In Dark Noon, Hollywood Westerns Get a South African Reboot

The living room is there. So are dusty cowboy hats, freshly laid railroad tracks, and Native American headdresses.

But while Dark Noon imbibes these hallmarks of Hollywood westerns, it examines them through new eyes, leaving no triumphalist cliché unchallenged. Almost every scene in this collaboration between a Danish director and a South African theater company (at Sainte-Anne warehouse in Brooklyn in previews ahead of the June 17 release) ends with at least one bullet-riddled corpse on the set's parched red earth. Most of the dead are women or indigenous people.

It's a western town, co-director and choreographer Nhlanhla Mahlangu said of the archetypal tumbleweedy community that rises during the action, but it's also about all cities in South Africa. We also talk about shootings in our country.

Nearly all of the play's seven actors crowded into an increasingly packed green room with Mahlangu to discuss the work after their final performance at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, and they began to agreement on these similarities. So much of our own lives are tied to these tropes, said cast member Mandla Gaduka.

The narrative in which the White Hat Cowboy tames the Old West, usually through the explicit or (usually) implicit genocide of his native predecessors, comes under intense scrutiny in Dark Noon.

Tue Biering, who wrote the screenplay and also directed, said he started the project about five years ago with a very different concept in mind. It started with me wanting to talk about Africa through the prism of an American western,” he said in a Zoom interview. And it struck me that it was so wrong for a white European to tell this story. I thought: What if we reversed it? And if You said My history?

Not specifically Biering's story, of course, but that of millions of Europeans who fled the oppression and poverty of a time when white lives didn't matter, as the script goes with insolence, only to discover that any chance of owning land meant colonization. The savage irony of these men and women, but especially of these men who oppress the indigenous populations they discovered there, plays a central role in Dark Noon.

Through a series of workshops in Johannesburg, Biering and Mahlangu assembled a company of actors and assigned each performer a research topic on American history (religion, gun culture, etc.). Later, the actors took turns trying on different outfits from a collection of Western costumes in the center of the rehearsal room and improvised. The actors' costumes, research, memories of Clint Eastwood's films on VHS tapes, and their own experiences in post-apartheid South Africa were all incorporated into Biering's script.

The predominantly black cast of Dark Noon, a white actor, ultimately wore something else to portray the European settlers: white face. Lillian Tshabalala-Malulyck, who has been involved with Dark Noon for five years, said her feelings about wearing white powder have changed over time.

At first, I was so excited about whitefacing, she said. As a black actor, it felt like a rebellious and liberating response to blackface. As the series progresses, I reflect on the fact that two wrongs don't make a right. But I've learned to embrace embarrassment, and I think this show gives audiences a chance to do the same.

But many spectators only sit for part of the show. The actors regularly drag them onto the set, where they sip whiskey, go to church and even square dance. Just as quickly, they find themselves herded into a barbed wire enclosure and even sold at a slave auction, sometimes just seconds after one of the most idyllic interactions.

Mahlangu compared the audience's experience to that of Sarah Baartman, the South African woman who willingly sailed to England in the early 1800s and later found herself paraded across Europe as a freak-show oddity known as the Hottentot Venus. There are times when you board this ship with no idea what's in store for you, Mahlangu said of the Dark Noon stage.

Plus, he added, because our play is like a western, all Hollywood films have lead actors and extras. We have luxury extras who paid to be there!

One task that spares the audience is the real-time construction of a Western town, as the actors gradually fill the bare stage with a saloon, church, prison and other buildings.

As I read about American history, Biering said it was all about land and planting something to say, “This is my land.”

Tshabalala-Malulyck compared city building to the ills of gentrification. It speaks to development and progress, she said, but it also asks: Who is it for? Who benefits?

As early as the 1920s, Hollywood was also asking itself these thorny questions, according to Andrew Patrick Nelson, a professor of film studies at the University of Utah and also host of the podcast. How the West was shaped.

At any time, can we find triumphalist conventions between good guys and bad guys? Nelson said. You can. But almost all great Westerns are quite critical of the process by which white civilization has appropriated the West.

However, he said, the power of iconic Westerns like The Searchers is that they can be simultaneously interpreted as glorifying and condemning their protagonists. These two things can coexist, he says. This is the power of myth we are talking about here.

Spoleto's tour was the U.S. premiere of the well-attended Dark Noon, which generated both walkouts and ovations at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023. (Finalizing cast and crew visas required a bipartisan effort (Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumers' offices ended up joining forces to bring them here, said Mena Mark Hanna, executive director of Spoletos, which is a testament to art bringing people together.)

Back in that Charleston green room, the cast and creative team all expressed some unease about finally presenting America's unvarnished story to American audiences. It's scary, Gaduka admitted, although the UK has presented its own challenges since we black South Africans were colonized by England.

As for Tshabalala-Malulyck, she sees this audience awkwardness as a valuable, even necessary, element of the Dark Noon experience. I hope they can be open-minded and not automatically become detached, she said. I hope they can see themselves there. I hope they can find out for themselves what the story really is and make their own decision about where they will lead as an American.