‘Rise ’76’ confronts a generation haunted by how little it has done with its inherited freedom

There are theatre productions that grab you by the throat in the first five minutes and refuse to let go. Then there are those that ask you to sit still, lean in and do the labour of remembering alongside them. Rise ’76, the ambitious new commemorative work by Tiisetso Mashifane wa Noni, belongs firmly in the latter category. Clocking in at roughly 140 minutes, Rise ’76 drifts dangerously close to becoming a staged oral archive rather than living theatre. Conversations linger. Testimonies expand. Historical detail piles onto historical detail. The script is sharp, witty and often profoundly moving but it is also indulgent in places. One understands why Mashifane wa Noni’s first draft ran close to four hours. “To hit as many historically accurate, emotional and storytelling beats as possible, I was always aware that the play would sit at about two hours, the challenge then became a matter of how to pace the play for maximum impact,” explained Mashifane wa Noni. Be that as it may, this is a must-see, must-experience and must-awaken-consciousness kind of production. Rise ’76 does not offer easy catharsis. It asks for patience. It asks for concentration. Occasionally, it asks for too much of both. But it also offers something increasingly rare in contemporary theatre: seriousness of purpose. Commissioned by the Market Theatre and the Baxter Theatre in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto Youth Uprising, Rise ’76 is not interested in offering audiences a sanitised liberation narrative. Mashifane wa Noni instead approaches June 16 through the slippery, unreliable architecture of memory itself. “What more can one say about a historical event that everyone knows about?” Mashifane wa Noni, who grew up in Pretoria and attended Glenstantia Primary before matriculating from St Mary’s Diocesan School for Girls Pretoria in 2013, writes like someone deeply conscious of history as both political machinery and emotional inheritance. Her academic background in polit