Township Stories

If you're after a searing, gritty drama exploring the culture of violence in modern South Africa, then keep looking. Township Stories may be set in Soweto, but its plot could have been lifted from a straight-to-video Hollywood shocker.

It's a thoroughly nasty piece of work that compensates for the shortcomings of its script with scenes of sex and violence, performed with gut-wrenching credibility.

Young actors Koketso Mojela and Thato Moraka give outstanding performances as young couple Matlakala and Dario, and director Paul Grootboom certainly knows how to make an audience wince, but these facts alone do not make Township Tales an important piece of theatre.

The play tells the story of a serial killer, dubbed The G-string Strangler, who murders his victims with their own underwear. In the stories that branch off from his crime, women are abused by their men, children rebel against their parents and young hoods wave guns around like water pistols.

When police arrive to investigate the killer's third crime, co-writers Grootboom and Presley Chweneyagae at first seem to be presenting us with a blasé force, desensitized by the numbers of rapes and murders they've seen. However, the scene swiftly descends in pantomime farce, and subsequent comic interludes sit equally uncomfortably alongside graphic scenes of sexual and physical abuse.

In the right hands, pitch black comedy about a deadly serious subject can be sublime - Irish playwright Martin McDonagh is perhaps one of the best examples and he, like Grootboom, also incorporates cinematic elements into his excellent plays.

However, Township Stories is most definitely not a comedy, and while pop music is used to devastating effect in some key scenes, to have R Kelly and Norah Jones croon away in the background as one girl is raped and another performs a knitting needle abortion is simply crass.