Bo Petersen’s magnificent ‘Pieces of Me’ — a play about the pain of passing as white

“Pieces of Me” is Bo Petersen’s magnum opus and the story of her life in the performing arts. When she was 19, Petersen learnt that her father had harboured the secret of being coloured to marry her mother, the love of his life.

The play opens on a family story she would later learn: her grandmother takes her aunts and cousins to watch, from afar, their son, brother and uncle playing at a swimming pool with his white family.

It is an opening of heart-wrenching pathos and also familiarity. Many of us come from families where fairer-skinned members left to play white or pass as white, fracturing families and creating generational whispers.

While I had always known the story from the side of the black or coloured families I grew up in, and where most of us knew of family members who had crossed the colour line and disappeared, Petersen tells it from her world of growing up white.

The weaponisation of race caused generational ruptures of inferiority and superiority, of brokenness and the ache of parting that Petersen captures so beautifully in this work, into which she pours herself and all her art.

As the Market Theatre’s publicity blurb puts it, “When Bo found out about her father’s hidden life, she became the custodian of his secret, the two of them becoming collaborators in their knowledge and silence. To avoid falling under the overwhelming weight of shared complicity, Bo began writing her ‘pieces’ as a way of trying to understand the myth of her father, his ‘passing [as white] and, in turn, her ‘passing’ [as white].”

Bo Petersen in 'Pieces of Me'. (Photo: Supplied / Ingrid Fadnes)

Bo Petersen in 'Pieces of Me'. (Photo: Supplied / Ingrid Fadnes)

Bo Petersen in 'Pieces of Me'. (Photo: Supplied / Ingrid Fadnes)

Bo Petersen in 'Pieces of Me'. (Photo: Supplied / Ingrid Fadnes)

She plays her grandmother and two of her aunts on her father’s side, all of whom she got to know as she came to know the life that apartheid had robbed her of.

Joining her on stage, on piano, is her cousin Christopher Petersen, who co-founded The Jazz Yard Academy in Bonteheuwel in Cape Town.

His music is the rich musical history of Bo’s father, says director Yvette Hardie, and is a manifestation of the reconstruction, reclaiming and reconciliation journey the cousins have been on.

The version of the play at The Market is directed by Royston Stoffels, who is also an actor and musician. It’s all beautiful, but the device by which Petersen whips the audience through the history of colonialism and apartheid to locate her own story is a must-see for anybody interested in where she and we all come from in our complex and beautiful country.

Petersen uses her art of masking and of entering other identities, of becoming new characters, as healing and discovery. It is the role of her life and a work that defines this great global talent of ours. The play has won numerous awards and travelled across the world, and it’s not difficult to see why. DM

There are specials on tickets for the performance, which ends on Freedom Day, April 27.  Book here. 

Selected performances have talk-backs where the audience can share their stories and talk to Bo and Chris Petersen about what they have achieved.