Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Bold new take on Fugard
IT MUST be no easy task adapting an Athol Fugard play. Every line that needs to be changed or cut must be checked.
People are Living There, on at The Galloway Theatre at the Waterfront Theatre School, is an adaption of the original Fugard text by Blythe Linger and Kathleen Stephens.
It will have a 10-day run which ends next Saturday, with shows nightly at 8pm.
Blythe and Stephens have condensed it from a two- and- a- half hour production to one hour and shifted the focus to Milly, played by Imke du Toit.
If you haven’t been to the Galloway, please do. It’s an interesting inner- city performance venue within a performing arts school and it could do with a bit more foot traffic. The theatre was once a chapel for the Anglican Mission to Seafarers.
As you walk into the theatre you encounter a woman sitting on the floor bobbing back and forward while a ticking noise issues from somewhere.
The play is a four-hander: Milly runs a boarding house and interacts with its young inhabitants: student Don (Kiroshan Naidoo), ditsy postman Shorty ( Almar Muller) and his aggressive wife Sissy (Clarissa Roodt).
We are exposed to her unfortunate loneliness, her desperation and her pursuit of happiness.
She nags the young men, prod- ding them into spending time with her and insulting them.
Meanwhile, a change of lighting indicates a switch in the performance to a parallel story line, where Milly is speaking to a therapist (Naidoo).
People are Living There provokes thoughts about mental health, loneliness and the effects of trauma.
This production had a run at the National Arts Festival, the ASSITEJ SA Naledi Showcase in Joburg and the Cape Town Fringe Festival. This is its first Cape Town theatre run.
Linger worked on lighting and the set of the previous run of People are Living There that was done in its original form at the Masque Theatre in 2013.
“I kept seeing different things every night. I read the text a year later and this year, I decided to try to adapt it,” said Linger.
The reasoning for the length cut, was the modern attention span.
“The length is difficult for a drama. Most dramas have length of about 55 minutes. This is 90 minutes with no interval. For every change, we had to liaise with Fugard himself. We adapted it to focus more on the lead., not the other characters.”
Linger and the team shows a knack for lighting and stage. He switches from a warm feel for the boarding house to a shade of blue for the therapy sessions. It’s all quick-paced and dramatic.
The set is composed of aged wood planks that serve as benches, firewood and objects Milly is polishing or dragging around.
Linger said he was inspired by German set designer Thomas Mika in creating the look. “The set needed to move. We needed to keep it minimal to travel to festivals. We needed things to be a chair and then in another scene, something else. I love working with wood.”
As the production moves, you don’t forget the presence of the ticking, it is persistent and eventually distorts. Linger says that Fugard worked with time as a character.