Voices Made Night

Voices Made Night is drawn from the short stories of contemporary Mozambican author Mia Couto and woven into a fractured, physical dream diary by Magnet Theatre.

When you enter the auditorium there are bodies strewn on the staircases, and you have to step over them to enter. It's a smart metaphor for the kind of cultural imperialism that Couto detects in so much South African literature, and which his own surreal and folkloric world stands against.

We begin with the figure of a writer, perhaps Couto himself, assailed by a chorus of dust-flecked lost souls. They reach out to him with their stories, urging him onwards and flinging his manuscripts into the air. They are a company of the poor and the neglected, and Couto's stories are riven with the trickster folk magic of the village or the ghetto.

His characters are grotesques, such as the jilted hunchback, who sees her lost bridegroom in oxidising statues of colonial generals. The mythology is an uneasy jigsaw of South Africa's many pasts, a core sample that takes in mischievous crow spirits, gruff shoe-lenders and the tenacious detritus of European imperialism.

It's in the weaving together of Couto's oblique tales and Magnet Theatre's particular style of physical theatre that the production comes unstuck. Bereft of a lucid reference point and stretched across 90 minutes, Voices Made Night begins to drag long before its muted conclusion. Easier to admire than to enjoy, it's a difficult but rewarding plunge into a fascinating author's work.