The King of Broken Things
Review by Oya Yilmaz Kermani (Golden Dolphin International Puppet Festival 2022)
''I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay.
Imagine, dream, believe.''
The past week was amazing on so many levels but there's one highlight, an epiphany moment, a revelation that will stay with me forever. Years of trying to integrate, mimicking how others act, endless efforts to control my emotions started to feel meaningless after watching one beautifully written and marvelously played performance by Theatresmiths.
The King of Broken Things made me remember that being awkward, different, cheerful or sad is okay. That holding my tears, laughters and hugs doesn't make me strong, that brokenness isn't bad, that I can be my weird little self.
The mask I've been wearing now is a thing of the past and I'm ready to proudly show the golden joins on the broken heart of the little girl that wanted to be seen, heard and loved.
Thank you Michael Taylor-Broderick, Cara Roberts and Brandon Bunyan for this beautiful, beautiful thing you created, and embracing my vulnerability when I needed it the most.
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THE KING OF BROKEN THINGS
The ending of this piece by Michael Taylor-Broderick is sheer theatrical genius. (Review by Barry Meehan)
Seen at the 2018 Hilton Arts Festival, “The King of Broken Things” created and directed by Michael Taylor-Broderick and performed by Cara Roberts, is a truly mesmerising piece of theatre, taking the audience on an incredible 45 minute-long journey, coming to an end far too soon, in my humble opinion.
The premise of the show is that everything broken can be fixed – inanimate objects, promises and even people.
Cara Roberts (daughter of two of South Africa’s greatest actors – Ian Roberts and Michelle Botes) draws us into her enthralling performance as a bullied child who finds an outlet as “the King”, fixing, repairing and finding alternative uses for a plethora of broken objects that litter the stage. Taught by “Dad”, who has been absent for many years (we never find out why), “the King” poses many questions about life and family, and anxiously awaits the return of “Dad”, whose departure caused “Mom” to break.
I wouldn’t dream of revealing more of the plot, or what “The King” builds on stage to await the return of “Dad”, but suffice it to say that the ending of this piece by Michael Taylor-Broderick is sheer theatrical genius! And we mere mortals would do well to dwell more on the magic words – imagine, believe and dream.
If you get the chance to see this wonderful production, don’t dare miss it! – Barry Meehan
Stage: The King of Broken Things – Seabrooke’s Theatre
REVIEW BY BILLY SUTER
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ONE of my biggest regrets driving away from last year’s Hilton Arts Festival at Hilton College was not being able to schedule seeing one of the four premiere performances there of The King of Broken Things, the latest stage work conceived and written by Durban lighting guru Michael Taylor-Broderick.
Many people I bumped into raved about the show, some rating it as their pick of the festival. Having heard all that and long been a fan of Michael’s lighting and his more recent creative writing for the stage, I was left very disappointed to have missed it.
What a surprise treat then, to suddenly find the new work sandwiched in, at late notice, for two Durban performances this week before it is staged at a festival in East London.
I attended the performance last night and would strongly recommend any fan or student of theatre make a beeline to DHS’s cosy Seabrooke’s Theatre to catch the final show there at 7.30pm on Friday (April 26). It truly is a wow work!
Following his enchanting Jakob, starring Bryan Hiles, and his more recent, equally beguiling shorter piece, 1 Man 1 Light, The King of Broken Things must rate as the best to date from Taylor-Broderick, who besides his great talent also happens to be one of the most likeable and humble personalities on the theatre scene.
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Running about 50 minutes without an interval, the play features a wonderful performance, by turns amusing and poignant, nuanced and energetic, from Cara Roberts.
She plays a young boy who runs from the audience on to a stage cluttered with crates, a table, a ladder, suspended bicycle wheels, hanging cardboard, paper on strings and many curious other odds and ends.
The lad arrives in a scruffy school uniform, clutching his ears, barely audible as he feverishly jabbers away, drowned by an amplified soundtrack of a mob of children making fun of him.
Then, when the din dims, he tells us about hating being made fun of, but being taught that sticks and stones may break his bones but words will never harm him.
He then, through careful direction, clever use of props, and an increasingly fascinating performance by Roberts, goes on to explain that while words may in fact carry weight – which he sets out to demonstrate physically – nothing broken cannot be fixed.
He draws us into his world, an untidy workshop that his ever-sad mother seldom visits anymore, where he strives to be inventive in making the ugly, broken or discarded beautiful and new.
He looks on the bright side, creating new things from old. Then his story bleeds from the fun and frivolous into one increasingly poignant and personal, where the rehabilitation of things broken and discarded gets to include people and hearts. The ending is a surprise that is pure genius, pure magic. The show, which Taylor-Broderick has realised with the help of some of the finest technical and theatrical minds in the country, is one of the best pieces of theatre I have seen in a while. Do yourself a big favour and see it!
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Profound and poignant
The Witness
19 Sep 2018
REVIEW: THE KING OF BROKEN THINGS DRAMA CENTRE, HILTON ARTS FESTIVAL
“WORDS have weight, something once said cannot be unsaid. Meaning is like a stone dropped into a pool; the ripples will spread and you cannot know what back they wash against.”
Those are the words of Philippa Gregory, author of The Constant Princess, but they could just as easily be those of Cara Roberts, who plays the young protagonist in Michael Taylor-Broderick’s exquisite new work, The King of Broken Things.
Taunted by other children for never having anything shiny and new, our hero chooses to listen to the lessons he was taught by his father to not listen to negative words as they can “weigh you down”.
To help, he has made a word protector, which helps to drown out all the horrible ones, and a cape covered in positive words, like “imagine”, “believe” and “dream”, so that he can soar through the sky like a bird.
He also believes in the Japanese concept of kintsugi (or kintsukuroi, which means “golden repair”), a centuries-old art of fixing broken pottery with a special lacquer dusted with powdered gold, silver or platinum.
The result makes a broken ceramic object even more beautiful than it was before it was broken.
Our young hero believes that like objects, broken people can be made whole and more beautiful.
Scars, both those you can see and those you can’t, he says, are the proof of what you’ve managed to survive.
Underpinning his tinkering is his desperate need to fix his “broken” mom.
Taylor-Broderick, who writes and directs the play, has made a set full of “rubbish”, things we throw away, which his hero uses to make different things.
And, with a wisdom beyond his years, he tells the audience, as he slowly builds a special project for an absent father, that we cannot keep throwing things away because soon there won’t be room for all broken things.
The King of Broken Things is profound, poignant and beautifully acted, and was one of my favourite shows at this year’s Hilton Arts Festival.
— Arts Editor.