Nicholas Neveling
Playwright Reza de Wet isn’t too bothered about the numerous literary prizes she
has won or the big city fame she could achieve if she wanted to.
“It’s the experience itself. It’s the felt life that’s all important. Some of my best experiences have been in very small productions that no one really watched,” she says.
For De Wet the “felt life” is all about magic and imagination. This world of
make-believe and fable provides the setting for her new work On the Lake, which
premieres at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival. The production is a reply
to Anton Chechov’s play The Seagull and is the third in a series of De Wet’s
responses to Chekhov.
“Chekhov creates a world that is so evocative, so atmospheric. Since the time I came across it, it has delighted me,” she says.
The central figure in Chekhov’s The Seagull is Nina, who is also the main protagonist in On the Lake. In Chekhov’s play Nina is the wish fulfilment of the
two main male characters, Trigorin and Constantine. Nina herself, seduced, abused and manipulated, searches desperately for her own identity and fails in
her bid to become an actress and achieve her artistic vision.
De Wet played Nina while still at university and ever since undertaking that
role she has had a deep fascination with the character. “She has stayed with me
and haunted me.”
In On the Lake Nina’s role is inverted and she achieves her creative aspirations. “She is the presiding artistic consciousness revisiting her past
but now as the creator of it, shaping it and somehow finding that she can liberate herself,” says De Wet.
A remarkable feature of On the Lake is that the cast and crew are all female.
“It changes the dynamic enormously if there are men in the play or women in the
play. If you make it exclusively one it creates something quite concentrated.”
There are male characters in the play, but they are only heard or referred to
and never appear on stage. They take on an ominous and disturbing presence that
creates a tangible force in the action.
The other unique feature of the play is its relationship to Gary Gordon’s lake
… beneath the surface. Gordon and De Wet co-scripted this play as a response
to On the Lake. The productions share the same set, lighting design and music
but De Wet insists they are separate projects: “It is really in a playful way
that the correspondences exist. The one doesn’t reflect or comment on the other.”
Gordon’s play communicates through the physical theatre elements of dance and
mime while On the Lake is more text based. The play is styled in the theatre
traditions of clowning, puppet shows and the circus. “It’s very sweet, very funny and I think it’s quite magical,” says De Wet.
The two stars of the production are the Johannesburg duo of Grethe Fox and Annelisa Weiland, who De Wet describes as “two of the finest actresses in this
country”.
On the Lake is performed under the banner of the First Physical Theatre Company
and opens at the festival on the June 28.