Charl Blignaut
TWO of the world’s greatest living playwrights, Ariel Dorfman and Steven Berkoff, are preparing to visit South Africa to attend the annual Grahamstown Arts Festival at the end of June. They mark the first in a string of well-known theatre figures who are planning South African visits and/or performances over the next few months. They also signify an increasingly high profile attendance at a festival that is steadily earning a place as one of the more dynamic in the world today.
Speaking from Duke University in Carolina in the United States, his base since his exile from Chile, Dorfman said this week that he was enormously excited to be making the trip. He gained international recognition in the early Nineties for his play about three Chileans coming to terms with the aftershock of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Death and the Maiden.
It ran to accolades around the world, performed by luminaries such as Glenn Close on Broadway, before being filmed with a cast that included Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley. Barney Simon staged the South African premiere at the Market Theatre in 1992. He was a close friend of Dorfman’s and Dorfman said this week that Simon had shown him a video of the production and that he thought it was “brilliant”.
Dorfman has been planning to visit South Africa since the Eighties, but has, for various reasons, had to turn down invitations from friends like Andr Brink, Achmat Dangor and Nadine Gordimer. Now he can barely contain his excitement at visiting a country with which he has always felt a soul connection. “The parallels between Pinochet’s rule in Chile and apartheid are overwhelming,” he says. “The experience of exile has taught me to go beyond provincial thinking and listen to the echoes of a wider political experience.”
Dorfman will be delivering a lecture in Grahamstown and chairing a debate after a screening of Death and the Maiden. He will also be showing his first film – a short called My House is on Fire – which he co- directed with his son and which receives its international premiere on the festival.
British actor and playwright Steven Berkoff is a brilliant writer of contemporary dialogue and a proponent of anarchic physical theatre. He is widely studied in South Africa and his plays are repeatedly performed here – such as East, Kvetch and Decadence. He will be in Grahamstown to perform his solo piece One Man. It comprises of three of Berkoff’s finest monologues and will be on stage from July 3 to 13.