/ 29 June 2010

‘My work has healed me’

Life has a funny way of bringing one back to the same places again and again. And yet the places and people one finds there are never quite the same.

For Dorothy Ann Gould, who performs in the production of Hello and Goodbye, the character of Hester is an old and much-loved friend.

Her current performance of this powerful, raging and wounded woman is the culmination of a relationship that spans more than 30 years.

When Gould was a student in Durban in the 1970s, the legendary Yvonne Bryceland and Bill Flynn performed Hello and Goodbye at Natal University’s Sneddon Theatre.

Gould wangled her way into being the assistant stage manager for the show.

Behind the scenes

As the backstage crew were puzzling about where to find a worn piece of linoleum for the floor of the set, she volunteered the tatty piece from the back room of her parents’ house.

Gould’s father, a fitter and turner on the South African Railways, was astounded that people were crazy enough to pay for an old piece of flooring by supplying a brand new one in exchange.

Gould played Hester for the first time in January 1994, with Lionel Newton playing Johnnie.

The show opened during the lead-up to the first democratic elections in South Africa in the week of the Shell House massacre.

The struggle

The theatre was almost empty on opening night because people were too afraid to go out. During the rehearsal period, director Lara Foot-Newton set Gould the task of spending a weekend on the streets to get a sense of Hester’s life.

She was given R80 to survive for an entire weekend, had to keep the same clothes on the whole time, could speak only Afrikaans and travelled 3rd class on the train to Pretoria and back.

She describes sleeping on a bed covered in newspaper and walking with her suitcase throughout the day for lack of anything else to do.

Men tried to pick her up by plying her with brandy and Coke, and promises of a braai.

Finally, she ended up at the zoo, where she devoured a pie and gravy. This left her with enough money for a beer and newspaper on the return journey to Johannesburg.

Halfway back to Johannesburg on the Monday morning, Inkatha impi wearing red headbands and armed with pangas jumped onto the carriage she was in.

All she had to rely on was the protection of the young man sitting next to her.

When she arrived back on the Monday she went straight to the Market Theatre for a run-through of the play.

The reward

She describes connecting with the soul of Hester during that weekend, and feeling like a wounded animal during the run-through on the Monday morning.

She came to understand the way in which Hester’s life had left her damaged.

She also realised that there was a reserve of strength within her – to get on her feet again like a bull or an animal, a gladiator staggering to her feet.

Athol Fugard phoned at seven in the morning after he saw Gould’s first performance as Hester, to congratulate her on a job well done.

Following the 1994 production of Hello and Goodbye, she did a once-off public reading of the role in Johannesburg, with Sir Anthony Sher reading Johnnie, directed by Janice Honeyman.

Since her baptismal solo performance in the mid-seventies in the role of the English poet Stevie Smith in the production, Stevie, Gould has played numerous complex characters.

She seems to have a need to intuitively connect with women whom she plays in order to really enter their world.

Her own journey of physical and emotional pain and survival seems to have played an important role in helping her to do this.

‘My work has healed me. Putting on the mask and being another person gave me a voice and a little bit of power.

‘Playing these women has enabled me to be a larger spirit than I was at drama school.”

It is this experience of the power of theatre to promote insight and understanding that keeps Gould committed to this work and leads her to believe that theatre is crucial in bringing social, emotional and spiritual balance to people’s lives and to society.

Coming back to play Hester in this production has brought other parts of Gould’s life full circle.

Mark Graham recently saw Gould’s husband, Michael Maxwell, performing and offered to direct them both in Hello and Goodbye. This is their first collaboration as actors.

This piece is from Cue Online, a project of Rhodes University’s New Media Lab.