Setting multiple stages alight

Published May 26, 2015

Share

SYLVAINE Strike (pictured) doesn’t often use fully formed plays that have already been performed as a source material. But if the subject matter appeals, she grabs a good piece of writing with two hands. Point in case is Miss Dietrich Regrets.

Actress Fiona Ramsey had originally suggested Gail Louw’s play to Daphne Kuhn (of Theatre on the Square) who approached Strike to direct. She was immediately drawn to the mother-daughter relationship depicted in the play.

“Anyone who is a girl has a mum and there’s a complexity and a marvellous thing there that is sometimes misunderstood and other times far too complex to understand,” said Strike.

While her relationship with her own daughter has some bearing on her thoughts on the matter, it is her relationship with her mother that is more of an influence. But over-riding every-thing is the one-of-a-kind relationship between German-American actress Marlene Dietrich and her daughter Maria Riva, the subjects of Miss Dietrich Regrets.

Strike has changed the original script slightly, injecting the play with her signature visual style and setting it in a different setting: “One has the illusion of Marlene Dietrich dying in glamour, but she died a pauper, in an impoverished, festering, dirty flat. She was supporting many people and had a terrible drug habit... so she blew it (her money) away.”

In Louw’s original version Dietrich is bedridden in her Paris flat, but Strike has her moving around. The story moves between Dietrich’s past and present, so whenever she is moving around on stage is actually when the character is remembering her past:

“It always sticks to the script and honours it, but I have poetic licence. The more I read it, the more I realised that it was a movie in her mind, so I set it on a film set, in her dream bedroom.”

When Miss Dietrich Regrets opens on June 4, Strike should be forgiven for being a bit tired, since that’s the day she starts rehearsals for the two productions she will start at the National Arts Festival.

In addition to working on Travels Around My Room and Simply Sapiens, she will also reprise Tobacco, and the Harmful Effects Thereof in Grahamstown on the Fringe programme.

Last year Strike was the featured artist on the Main programme, which has mostly been her stage home in Grahamstown since she was appointed Standard Bank Young Artist for Drama in 2006. But this year will be the first time since 2005 (with The Travellers) she has had to wrestle solely with the difficulty that is the swollen Fringe programme.

Strike is also directing William Harding’s Travels Around My Room, and one third of Simply Sapiens, which is a triptych co-written and performed by Greg Melvill-Smith and Craig Morris.

Simply Sapiens examines what it means to be human and her sketch entitled Virus is a monologue for Morris.

Tobacco, and the Harmful Effects Thereof is at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town and travels to the Market Theatre in Joburg in February.

• Miss Dietrich Regrets, Theatre on the Square, June 2 to 27; Tobacco, and the Harmful Effects Thereof, NAF – St Andrew’s Hall – July 2 to 11; Travels Around my Room, NAF – St Andrew’s Studio 2, July 2 to 11; Simply Sapiens, NAF – PJ’s, July 6 to 11.

Related Topics: