Q&A
LIONELNEWTON
Matthew Krouse
Lionel Newton is one of South Africa’s most talented actors. He is known for his work off the mainstream, having collaborated in the early Nineties with choreographer Robyn Orlin, and his later appearance in the improvised feature film, the comedy Jump the Gun directed by British director Les Blair. In the last five years he has worked extensively with mime artist Andrew Buckland in South Africa and at the Edinburgh festival where their work has been highly acclaimed. Their recent play The Well Being, directed by his wife Lara Foot Newton, has been reworked and is currently showing in Johannesburg before touring to Britain and Canada.
How has The Well Being been transformed?
We’ve played with some of the conventions that have grown over the last 10 years in the work we’ve done together the work that Andrew started on his ace. Some of the conventions we would just flick through and use as a device to propel the narration we focused in on. We tried to create a stronger relationship between the two actors, the two men as actors and as men playing a woman, and caring for the story of her.
You have just performed Waiting for Godot in Cape Town. Is there a difference now between audiences in Cape Town and Jo’burg?
My personal feeling is that there’s more of a realistic audience in Johannesburg in the sense that if you put on really good theatre the kind of people who come are not stereotyped. I find Cape Town a lot less integrated than Johannesburg, colour-wise. In Cape Town, when you make a joke in another language you can feel the lack of integration. They’re stuck somewhere in the Seventies, or early Eighties.
Isn’t there a danger with this type of work when you start to overwork it, that you start to make jokes about jokes that are in-jokes and that it’s hard for the audience to get to? Where do you actually draw the line with making the real into the surreal and expecting people to just get it?
Lara helped create the play at a particular time in her life, when she was pregnant. It was just after my first son was born. The story of Flo is that she gets raped and after that she mates with a porpoise and gives birth to a watermelon. So if you follow that, it’s quite easy to understand it’s quite easy to dip into the surreal and come back. I think your point of reworking work is very valid. But we haven’t said let’s take it five steps forward because we’re going to Britain now. It was just a question of, “we are going to Britain, we need to buy plane tickets, we need to organise our domestic lives”. You don’t get a producer who just picks you up and transplants you and everything carries on. So we need to make some money out of it and one or two things were taking too much stage time, detracting from the story and we felt that the story was not told completely the way we wanted to.
Where will The Well Being play in London?
At the Riverside studios, for three weeks.
How are you affording this?
We were picked up by a producer, I don’t even know his name, who came and saw the show (at Edinburgh) and absolutely fell in love with it. You know, the critical response to The Well Being in Edinburgh was overwhelming. People responded to the simple format a newspaper, a watermelon and two guys, and a bit of sand. I couldn’t believe it. He is paying for everything. He’s putting us up, he’s raised the money. We’re playing at the Riverside for a month and then we’re going to various festivals that end up doing two festivals in Ireland. We’re also going to the Brighton festival. The only thing we didn’t have were flight tickets. We’ve also been picked up for Canada, for January next year, to play for a month somewhere.
For the full, unabridged, version of this interview go to ZA@play at http://www.mg.co.za/mg/art/artmenu.htm
The details
The Well Being is on at the Wits Downstairs Theatre until April 3. Shows start at 7pm with selected matinees. Tel: (011) 717 1376