Why I’ve made a drama out of a tragedy
The violent death of an actor and friend in Cape Town seven years ago has inspired a play about grief and reconciliation being staged at the Edinburgh Festival
‘ISOMETIMES THINK it fortuitous that we were doing a play which was all about death and murder,” says Dame Janet Suzman. The play in question is Hamlet and the actor/director is recalling a terrible moment like no other in a career spanning 50 years in stage and screen.
It occurred in April 2006. Suzman had finished a day rehearsing her production of Hamlet, which she was directing for the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town. Everyone was excited.
In three days’ time, the production was leaving for England to open in Stratford at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with which Suzman had spent much of her career after moving from apartheid South Africa to Britain at the age of 20. This Hamlet would be part of the Shakespeare’s Complete Works festival.
“It was a Sunday — actually Easter Sunday — and we all hugged each other saying ‘see you on Monday’,” she recounts flatly. But on Monday she heard the news that Brett Goldin, the 27-year-old actor playing the role of Guildenstern, had been found dead near a main road in Cape Town.
His hands had been tied behind his back and he had been shot through the back of the head. His body lay next to that of his fashion designer friend Richard Bloom, who had been slain in the same manner. The deaths tore a hole in the men’s families, of course, but also in Johannesburg’s Jewish community. Although South Africans were familiar with stories of random violence, this was more brutal than most. The friends had been robbed, stripped and executed.
Seven years on, Suzman, 74, is appearing in a play at the Edinburgh Festival which is in part based on the murders. Written by the Baxter Theatre’s director, Lara Foot, Solomon and Marion is a tender two-hander about grief and reconciliation. “The play is a sort of comedy,” says Suzman. “It’s about two completely unlike people — a young black boy [played by Khayalethu Anthony] from the townships and an old white lady living on her own, either out of folly or bravura, in a far-flung part of South Africa. He turns out to have witnessed her son’s murder. The loss of a child through gratuitous murder may be a peculiarly South African thing.”
Does this phenomenon ever make her want to wash her hands of the country she was born in? “It’s like this,” she replies. “The country of your birth is like your parents. You don’t choose them, it just happens that way. But they are part of you. They are in your blood. The country of adoption is like your spouse. You chose it. South Africa is like my mad mother. I find it the most fascinating and infuriating place. I’ve always gone back.”
Suzman’s famous aunt never left. One of its most formidable MPs, Helen Suzman was also one of the bravest white voices in South Africa’s antiapartheid movement. It was, in part, says her niece, a Jewish sense of injustice that motivated her. Neither were brought up in observant households.
Janet Suzman was the daughter of a well-to-do Jewish Johannesburg family. “My mother was atheist. Never went to synagogue in her life. Which made total sense to me. And still does. My father developed 2,000 years of Judaism round him on Yom Kippur and then it all went away again.” But that is not to say Judaism has no hold on her. If South Africa is like her mad mother, perhaps Judaism is like a contrary father.
She has no truck with Jews who have failed to learn the lessons of tolerance taught by the Holocaust, particularly Israeli Jews holding intolerant views of Arabs and Palestinians.
“I want to tell you something,” she adds. “I’m so conscious that when I look for what attracts me in Judaism, nothing much practical does. But the central ethic of Judaism does very much. The idea of an ethical life. The idea of not doing to anyone else that which you don’t want done to yourself — well I feel that intensely. And so I was never surprised by Helen’s burning sense of justice, or burning sense of injustice being done. And her absolutely flagrantly energetic and tireless attempts tocircumventthat.”
The death of Goldin did not stop the productionof Hamlet, Suzmanpointsout. “You have heard the adage about how the play must go on. Well, that is a metaphor for life. Life must go on. It was the most remarkable performance of Hamlet I’ve ever seen. The place was filled up with grief. It rose up and embraced this ghastly event into its soul which I don’t think any other play could have.” Any play other than perhaps Suzman’s latest. Solomon and Marion is at the Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, until August 26