Foot uses theatre to bring about change
YESTERDAY afternoon, playwright Lara Foot was working on lighting at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, today she is on her way to Grahamstown, and tomorrow the curtain goes up on two of her three plays. The director and CEO of the Baxter Theatre Centre is the Featured Artist at this year’s National Arts Festival and is premiering The Inconvenience of Wings and re-staging previous award-winners Tshepang and Karoo Moose on the main programme, which opens tomorrow.
The multi-award winning playwright, director and author, with a masters degree from UCT and 40 professional productions to her name, still gets excited by new work and the platform given at the NAF.
Being chosen as Featured Artist is an enormous honour – last year, for example, Pieter-Dirk Uys was given the accolade.
NAF artistic director Ismail Mahomed said this year’s programme celebrated women, inspired by the 60th anniversary of the Women’s March to Pretoria in 1956.
More than three-quarters of the Main programme is either written, directed, curated or headlined by women, and the Solo Theatre Festival contains eight one-handers about women, and performed by women.
“The stories celebrate the compassion, tenacity and integrity with which women engage in their political landscapes,” Mahomed said.
Solo productions include Ruth First: 117 Days (performed by Jackie Rens); Amsterdam (Chanje Kunda); Immortal (Jenna Dunster); Unveiled (Gushan Mia); Penny (Zethu Dlomo); In Bocca Al Lupo (Jemma Kahn); Blonde Poison (Fiona Ramsay); and Watching (Ester Natzijl, a production that comes to the Festival from the 2015 Amsterdam Fringe).
Foot uses theatre not only to tell compelling stories but also to bring about social change.
Tshepang, incidentally, means Hope and that is a recurring theme in Foot’s work: despite the grim reality of poverty, abuse and many other social ills, her plays leave the audience with the hope that life can be better.
By turning the stage spotlight onto injustice on stage, she encourages her audiences to confront the injustice off stage as well.
She has come a long way since she won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Drama in 1996.
She’s been married and divorced, and has two teenage children (her daughter Rebecca will also be at the festival).
The Baxter Theatre promises audiences will see a “grown up Lara” in her new play.
The Inconvenience of Wings includes Grahamstown drama legend Andrew Buckland and Mncedisi Shabangu, who has been in several of her works, as well as actress Jennifer Steyn.
Karoo Moose also opens tomorrow night, and will feature the original cast from 2007, many of whom are now theatre names.
Karoo Moose won 15 awards and, as Foot has said of it, “the themes of the story for me were bound up in the idea that the children in the village needed some kind of magical event to free them from abuse, neglect and poverty.
“Something magical was needed to break the cycle of violence.”
Next week, Foot will restage Tshepang, a poetic version of the brutal story of Baby Tshepang.
ý For more information on the NAF go to: www.nationalartsfestival. co.za