Diane De Beer
Director Malcolm Purkey and playwright Craig Higginson have become quite an item – on stage. The Imagined Land, which was part of this year’s National Arts Festival’s main programme and is now open at Sandton’s Auto and General Theatre on the Square, is their fourth play together with The Girl in The Yellow Dress their most successful outing to date. It was staged when Purkey was artistic director at The Market and Higginson the theatre’s dramaturg. “It had a second season,” says Purkey, “on demand.” And everyone in local theatre knows that’s unusual and something to be cherished. But they’re not resting on their laurels.
For many years, the two have worked together from the moment Higginson starts a new play. But he’s not only writing plays. He regularly launches a book and a play at more or less the same time, which he has done again with The Dream House which was recently published. And now comes the play.
This time around he contacted Purkey, now Joburg dean at AFDA (The South African School Of Motion Picture Medium And Live Performance) to tell him there was one brewing. “I think probably through the years I’ve been some kind of sound board,” says Purkey, but he knows his young charge is all grown up now and needs much less mentoring and working it on his own.
“Something clicks and happens with his work,” notes Purkey about their association and both have served the other and audiences well. The Imagined Land has a run at Sandton’s Theatre on the Square and hopefully travels further afield in the future.
It tells the story of a celebrated Zimbabwean novelist about to undergo brain surgery. Her daughter, in the literary criticism field, returns home to take care of her mother when a young biographer, also from Zimbabwe originally, turns up with a request to write the author’s biography. She changed the course of his life, he says.
In that single paragraph, one already feels the inherent tension without knowing that the mother and daughter are white and that the potential biographer is black. Add to that, he is also the daughter’s lover.
Purkey was thrilled to be testing the play in Grahamstown before this Jozi run and also encouraged that AFDA supported them wholeheartedly. “It works all round,” he believes. With an exciting cast of Fiona Ramsay as the mother, Janna Ramos-Violante the daughter (the two also recently played mother and daughter in Miss Dietrich Regrets and starred in Doub t this year) and Nat Ramabulana as the hopeful biographer, the stage is set for some fireworks.
“I was quite anxious about all these new relationships I was forming,” says the director who inexplicably had never worked with Ramsay before.
He spotted Ramos-Violante in Constellations last year, while he had teamed successfully with Ramabulana in The Girl With The Yellow Dress. “I love working with him,” he says and will probably add the other two to his list too. The creative, Denis Hutchinson (lighting and design), is also a first-timer for Purkey and he is feeling good about forming all these new stage relationships.
He was excited to be back in rehearsals, which he loves. His last play was in 2012, but in the future, the outlook is much better. Sophiatown, a musical he shaped and directed, has been prescribed around the country and a new stage version for a new generation is in his sights.
For now, though, preoccupied with The Imagined Land’s debut , he’s excited about his cast and crew. “It seems to be the beginning of something,” he muses.
He believes to make successful theatre, the play’s the thing. “We need to work with plays that are really compelling,” he says.
Usually, as in this instance, the resources are limited, and when the groundwork isn’t solid, you’re in trouble. He believes he has the goods in hand this time. “It’s been a real collaborative effort as we test ideas in rehearsal with Craig on hand,” he says. “It’s all about lifting it off the page.”
And following the Grahamstown debut, he is upbeat. The Imagined Land deals with many different issues, among others the vexing question of who has the authority to represent. He’s tickled and thrilled by the kind of topics discussed on our stages.
“Aren’t we lucky that art can still be that challenging? That’s how we find the power. The play has to have bite.”
By all accounts, The Imagined Land will do damage.
l The Imagined Land plays at Sandton’s Theatre on the Square until September 12.