A GROUP of KwaZulu-Natal’s finest theatre practitioners have been working on staging Craig Eisenstein’s award-winning new work, Your Hand in My Pocket.
Director William le Cordeur has been hard at work with his team – Clinton Small, Caitlin Kilburn and Avi Maistry – for Eisenstein’s play, which is to stage at The Catalina Theatre.
Joburg’s Eisenstein scooped top honours for his play at the Pansa/ NLDTF Festival of Reading of New Writing held in Durban in June.
According to a press release, the play unfolds when Timothy meets Norah on a beautiful day in the park. Affection between them grows by starlight and ready-made meals.
But even the light of stars casts its own small shadows, and by the brightness of later days a dark history can no longer remain hidden in their newly-blossomed relationship.
Speaking to Tonight, Eisenstein said at the time of penning the play, he really just wanted to write a piece about two people falling in love in a park.
“The gravitas really came out as I wrote. I started putting mannerisms and quirks into the characters which kind of made it deeper,” he said.
After having the play read at an event at Wits University, Eisenstein hadn’t anticipated it would go further than that.
“It was overwhelming when it won the Festival of Reading of New Writing. The main thing is to now see how the play is received in Durban, but it would mean the world to me to be able to tour it elsewhere.”
Eisenstein is set to arrive in Durban shortly before the staging.
He said he only knew Le Cordeur and Kilburn so well, but was confident Le Cordeur would do great work with his piece.
Eisenstein has written several unpublished works consisting of a novella, a collection of eight children’s short books, numerous short stories, several plays and a novel. One of the short stories won the 2010 German Embassy Cultural Award for his tale depicting the journey of a young man crossing from East to West Berlin in 1961.
Commenting on what he hoped the audience would take from the play, he said: “The reconciliation of history and past hurts as a way to validate and vindicate this core, powerful intangibility that we call love, for me, is certainly an aspect that I’m quite fond of.
“[This] is one of many possibilities that I as the author of the work would consider, but I would never ply my own writerly desires on those of an audience.
“It is never up to the writer to specifically desire that a certain facet, theme or meaning is taken from a work; the most satisfying hope I would ever have would be that an audience member finds an atom of resonance within the narrative that they connect with, and that is personally poignant to them, individually; and it is from that personal atom of remembrance that I feel contains all the wealth of what I hope they walk away from the theatre with.”
• Your Hand in My Pocket runs from November 8 to 18 at the Catalina Theatre, Wilson’s Wharf. For bookings contact the Catalina Theatre box office at 031 305 6889 or visit www.strictlytickets.com Tickets are R60. Show time is 8pm.