my whole family from both sides of the flimsy fence. 

 

“There the fence lies – nice and flat and where it ought to be. No place left for it in our family,” she concludes.

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Translated into English from the original review in Afrikaans.