Foreword

A PORTAL TO THE PAST

Hold Still opens with a flashback to a painful past. Oliver Feigel – whose family is the focus of the drama that is about to unfold – narrates a story his father has told him many times. As we hear Oliver speak the words of his family’s fable of survival, we understand immediately that we are in the hands of a master storyteller. Nadia Davids writes with an urgency that is never rushed.

The lyricism of Oliver’s first words is powerful. He begins: ‘My father tells me this story. Once, in a forest, made tall by pale slender trees, not so far from the town that you felt lost, but not so near to it that you felt found, a small boy was at a picnic with his family. As the grown-ups ate and talked, the boy slipped away to the nearby stream to sail his paper boat.’

When Oliver finishes telling the story, we are transported away from the forest of the fable to his home, where we first meet his friend Imran and then his parents, Rosa and Ben Feigel. The Feigels live in contemporary London, a city that is gripped by rising British nativism. Against the backdrop of Brexit, we can sense the anxiety of the Trump tsunami a con- tinent away. Racism is in vogue, and the anxiety about what it means for Ben and Rosa – an urbane, progressive, exceed- ingly clever couple – seeps into their well-appointed flat.

Rosa Feigel – acerbic, exasperated, panicked, black – rails against ‘hot takes’ delivered ‘courtesy of the Daily Mail’, while her husband, Ben – politically naive, doggedly loving, as pan- icked as his wife, white – tries desperately to believe that the liberal institutions designed to protect the vulnerable will do what they were intended to do.

Rosa works in corporate social responsibility, nibbling away at the edges of capitalism, while Ben is a columnist for a progressive newspaper writing about social issues and, like his wife, earning his keep by (gently) biting the hand that feeds him. Both trade in critique as currency, and yet neither seems aware of how embedded they are in the systems they play at challenging.

The play revolves around their son, Oliver, and his bud- ding awareness of their weaknesses. Given that he is named after a dead revolutionary whose party has become adept at speaking with a forked tongue, it is no surprise that Oliver has a nose for hypocrisy. Yet he is also a believer. On the cusp of manhood and suffocated by his parents’ love, Oliver embodies both the cynicism and idealism of youth.

When his friend Imran is denied asylum in the UK, Oliver hides him in the attic and tries to convince him to enlist Rosa and Ben to help him. Imran refuses. Though he has known them since he was a small child, Imran doesn’t trust Oliver’s parents. As the target of their generosity over the years, Imran has accepted boots and textbooks and tutoring sessions. In spite of this – indeed, because of it – Imran has always been suspicious of their kindness. He has lived in their orbit long enough to be certain that they will not risk themselves or their son for him.

Their son – as sons tend to do – thinks otherwise. He is sure his parents will help Imran and find a way for him to stay in the UK. And so, the stage is set for an emotional reckoning. But when Ben and Rosa discover Imran in their house, their response falls short of their son’s expectations. In the space created by their prevarication, Oliver begins to understand that his parents are not the people they have claimed to be.

The question of who we really are – without the trappings of our titles – is one our children are uniquely qualified to ask us. And so, Oliver – who vacillates between belief in his par- ents and a sense that they have betrayed him – serves as the moral core of the story. The moment in which Oliver contemplates the idea that he has ascribed a goodness to his parents that they may not deserve is nothing short of devastating.

While Oliver demands that his parents enact their love for him and their stated commitment to justice by protecting his friend, Imran asks for nothing. Imran’s absence of expectation, his tightly coiled refusal to believe in the goodness of people who artfully proclaim themselves to be good, haunts this story.

But of course, the beauty of this tale is that it operates at many levels. In Hold Still, Nadia Davids has written stories within stories. There are stories that provide portals to the past – the stories of Ben’s father and his people, and Rosa and her parents and their people. Then there is the story of their little family of three, each of them trying to love one another through sarcasm and resentment and the existential dread induced by late-stage capitalism. And of course, there is the forensic examination of the politics of migration and hostility that is both the focus of and the backdrop to the emotional action. In this sense, Hold Still is both a story of family and a narrative of collective and ongoing traumas. It asks what we will do for those we love, and perhaps most importantly, it asks what we are willing to risk for those to whom we have only a moral obligation.

When the stakes are high and the immigration system that Ben writes about in his columns, and that Rosa rails against at dinner parties, threatens to deport their son’s best friend, they must decide whether they will be accountable to their ideals, or whether they will turn away from Imran to save themselves.

The play need not be watched to be powerful. Davids has done the work, creating an emotional landscape that recalls the setting of Ursula Le Guin’s short story ‘The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas’. Omelas is that charmed place where ‘there was no king’ and the people ‘did not use swords, or keep slaves’.

The people of Omelas had no monarch, shunned slavery, did not believe in the evil of the stock exchange or advertis- ing. They had no secret police and no bomb. Like the Feigels, the people of Omelas were ‘mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched’.

But of course, the cleverness and wit of the people of Omelas is built on a reality that, though not a secret, is hid- den from public view. The people of Omelas – like the Feigels – harbour a hidden child. The child lives in a basement in Omelas. As Le Guin writes, ‘It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect.’

Whatever the case, the child in Omelas exists, in the same way that Imran – though not physically grotesque – exists in the Feigels’ attic.

In Omelas, the townspeople ‘would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.’

Like the townspeople of Omelas, Rosa and Ben under- stand that their privilege is contingent on the existence of people who live in the shadows. Without the people in the basement, the prosperity of the sophisticates would dwindle. When Rosa baulks at harbouring Imran, she is acknowl- edging that she gets to keep her place in England only if she closes the door in Imran’s face. ‘My parents were granted asy- lum here, but they were on watch list for years,’ Rosa tells Ben (Act 2, Scene 2). ‘You are a first-generation Jew. Your father was a known union organiser. We are the perfect scapegoats for these people – everything they despise in one unit.’

And so, we see exactly what Davids is up to with her pol- ished dialogue and her clever characters. The living room of the Feigels’ home is a portal to the past, a way of engaging with the traumas of apartheid, genocide and displacement, while insisting that they are deeply connected to the present. Imran’s dilemma is not his alone. As Oliver insists, and as Rosa and Ben try to deny, Imran’s crisis is experienced collectively. The traumas we abide will haunt us for generations to come.

Hold Still is a story for our times, but it is so much more than that. It is a story for all time. It insists that we owe one another our lives – not in the abstract way of human rights and international law, which, as we see in the present moment, can so quickly be flung aside. In dialogue that is irreverent and through monologues written in aching prose, the play tells a story that is impossible to ignore but terrify- ingly hard to countenance. It’s the story of a boy in an attic and his friend who insists that he must be saved. More than that, like all great art, the question at the heart of Hold Still is, what does it mean to be good?

The children in this story already know the answer to this question, and so it is the adults we must worry about. In Davids’ ferocious, loving, complicated telling, it is not Imran but Ben and Rosa who need saving – as do, perhaps, all of us.

Davids is too talented to offer us pat answers about how we might go about this mission. Still, in her inimitable style, she offers us glimpses of what it might look like for Ben and Rosa to rediscover their fire. In the end Davids reminds us that courage – unconditional, fierce and unflinching – looks a lot like love.

Sisonke Msimang

1 July 2024

“Foreword” by Sisonke Msimang in Hold Still: A Play by award-winning writer and theatre-maker Nadia Davids. Copyright © Nadia Davids 2025. This play script was published by Wits University Press, 2025.

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