Porra power

Sonia Esgueira on playing the hairy daughter, stereotypes and the secret to her one woman show’s six year success

Only the sassy Sonia Esgueira can admit that she loves her own jokes and still come across as absolutely charming and utterly humble.

“If people don’t laugh, I am like ‘I don’t understand people, I mean come on. This is gold here, I am giving you gold’,” she jokes, before bursting out into contagious laughter and chatting some more about bringing the newly director Porra’Licious back on to the stage.

Ask Esgueira what the secret of her success is, and she will graciously rattle off about how grateful she is for the support and encouragement. There are the odd shows where audiences don’t laugh as hard as they should  (on these nights Esgueira melodramatically threatens to “give it all up and become someone’s PA”), but more often than not her loyal supporters are steadily chuckling away at some of the harsh but nevertheless endearing truths that play out on stage.

“I am  lucky to have so much support, and I  think it’s because I have a very niche market that supports me 1000%,” she elaborates. “They come out in their droves and word of mouth spreads to the rest of the Portuguese community. Actually, I think that’s the secret to theatre success – to have a strong target market. People want to know about themselves, and they want to laugh at themselves. If I wasn’t doing the show, I would have gone to see it,” she says, again bursting  out laughing.

In Porra’Licious, the third installment in the uber successful one woman trilogy that Esgueira fondly labels “a romantic comedy for the stage”, her larger than life characters like Paula (ever longing and looking for “the one”) and the macho man  Rui Ferreira (ever chasing the same  Afrikaans poppie) have matured somewhat and are that much closer to finding the happily ever after’s that they have been so desperately seeking  over the years.

Under the new co-direction of Helen Iskander and James Cuningham, Esgueira says that audiences can expect a show with depth and a lot of physical mime and gestures throughout the monologue. She also says that while the characters in the first installment Porra were quite strongly stereotypical, the third installment really sees them coming into their own.

“I think with the first Porra I really played into the stereotypes. I was doing a show about one community in a country with so many different languages, cultures and communities, so I felt I needed to make the characters and their stories very accessible and recognisable, you know, like the cafe owner and the  hairy daughter. But later the characters became their own people.”

Esgueira is the first to admit that writing  Porra’Licious, which is in many ways the end of an era,  was an emotional experience. She’s not saying that it will never return to the stage, but she is also keen to stretch her creative muscles and try something new. Once this run has finished at the Studio Theatre, she says she’s excited about a new one woman she’s working on for next year. All she will reveal for now, however, is that it’s a mainstream comedy about “one person’s search for something”. 

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Tuesday 4 October 2011.

Porra’Licious is on at the Studio Theatre, Montecasino from  October 5 to  November 13. Tickets are R150 at the theatre (011-511-1988) or Computicket (www.computicket.com).