Into the Desert
Reyka creator Rohan Dickson talks about finding a home for his new show Desert Rose.
Desert Rose
Season 1 Thursdays (from 2 June) M-Net (*101) 20:30
M-Net’s (*101) new local drama series Desert Rose is a tale of innocence and experience, set in a forgotten Northern Cape town. The story centres on the Greyling siblings and what they have to do to survive in the middle of nowhere after their musician father Freddie (Neil Sandilands, exBart on soapie 7de Laan, see p30, and now General Abbot in Netflix sci-fi series Sweet Tooth) vanishes into the desert, leaving their home mired in debt and the family beholden to a dangerous and greedy man.
The desert setting was essential for the themes that series creator Rohan Dickson (the writer behind crime drama series Reyka) wanted to explore. “It is a familial story. It is a familiar story. But the idea of characters that feel that they have been exiled resonates deeply for me. The Greylings are the forgotten people who’re left to live on the fringes in a country that has left them behind. And that’s not to feel sorry for them.
It’s now (about) how do you survive. Is there love? Is there redemption? Is there humour? Is there humanity that can be found in those little cracks or do you just waste away in the desert?” But before he could write, Rohan had to take his own walk into the wilderness…
APEOPLE&APLACE
“The story is loosely based on episodes and pieces of narrative that I remember hearing about my family as a boy when I was growing up. I had a lot of the tone, I knew the characters, and I knew what would kickstart the story, which would be the death of one of the siblings.
All of that happened in real life,” says Rohan. “But I didn’t want to place it where it actually happened, which is where I’m from (KwaZulu-Natal), I had wanted to detach because I knew I was fictionalising a huge amount of it. And I love stories or films that are set in the US desert or the Australian Outback. Finding the desert was what the first adventure was for.”
Just before lockdown struck in late March 2020, Rohan and his script editor Gerrit Olivier set off on a roadtrip to explore the Northern Cape, to ground the story. “I knew that Gerrit would love to go on an adventure. He’s much older than me and he knows a lot of the history, plus he’s Afrikaans, and every single person we encountered was Afrikaans, first language. After that, he read every draft of all the scripts and gave me specific notes on how people in that situation would behave, especially coming from Afrikaans roots. That was very valuable,” Rohan explains.
And off they went into the vast open landscape of the Northern Cape. “I was unsure where I was going, I didn’t know the Klein Karoo, I didn’t know about Kamieskroon, the place where we ended up shooting the series. I went with Gerrit for over a week. We drove to Springbok and explored. There’s an area about 200km wide where we explored everywhere. People took us into their homes, and we spoke to a complete diversity of Northern Cape people. We found the strangest and most amazing people literally in a small shack in the middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere. We would just approach the shack and ask to speak to them.
“In Kamieskroon there was a family there that spoke to us a lot and gave us dinner and looked after us a bit – just spontaneously. They were amazing, and very welcoming. I don’t think at the time Kamieskroon was the obvious choice because it’s very small, it’s more like a settlement than a town, and we didn’t know whether we would have all the facilities to be able to shoot a production there. But as it turned out, that is where we shot 80% of the series, with the last 20% being shot in Port Nolloth on the coast.
“It’s just so beautiful. We spent eight days surrounded by the Namaqualand, and at the time, it was barren. I’m sure the flowers add a very poetic touch, but what we saw was haunting and incredible. It was a really seminal experience in the research. My story became more Afrikaans. The flavour of the Northern Cape became more present. And as I started writing it, I left behind those stories from my family and I was able to start making up things. It became more quirky. It’s offbeat now. Even if there had been no TV series, it still would have been something I would never forget,” Rohan says, smiling.