The plays that they worked on in the Jakes Gerwel Foundation / NATi Jong Sterre/Rising Stars Project for Upcoming Playwrights will premiere at 2023 Suidoosterfees at Artscape.
The play takes place in the 1980s and tackles the history of “farm slavery” interwoven with the acknowledgment and honouring of freedom fighters of the 1980s – “white, brown and black freedom fighters,” Curtley says.
“I want to tell the story of the attacker, as well as the victim. The climax of the play is a farm murder. But this is a different farm murder, one with deep reasoning and history behind it – a bittersweet moment. We see how the history of the characters has an impact on each other’s lives. How farmer workers were abused by their owners, but in this case, the owner has a story behind his oppressive behaviour.”
What I hope to achieve with this play is to show audience members how easy it is to become trapped in a cycle of abusive toxic behaviour, which is represented through two characters, who are lovers, trying to escape the cycle of drug abuse.
I want to make audience members feel trapped in the toxic cycle with the two characters. When audience members believe that they can finally escape the abuse and toxic environment, they are pulled back into the cycle with the characters when the circular structure of the play is revealed.
However, when audience members eventually leave the auditorium, they will feel a sense of relief because they could escape, while they left the two characters behind with no hope of leaving the toxic space represented by the performance space.
In Afrikaans there is no word for ‘gender’. All we has is ‘gender’. I therefore write Gender to examine the English word ‘gender”s understanding of the performance and expression of the male and female in Afrikaner history. Even though it is mostly about my ancestors, it is a queer play.”
Netwerk 24’s Murray La Vita went to visit them at Paulet House in Somerset East.
He also spoke to author Theo Kemp, JGF’s Executive Director and designer of all the mentorship and residency programmes.
And like all the journalists who visited Paulet House this year, Murray thoroughly enjoyed his visit to the Walter Battiss Art Museum and the museum’s inimitable curator Ros Turner. .
