Guy Willoughby
It’s not often that a playwright has two full-length dramas running concurrently in a major centre, but such is the happy fate of Fiona Coyne, actress, elephant lover and recently author, whose plays Dearly Beloved and Glassroots open at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown this weekend.
“Please God they don’t close too quickly,” observed the playwright in her snug Plumstead, Cape Town, fastness before departing for Grahamstown. “I hope they’ll still be calling me a playwright this time next week!”
There’s every chance: Coyne’s writing record, though short, is robust. Glassroots, which collected a raft of Fleur du Cap Awards (including best indigenous play and best director), was a hit at last year’s festival before enjoying extended runs in the Cape. Sharp, witty and unblushing in its dissection of the nagging race and class phobias still bedeviling middle-class South Africa, Coyne’s bright comedy of manners tickled local funny bones and introduced a fresh new voice into our theatre.
Her debut into dramatic writing came in 1998 with the one-woman play As the Koekie Crumbles an entertaining take, performed by the author, on her years in Kenya. This year expectations are high that she’ll have a hat-trick with Dearly Beloved.
Much of the success of Glass Roots was due to Roy Sargeant’s tight, principled direction, and Coyne has nothing but praise for their partnership: “Roy commissioned Roots after seeing Koekie Crumbles. I have complete faith in his text-cutting decisions, because he has such respect for the writer.” A quick laugh: “Ours is not a relationship that turns on the struggle for power.”
The new text is a four-hander that coops up two bickering middle-class couples in an oddly menacing game park. It eschews smart one-liners, comfy character types and the familiar comedy of racial gaffes to comment on, as Coyne puts it, “the politics of relationships and the endless struggle for power inherent in them.”
Dearly Beloved offers a detailed take, devoid of any cathartic events or startling heroics, on the empty and pretentious lives of four unpleasant people who are not (as Aristotle might say) unlike ourselves. This it does in a style somewhere between the careful naturalism of Ibsen that master inquisitor of an earlier bourgeoisie and the whiff of absurdism beneath the floorboards of Edward Albee’s intricate late-capitalist world.
The playwright admits that the new play has been testing for the actors the leads are Ralph Lawson and Mary Dreyer because “no performer likes rendering anti-heroes instead of traditional heroes and villains. Thus I think Shakespeare, of whom I’m a rampant fan, has largely been misrepresented on stage. Our actors have worked hard to retain a naturalistic style within very absurd situations.”
Coyne’s arrival as a dramatist is just the latest turn in a peripatetic career. After an upbringing in Springs (“the dead centre of the world”) and drama training at Pretoria Technikon, she joined Capab’s permanent drama company from 1986 to 1992 before joining her husband, copywriter Willie Fritz, in Kenya, where she spent the next four happy years raising orphaned elephants. “We came back to South Africa in ’96, knowing that if we didn’t leave we’d never move again.”
A difficult two years adjusting to suburban life at the Cape resulted in As the Koekie Crumbles: “Director David Matheson said to me at a dinner party, ‘These Kenyan anecdotes will make a play.’ I hope he still agrees.”
She sums up: “I love the immediacy of theatre, the sense of art being made in front of your eyes. Whatever I do, I do with complete conviction … I do hope I’ll be a writer when I’m big!”
Dearly Beloved plays on the main stage at the National Arts Festival from July 28 to 30. Glassroots plays on the fringe from July 1 to 3. Both productions are directed by Roy Sargeant. For more details visit www.sbfest.co.za