South Africa Mirrors the American West in “Dark Noon”

It’s not all history, though, and the supposedly American aspect also shifts, at times, into South African self-portraiture. “Dark Noon” is the work of the Danish writer-director Tue Biering, in collaboration with both the South African cast and the co-director, Nhlanhla Mahlangu. Mahlangu has said that the show’s town—a take on Western movie sets, built, as we watch, with folding frames and a working railway—also recalls the apartheid-era squatter camps of home. The two countries rhyme, of course, in other ways, too. At one point, each actor addresses a camera, confessional style, to talk about the impact of U.S. Westerns on South African youth: “Many people in my township died by the gun,” the performer Lillian Tshabalala-Malulyck says, noting how the films exported a gamified violence. A human being plays a rolling tumbleweed; members of the audience play a terrorized boomtown congregation as gunfire explodes in the street; eventually, almost everybody plays dead. Pow pow pow goes a pistol, and a Native warrior falls down. But it isn’t enough to kill the Indigenous defender once—oh, no. The shooter takes aim, and kills him over and over and over again.About TownClassical