Intimate and full of humanity, Pieces of Me is food for the soul in a ritual of storytelling

Bo Petersen at the Baxter Studio in Pieces of Me. (Photo: Maggie Gericke)

By Keith Bain

21 Jul 2024

Simply staged, beautifully directed, and executed with incredible honesty, Bo Petersen’s raw account of one of apartheid’s least-discussed secrets is a rare and riveting theatre experience.

There’s a kind of light that radiates out of people like Bo Petersen. We humans like to say they glow or shine or give off “an energy”. Whatever it is, you can’t help but feel that spark, that fire within them that somehow lights up a room, makes you want to get closer, to listen more carefully to what they have to say.

Certainly, when you watch Bo Petersen on stage in her new autobiographical one-woman show, Pieces of Me, there’s a sense that this actress is speaking directly to you, baring her soul unconditionally as she reaches into the audience and pleads to have her story heard.

Having known very little of Petersen before the show, I left the Baxter Studio feeling like I knew her intimately.

The play, in which Petersen combines character vignettes with direct-to-audience conversation, recounts her own family’s history and how this intertwines with the wider social and political history of South Africa. She zooms in on the tragedy and horror of racially divisive colonial and apartheid-era laws, and specifically on the legislated cruelty that separated people – lovers, families, communities – according to the colour of their skin.

In some cases, that history placed members of the same family on different sides of the fence, their identity and their futures determined by how light or dark their skin happened to be.

Haunted

That is what happened to Petersen’s father, Benny, a coloured man who “passed” for white and married a blonde woman, Bo’s mother. For her entire childhood, Petersen was effectively haunted by the unspoken impacts of this secret concealment of identity.

Petersen very tenderly and quite lovingly channels a collection of voices – from aunts and a grandmother, Benny himself and others – in order to get to grips with the varying kinds of pain, resentment, longing, sorrow and opportunities this weird family split caused for the people in her extended family.

Read more: All rise: Agatha Christie’s ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ is a study in audience gullibility

The show, which is quite unlike anything I’ve seen before, feels as though it is motivated by Petersen’s almost urgent need to share hard truths about herself, to remind us of a history that is often so painful we try to ignore it or pretend it no longer matters. What she has to say is raw and tender, and her telling is packed with realisations about how we become who we are.

Bo Petersen and her cousin, musician Chris Petersen, in Pieces of Me. (Photo: Maggie Gericke)

Along with what it says about the evils of racial division, it is also a play about what it means to be an actor, to slip into the skin of a character and become an-other for a while.

In her beautifully crafted script, Petersen recognises parallels between her chosen profession and the life of “passing” as white that was her father’s daily lived experience. The difference of course is that, for Benny, hiding his identity was always mired by hurt, and while it gave him bittersweet access to one kind of life, it simultaneously robbed him of another, and had devastating consequences for his relationships with the rest of his family – and with the world.

Petersen describes the heartbreaking ways in which her father spent his life trying to remain invisible, while she has spent her life trying to be seen. For her, acting – a career spent becoming other people – has been life-affirming. For her father, the secret duplicity meant being permanently afraid of being found out, exposed, outed, even imprisoned.

Intimate

While Pieces of Me is a very intimate one-woman show, Petersen is not alone on stage. She shares the space with a member of her family, Chris Petersen, who spends the performance seated behind a Roland keyboard, adding music, whistling, occasionally interacting with his “white” cousin, effectively being part of her life of being seen.

It’s a potent statement having him there, sharing the limelight and being part of Benny and Bo’s story. Being on stage together, it’s not the differences between actor Bo and musician Chris that are highlighted, but the obvious fact of their shared humanness and their mutual creative spark.

Bo Petersen at the Baxter Studio in Pieces of Me. (Photo: Maggie Gericke)

What you get from Pieces of Me is more than a story, more than a page from our history.

What you get is Bo Petersen’s humanity – that glow – and it fills the entire theatre, and feels powerful enough to reach across the entire world.

In many ways, she is a shaman dispensing sustenance for the soul, reminding us where we come from, what has gone before, and the value of keeping alive the stories that make us human. DM

Written and performed by Bo Petersen, directed by Royston Stoffels and featuring Chris Petersen, Pieces of Me is playing at Cape Town’s Baxter Studio until 27 July; following performances on the 18, 23 and 25 July, there will be talks about the play led by academics, writers and theatre professionals. There will also be a performance at The Homecoming Centre, on 20 July, with proceeds going to District 6 Museum. From Cape Town, the play will transfer to the Hilton Arts Festival, 2 to 4 August.

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South Africa

Haunted

Intimate