/ 1 June 2008

Deconstructing South Africa’s divisions

The Mail & Guardian spoke to novelist and dramatist Craig Higginson about his second play, Dream of the Dog, which recently returned from a successful run at the National Arts Festival and this week opens in Johannesburg.

Set in KwaZulu-Natal, the play explores the terrible secrets of Patricia, a 60-year-old farmer’s wife, and Look­smart, a 30-year-old land developer who grew up on her land. It deals with the return of repressed memories and the re-interpretation of personal histories and is a turbulent journey into the past. Vanessa Cooke and Mncedisi Shabangu star and Market Theatre artistic director Malcolm Purkey directs.

Tell us more about the play’s title.

At the centre of the play there’s a dog attack that happened in the past and the characters confront each other and try to come to terms with the memory of this painful, violent experience. The play is about the different interpretations of events, about how we all recall things in different ways.

Sounds like it might be some sort of allegory in terms of South Africa’s history of conflict and misunderstanding.

Yes, perhaps. I have a theory about the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission], that even though there has been this powerful symbolic gesture by the government, privately there has been neither genuine truth nor reconciliation. And I think a lot of that unresolved suffering related to apartheid is now manifesting in crime. So the idea of Dream of the Dog has got to do with the damage from the past which people haven’t dealt with.

Are you writing to redeem the world?

Well, I think that for me writing has to have an ethical function. No, I’m not trying to write a redemptive play, but I am trying to write a play that disturbs our complacency and gets us to take a fresh look at one another. I think we’re still walking around with some of the essentialist blocks we’ve inherited from the past — white, black, coconut, township boy, woman, man, gay, whatever. I suppose the play sets up archetypes and then kind of deconstructs them and all that you’re left with at the end is the naked human soul and our need to be loved. The irony of this country is that somebody can be a tsotsi or even a racist, but they can also be a loving father. So I’m trying to step away from the archetypes, trying to deconstruct those divisions.

You were in the United Kingdom for quite some time where you worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, among others. Did you make an active decision to come back to South Africa?

I worked with Barney Simon the year before he died and I went to the UK for a holiday. But then before I knew it I had a girlfriend and a job and suddenly I was quite embroiled in a life over there … when I did come [back] I thought ‘What the hell am I doing?” I had an interesting time in England … but when I came home, ultimately, I think I realised that I understood this place and these people. They were my people and I cared about them in a way that I didn’t care about English people … There seems to be so much that’s unsaid and unwritten here. England is so saturated and there are so many people saying and doing all kinds of things and if you’re not English it makes it hard to write with any authority.

You had readings in London and previews at the Market. How did those go?

The play seems to be generating a lot of dialogue, which for me is good. In the past, the moral of a play was much simpler, so you could watch The Island or Woza Albert and come out of the theatre feeling defiant that apartheid would end and humanity would thrive, whereas now we don’t have such a clear division of what’s good and bad. For me the task of theatre is to engineer or facilitate dialogue rather than to try to be celebratory and to try to make people unified. Especially when the calls to unification are often a falsification of the truth.

Dream of the Dog is showing at the Barney Simon Theatre, Market Theatre Complex, Johannesburg. Until August 26. Tel: 011 832 1641