The way to put us back on the world map is through great theatre writers. My main goal here at the Baxter is to develop new work,” says 37-year-old director and playwright Lara Foot-Newton, the newly appointed resident director at the Baxter Theatre.
We meet in front of the sold-out Studio Theatre before a special showing of Primo, performed by Sir Antony Sher. Like the other theatre goers, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a regular audience member at the Baxter, warmly greets bystanders. The play, based on Primo Levi’s account of the holocaust, ends and the audience sits in silence. The auditorium is full.
Foot-Newton arrived at the Baxter in Rondebosch, Cape Town, two months ago. She found the theatre bustling; the restaurant busy; Kat and the Kings directed by David Kramer, and the Joe Barber III show, The Family Affair, both having to extend their runs owing to packed houses.
The independent Baxter under the management of director and CEO Mannie Manim has a thoughtfully chosen upcoming season. In February the South African creators of the popular Baobabs Don’t Grow Here will perform their imagistic new show mixing mime and acting, Black and Blue.
The Syringa Tree will be staged in March. It is written and performed by Pamela Gien, who — like Sher — returns to her home country to act in her internationally acclaimed one-woman show about a black and white family. Fascinatingly, the play began as an exercise in a Los Angeles acting class. Gien plays 24 characters: black, white, young, old, Xhosa, Zulu, Afrikaans, English, Jewish.
Another new production is a raw play written by American Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jesus Hopped the A Train. It is a story about a Latino street kid from New York, directed by talented South African Lara Bye.
Foot-Newton is aware of the fact that there is a strong need for new theatre work to be written and created here and now. It is her mission at the Baxter: ‘After the democratic changes, many theatre workers stopped doing anything of content. For years, there was flimsy material even from good writers; it seemed as if we had no social issues. But this is still a challenging time of transition, corruption, violence, family units falling into pieces. There have been many writers who sensationalised black imagery and struggle issues through their work, which lacked integrity. Art became the dancing curio shop. It’s mostly white writers who have done that and I think it’s irresponsible,” says Foot-Newton, who wants to change the way of creating plays here at the Baxter.
‘The workshop process of writing in South Africa has lost its dignity. It has become a lazy way of writing. You can’t just improvise, stage whatever you find and say this is a professional production. We need to establish more formal structures of writing. I need help in developing professional workshops for playwrights here at the Baxter. I may ask someone who has experienced a similar political transition, maybe the South American playwright Ariel Dorfman.”
Last year Foot-Newton was often in London, working with the British director Sir Peter Hall. She has been able to establish a firm protégé/ mentor relationship with him through winning the prestigious British Rolex Award 2004. The effect that her internationally acclaimed show Tshepang had on Hall was profound. Tshepang, about infant rape, was developed in her MA course at Wits University, and Foot-Newton greatly appreciates that she was able to be a part of a professionally run writing course and recognises the importance of these courses for new South African writers.
Continuing in her belief that the political can be found in the personal story, she recalls: ‘When I did Tshepang, people kept telling me: Who on Earth is going to see a play about this?” And we started tiny, with two or three people in the audience. Now everybody wants to see it. I realised that when you do something with integrity, it counts. People are not stupid, we just have to be braver as artists,” says Foot-Newton, who now aims to write a new play about families. ‘I think all families are broken in a sense and we are all emotionally crippled by our families.”
Tshepang opens in Johannesburg on February 21. It received rave reviews from the British press when it was on in London last year.
As part of their continuing collaboration Hall will conduct Shakespeare workshops at the Baxter in March. They will be directly connected to the Baxter programme. ‘His workshops will include actors in our Hamlet, which we rehearse in May and June, directed by Janet Suzman. I also plan to direct a work by Shakespeare later this year. Also, some of Hall’s workshops will be open to any artist who is interested in his approach.”
As I leave, I see a group of 12 black writers and directors aged 20 to 30. They are passionately discussing their new work, which will be staged at the Ikhwezi Community Theatre Festival in March at the Baxter. They come from all over the Cape — Umtata, Port Elizabeth, Khayelitsha, Observatory — to attend a special professional workshop here. It seems that Foot-Newton’s work has begun.