SA playwright hits big time in London
ASOUTH African play written by University of Cape Town-trained actor Paul Herzberg, The Dead Wait, has attracted considerable attention in London, where he lives. It has been described as a post-apartheid drama about the Angolan border war and is set in both the late 1980s and present-day South Africa. It has received rave reviews. The Daily Telegraph awarded the production four stars, calling it “a smart and compelling piece of theatre”.
It is about a white conscript who is instructed by his racist officer (played by Herzberg) to carry a wounded freedom fighter through the bush to the army base. Critic Dominic Cavendish said its events underlined the extent “to which individual psychological scars are bound up with a national story of ‘healing’ ”.
Time Out magazine also awarded The Dead Wait four stars.
It described it as “a kinetic mix of pain, anger and endurance”, and the theatre blog What’s Peen Seen? gave it five stars.
“Take measure of the innumerable ambiguities that surround pre/post-Mandela South Africa and it takes a truly gifted playwright to account for all the variables. Paul Herzberg is just such a playwright,” said the blog’s critic, Robert Wallis.
It was first staged at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg in 1997, then reworked for the Royal Exchange in Manchester in 2002 and then again for this production at the new Park Theatre in Finsbury Park. Now it is in negotiation to be made into a film that will be produced by Los Angeles-based South African David Wicht, of Film Afrika. If all went according to plan, the film would be shot in South Africa, Herzberg said this week.