Theatre Directing in Sa

Theatre Directing in South Africa – Skills and Inspirations is a user-friendly introduction to the
Theatre Directing in South Africa

role of the theatre director and the concept of stage-craft presented in a way that is easy to
understand. It is written for those who are stepping into the role of director for the first time,
or those who feel that they need a refresher course and new inspirations. The book includes
Theatre Directing
in South Africa
interviews with ten contemporary South African directors, exploring their journeys into theatre
and how they came to find themselves in the director’s chair.
Interviewed South African directors include: Brett Bailey, Neil Coppen, Lara Foot, Mpumelelo
Paul Grootboom, Greg Homann, Amy Jephta, Simthembile Prince Lamla, Zinzi Princess
Mhlongo, Bheki Mkhwane and Pusetso Thibedi. SKILLS AND INSPIRATIONS
Roel Twijnstra, originally from the Netherlands, is a theatre director and set designer based
in South Africa. He was trained as an assistant of Peter Stein and Peter Brook and has worked
in the USA, Russia, Indonesia, Nepal, Morocco, Uganda, Benin, Guinea, Zimbabwe and, for
the last 15 years, in South Africa. He lectures theatre directing at the University of KwaZulu-
Natal (UKZN) Drama Department in Durban and has written a number of books about theatre.
In 2010, he published his first novel Zulu Crush. Roel co-founded the NPO Twist Theatre
Development Projects in 2010 and is its current project director. www.roeltwijnstra.nl
Emma Durden works in the field of theatre for development and health. She studied
drama at Rhodes University and started working as an actor in 1993 at NAPAC (the then
SKILLS AND INSPIRATIONS

Natal Performing Arts Council). She has since gone on to be a director, theatre-maker and
educator. She has a PhD in Theatre for Development from the University
of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and has taught courses at UKZN,
the University of Cape Town and the University of
Zimbabwe. Emma runs a consultancy called Act
Two Training and the PST Project industrial
theatre company, and manages the NPO Twist
Theatre Development Projects.
ISBN 978-1-4314-1083-5
Roel Twijnstra & Emma Durden
9 781431 410835
The publication of this book is made possible through generous grants from Twist Theatre Development
Projects supported by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (NLDTF) and the Embassy of the Kingdom
of the Netherlands.
FUNDED BY
Roel Twijnstra
& Emma Durden
Theatre Directing
in South Africa
Theatre Directing
in South Africa
SKILLS AND INSPIRATIONS
Roel Twijnstra
& Emma Durden
INCLUDING INTERVIEWS WITH:

Brett Bailey, Neil Coppen, Lara Foot,
Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom, Greg Homann,
Amy Jephta, Simthembile Prince Lamla,
Zinzi Princess Mhlongo, Bheki Mkhwane
and Pusetso Thibedi
d-PDF ISBN 978-1-4314-2923-3
ePUB ISBN 978-1-4314-2924-0
mobi file ISBN 978-1-4314-2925-7
Design and layout by Jacana Media

Job no: 002203
Front Cover Image: The Famished Road directed by Roel Twijnstra and
Jerry Pooe 2013. Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
Back Cover Image: Roel Twijnstra and Emma Durden, 2014.
Photograph by Val Adamson.
The publication of this book is made possible through generous grants

from Twist Theatre Development Projects supported by the National
Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (NLDTF) and the Embassy of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands.
FUNDED BY
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO THE DRAMA HONOURS CLASS 2013 OF
UKZN-HOWARD COLLEGE:
Maddi Davis, Christiaan du Plessis, Nicole Masuku, Georgina Mabbett,

Sbonelo Mgilane, Nontando Myeza, Mfundiseni Ndwalane, Siphesishle
Shangase, Arno Wagenaar and Slindo Zondo. It was quite a journey
together. Through you I found the words for this book.
Thanks to all the staff of the UKZN Drama Department, but most of all
to Tamar Meskin who inspired me with suggestions and readings; and
Peter Mitchell from the UKZN Drama Department in Pietermaritzburg
for having faith in all my experiments.
Thanks are due to the ten directors who agreed to be interviewed and
re-interviewed for Part One of the book, and to the acknowledged
photographers who generously allowed us to use their photographs.
Thanks also to Ismail Mohamed for a pre-reading of the book, and his
valuable comments, and to Radwinn van Wijk, an inspiring young voice
in theatre in Durban, for his feedback.
Most special thanks to my friend Emma Durden for collaboration,

additions, feedback and editing, and my wife Philisiwe Twijnstra
for a listening ear and a critical tongue.
– Roel Twijnstra
Working in the theatre industry is made both possible and pleasurable

through collaborations. My thanks go to Bheki Khabela, Bhekani
Shabalala and the late Sduduzo Kawula whose enthusiasm for the work
we do together convinced me to stay in Durban and keep directing.
Thanks also to Nicky DuPlessis, the PANSA exec in KZN and the other
Durban-based practitioners from whom I have learnt so much, and to
Daniel Maposa and the team from Savanna Trust in Harare, who invited
me to teach at the University of Zimbabwe, where I was finally forced to
write down some of the things I’ve learnt over the past years. And lastly,
thanks to Roel for inviting me to collaborate on this project... it’s given us
a whole new set of topics to debate and laugh about!
– Emma Durden
CONTENTS
PREFACES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv
PART ONE – A HISTORY OF INSPIRATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 1: Ten Contemporary Directors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Simthembile Prince Lamla. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Zinzi Princess Mhlongo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Neil Coppen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Greg Homann. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Pusetso Thibedi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Lara Foot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Amy Jephta. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Brett Bailey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Bheki Mkhwane. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Chapter 2: Contemporary Directors in Context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Selecting the contemporary theatre directors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Overview of the roots and routes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Artistic inspirations of the directors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
PART TWO – THE BASICS OF DRAMA AND DIRECTING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Chapter 3: The Source. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
On drama and conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
The psychology of the spectator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Aristotle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Signs and receivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
On theatrical convention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Chapter 4: The Director and the Script. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Script breakdown method using character and emotion. . . . . . . . . . 79
Script breakdown method using action moments
and action units. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Dramatic concepts and genres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Chapter 5: A Concept for a Theatre Director . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
A director’s note, a vision. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Making your choices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Chapter 6: How to Direct a Play, from Concept to Show . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Relationship with the artistic and production team. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Rehearsals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
The director and the actor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
How to deal with criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
The director and the stage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
Placing of the audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Movement, rhythm and tempo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
PART THREE – WORKSHOPPING A SCRIPT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

Chapter 7: The Starting Point. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
It must be something that intrigues you. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
It must have dramatic potential. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
It must generate imagination and action made
visible in images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Chapter 8: Source Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
The research. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Theatrical aspects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Chapter 9: Formulating a Basic Idea about the Plot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
Basic idea and basic stories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Chapter 10: Scene Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Assignment, creation, presentation and discussion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
Improvisations on basic ideas about story and characters . . . . . . 197
Improvisations on developing genre and acting style . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Improvisations using extravagance and grotesque means. . . . . . . 198
Improvisations of solos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
Using oral history. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
Chapter 11: Table Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
viii Theatre Directing in South Africa

From story to plot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
First draft of a working script . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Chapter 12: A Simple Model for Workshopping. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Starting point . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Source work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Developing the basic idea for the plot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Scene work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
Table work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
PART FOUR – THE DIRECTOR AS AN ARTS ENTREPRENEUR . . . . . . 211

Chapter 13: What Does it Take to Become an
Arts Entrepreneur?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Entrepreneurs look for opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
Entrepreneurs get themselves noticed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Entrepreneurs take calculated risks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
Entrepreneurs make investments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Chapter 14: Other Useful Skills for You as an
Arts Entrepreneur. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Proposal writing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
Managing your organisational structures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Managing projects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Collaboration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Chapter 15: Getting Started on an Entrepreneurial Project . . . . . . . . . 225
Stage 1 – Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
Stage 2 – Incubation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
Stage 3 – Illumination. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
Stage 4 – Verification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
In conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
Contents ix
PREFACES
A NOTE FROM ROEL TWIJNSTRA
T
he Department of Drama at the University of KwaZulu-Natal
(UKZN) Howard College in Durban offers their Honours students
a course in theatre directing. I was asked in 2013 to lecture on this
course. It started me thinking about what I wanted to tell the students
about theatre directing. What are the skills that you really need? How do
you deal with the actors, the script and the space? What does a theatre
director need to know to be able to bring a vision to the stage?
Theatre and drama in all cultures come from the same source. Local
traditions and history shape them to their often diverse forms, and this
combination of universality and locality has always intrigued me. In my
own career, I have worked as a theatre director and lecturer in different
countries: The Netherlands, USA, Russia, Indonesia, Nepal, Morocco,
Uganda, Guinea and for the last 15 years mostly in South Africa.
Working in these different contexts has prompted me to explore a range
of questions, with a particular focus on theatre in South Africa.
What is that universal source that theatre comes from? How is theatre
constructed, and what influences it to its present diverse forms? Where
does popular physical theatre in South Africa find its origin? How did
strong musical traditions grow in South Africa, resulting in amazing
musicals and musical theatre? Where does protest theatre come from?
Who are the writers that have inspired the directors; who are the
directors that workshopped with their actors and created texts that are
still relevant today? Who are the contemporary directors in the South
African theatre industry trained and influenced by?
To start to find an answer to these questions, I invited some South
African directors to talk with the UKZN students about how they found
their own identity as a director. I asked them who influenced them and
how local mentors are connected to international influences. This was
the starting process that gave rise to a long list of interviews, some of
which are included in this book.
Another of the questions that I set out to answer was that of the role
and popularity of theatre in South Africa today, seeking to understand
what other influences determine the mindset of a young theatre audience.
How does theatre borrow from, or build on, soap opera, television drama,
films, games, internet and stand-up comedy? Is theatre still attractive for
an audience today?
Neil Coppen, one of the interviewed theatre directors, suggests that
we need to recognise the fact that young audiences are more used to
watching film than theatre, and that we need to work with this reality.
Besides beautiful work that is made and presented at festivals and in
the big theatres, is there enough professional work made for audiences in
the townships? Is it accessible and shown in the right places?
The answers to all of these questions make up Part One of this book,
which explores how theatre directing in South Africa, like everywhere,
is personality driven. Strong directors with visions about life, social and
political issues and themselves dominate the industry, presenting often
beautiful shows.
Part Two of the book explores the specific skills needed for theatre
directing. A director needs to have his or her own answers for a range of
questions: What is a play and how does it work? How do you coach the
actors through the complex dramatic structure of a script? How do you
make decisions about casting? How do you settle on an acting style that
supports what you want to express? How do you influence the mindset
of an audience? How do you create the blocking on stage? There are
many other practical tips, tricks, dos and don’ts for directors at the start
of their career.
Teamwork is another vital aspect for directors to master. Workshopping
a play looks simple, but needs specific skills related to drama and group
dynamics. The Drama Department at UKZN Pietermaritzburg campus
offered me an opportunity to work with their third-year students in
the second part of 2013, focusing on workshopping. The result and
methodology developed for this course is included in Part Three of this
book.
I decided to combine the skills needed to be a theatre director with
the specific influences in South African theatre for my lectures and this
Prefaces xi
book, a book that has no scientific or scholarly ambition but simply
aims to inspire young emerging talents on their way to become theatre
directors of the future in a country in constant transformation.
Director Greg Homann talks about the need for young people to
become arts entrepreneurs, finding their own way in the South African
arts industry. Part Four of this book (written by Emma Durden) focuses
on arts entrepreneurship. We hope that this book inspires young people
to become true arts entrepreneurs, because in South Africa that is part
of the job.
– Roel Twijnstra
A NOTE FROM EMMA DURDEN
When Roel first talked about writing this book, I offered to help him
as he was writing in a second language. As time went by, this grew into
a more collaborative process, as we shared ideas about the structure of
the book, the contemporary directors, and the history of South African
theatre.
As the book started to take shape, I added bits to each chapter,
and ultimately added a chapter at the end, as it is clear that without
basic entrepreneurial skills, talent alone is not enough to take any
aspirant director in South Africa from student to successful creator. I
also conducted follow-up interviews with the ten selected directors, to
integrate the practical way that they approach their work into Roel’s more
theoretical sections.
The perspective that I bring to the book is based on 20 years of
working in the performing arts industry in South Africa, with the start
of my career as an actor with the Natal Performing Arts Council, and
including many years of working in the fields of theatre for development
and health, industrial theatre and community theatre; crossing the
boundaries between academia, the industry and the community.
We hope that you find the book both inspiring and useful.
– Emma Durden (PhD)
xii Theatre Directing in South Africa

MESSAGE FROM THE AMBASSADOR OF THE KINGDOM OF THE
NETHERLANDS TO THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA
South Africa and the Netherlands have developed a strong partnership.

We are closely working together in a number of areas, like trade and
investment, agriculture, education, culture, sports, defence and migra
tion. Sharing of knowledge and innovative approaches are essential in
our cooperation.
Via this book the authors and ten South African contemporary theatre
directors share their knowledge on theatre development with us. With
this important information we can empower ourselves and others and
expand our knowledge. This is one of the aims of the Culture, Sports
and Development programme of the Netherlands. It therefore gives me
great pleasure that the embassy, by means of this programme, is able to
financially support this book project as a contribution to the renewal
of the curricula for theatre creation in different drama departments of
universities and training institutes in South Africa.
I hope in the first place that everybody will enjoy reading this book.
Secondly, I trust that the content of the book will assist you in developing
your knowledge on how to make theatre in a South African context.
And, thirdly, I hope that you can use the knowledge gained to empower
yourself and others by increasing life skills such as self-expression and
self-confidence.
– André Haspels
Ambassador of the Kingdom of the
Netherlands to the Republic of South Africa
Prefaces xiii
INTRODUCTION
L
et us take a moment to reflect on how to use this book. You don’t
have to read it from the start to the end, although that is possible.
You can take things out of it that you need, plotting your own
journey as if you are in a supermarket, putting only those items that you
are looking for into your own trolley.
The main thought behind Part One of the book is the crucial
understanding that directing has to do with more than just talent. It has
to do with your personal background and the choices that you make in
life regarding your career; the voices of others that inspire you; the often
unexpected coincidences and the encounters that pave your path as a
director.
Talent, background and influences have been described in the routes
of the ten selected directors, but it takes more than that to become a
director. You need skills, as you do with any other craft. A carpenter with
talent but without skills will make lousy furniture. In Part One we don’t
talk about skills. But looking at the work of these ten directors, you will
see how skilled they are. They are very different, but they are all extremely
skilled in working with space, actors and text. Those skills don’t come
from talent or background. They have learned them by studying at a
tertiary level, reading about theatre and arts, through mentorships or by
looking at the work of others, analysing them and trying them out for
themselves.
Part Two of the book is all about skills. The skills, knowledge and
understanding that you need to have to transform your talent and
background into concrete work on the stage. We start this second part of
the book from the concept that the director works with a written script.
This is a script that is not written by the director or workshopped in
collaboration with the actors. We do that to focus on the skills for directing,
not confusing those with writing skills. We address the understanding of
a dramatic text but do not go into skills and exercises of creative writing
or writing a play. There are other books and methods that deal with that.
We recognise that many theatre directors in South Africa direct their
own plays and work as primary creators to structure their own work. At
least six out of the ten directors interviewed in Part One create and direct
their own work on a regular basis. Some of them may be considered
more writer than director. For them, writing and directing go hand in
hand.
Skills for directing and writing scripts firstly come from analysing an
existing text, understanding what a play is and how it works. In Part Two
of the book, we also start with giving you the tools to understand and
break down a play into smaller units and structures that keep everything
together. We also focus on the actor and the space.
In Part Three of the book we talk about one possible format for
workshopping a script in collaboration with the actors. This requires
writing skills and knowledge about where stories come from and how to
construct them into a plot for a theatre play. It will give you a format on
how to structure a workshopping process.
Part Four deals with your business skills. This is based on the
understanding that you need to be an arts entrepreneur and find your
own territory in the theatre industry. Entrepreneurship is a necessary part
of growing the arts in the South African context, where funding is limited
but opportunities abound.
Introduction xv
PART 1
A History
of Inspiration
This part of the book introduces ten contempor

ary South African theatre directors and uncovers
how they become interested in theatre, who their
mentors and inspirations were, and how they
found their way into the industry.
Every history rewrites the reality of the past.
Every generation writes its own history, maybe
deleting what previous generations thought of as
vital and essential. This book has to write its own history – it is a book
for students at drama departments, in acting schools and working on
their own, and it focuses on young emerging talents in the industry. For
the history of directing in South Africa we have chosen to start with the
personal histories of ten contemporary theatre directors in the industry
today.
How do you go about choosing just ten South African theatre
directors to focus on in a book such as this? We wanted to select directors
who differ in their concepts, their ways of working and their personal
backgrounds to get a diverse spectrum of profiles that would match
with the different skills for theatre directors that are offered in this book.
We wanted to reflect the reality of the theatre industry in South Africa,
which is somewhat fragmented. We also wanted to present perspectives
of different generations of contemporary theatre directors.
Firstly, we wanted to look at established directors who have already
arrived and can be seen as some of the most important directors in the
industry today. Secondly, we were looking for a group of young theatre
directors who have found their own signature, won awards and whose
work is influential in the industry at this time. And lastly, but the most
challenging component, was to select young emerging directors, just
finished with their training, who have recently created successful shows
that have attracted the attention of the industry.
To select these three categories we asked for help from the artistic
directors of festivals, senior lecturers of drama departments, artistic
directors of theatre companies, writers and theatre directors. Who to
select and why? Through this process, a long list was made. Some had
won festival awards, from the Standard Bank Young Artist Award to
‘best production’ at the Zwakala Festival; some were bursary recipients,
recognised by the Emerging Theatre Directors bursary from the
University of Cape Town (UCT)’s Gordon Institute or had been accepted
by internationally renowned institutes like the Director’s Lab at the
Lincoln Center in New York.
We selected some directors who studied at different universities, but
also some who came from a community theatre background or attended
training in institutions such as the Market Lab. Some had a particular
2 Theatre Directing in South Africa

profile, some were simply directors, others were better known as writer/
directors. We also selected one who has a well-known background in
workshopping. The long list became shorter and started to dovetail with
the different chapters and specific skills that are addressed in this book.
Furthermore we looked at representing different geographical areas in
the country, and at different gender and race groups, and last (but not
least) we had to deal with some who were simply not available.
Of course we could have chosen others, and maybe more famous or
relevant ones should have been included. Talking about contemporary
theatre in South Africa in all its diversity involves discussing the work of
incomparable directors and theatre-makers like Jaco Bouwer, Yael Farber,
Mark Fleishman, James Ngcobo, Aubrey Sekhabi, Pieter-Dirk Uys,
Mike van Graan, Jerry Mofokeng, Ntshieng Mokgoro, Omphile Molusi,
Monageng Vice Motshabi, Jerry Pooe, Sylvaine Strike, Themi Venturas
and countless others who, for different reasons, should not be excluded
from any discussion about contemporary South African theatre.
But the focus of this book is different; it doesn’t aim to step into the
discussion about who is most essential, but instead plots a journey back
in time, looking at where the current generation of theatre practitioners
comes from. We wanted to start to understand how theatre directors
were shaped and what inspired their decisions to take this path. To this
end, we asked ten contemporary directors the following questions: Who
were their parents and how were they raised? Was art something that
was important at home? Where did their passion for theatre come from?
When were they exposed to theatre for the first time? When did they
make the choice to pursue theatre as a career? How did their families
react to that decision? Who inspired them and who are their guides and
mentors, their artistic fathers and mothers? Whose artistic genes are still
visible in their work today? What routes did they take to find their own
voice? How would they describe their own voice and signature?
We collected a lot of personal anecdotes which might resonate with
the personal challenges that students and young directors are facing in
their personal lives.
These contemporary directors are now inspiring others: students,
actors working in their shows, members of the audience. As much as
A History Of Inspiration 3
they were inspired then, they are inspiring others now. Are they aware of
that? This history of inspiration of the ten selected connects the directors
from the future with inspirations of the past. When we believe in the
next generation, we should inspire them with the personal journeys of
contemporary directors to see that they are not alone in their struggle
with parents, the uncertainties in finding their own voice, and claiming
territory in the industry. It is something every emerging theatre director
will have to go through as part of the job.
The interviews for this book were done between June and September,
2013. Quotes that are included in the second and third parts of this
book were placed there to make the theory and skills discussed more
personal, and to illustrate theory in practice. Pictures of the work of the
ten directors also illustrate this book.
Over the next few pages we provide a summary of the interviews that
were conducted with these directors. Chapter 1 simply presents these
interviews, to provide a portrait of these directors. Chapter 2 places these
writers in context. In looking at the personal histories of contemporary
directors, we have tried to compare that history to the more objective
history of key moments and works in South African theatre over the last
60 years. Moments of inspiration and inspiring role models in the theatre
industry are often linked to places of inspiration like the Market Lab and
the National Arts Festival. Are those places still the places to be for the
young generation? Where are directors inspired and offered a place to
work? This part of the book seeks to answer these questions.

CHAPTER 1
Ten Contemporary
Directors
Empty chairs, 2013.

Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
Simthembile Prince Lamla
Prince Lamla, 2013. Standard Bank Young Artist for Drama. Photograph by Suzy Bernstein.
This rainbow nation is pissing me off. It looks beautiful on the

surface, but under the rainbow are a lot of scars and wounds.
The trouble started in 1991 when Mandela was released. We
were promised and made to believe: “We’ll do this for you” and
look how many greedy leaders we have today. The stories I
want to tell have to do with what made us and what do we
need to become a real beautiful country.

Prince Lamla was born on 16 June 1982 – “a fiery date in South Africa’s
political history” – so perhaps it was his destiny that his interest in South
Africa’s political theatre would be sparked from an early age.1
He was raised in QwaQwa in the Free State, as the oldest of three
brothers. His mother worked as a teacher in a primary school and his
father at the Department of Education. He notes that it was:
A family faced with the challenges any family struggled with in a township
at those days. You’ll do everything to make sure that your children
become a better man or husband. My parents were very strict and made
sure I would go to school and church, do my homework and the garden.
When I got off the track, I got smacked. My mother is reserved, she will
think before she says something, my father is more outspoken.
As the first born, Lamla inherited a lot of responsibilities and had to

take care of his brothers. In the family environment, art was absent;
there was only the presence of martial arts, as his father was a chief
instructor in karate in the 1980s and early ’90s. In 1997 in a youth club
in QwaQwa, Lamla was exposed to theatre for the first time. He saw his
peers performing plays, dancing and singing:
It did not make sense at that moment, but I got a role. I got more
responsibilities and made my own group after school hours. My friends
and I decided to form our own group. I was a reserved kind of a person.
Always quiet. But I realised at that time that I was more expressive when
it came to making plays.
I met Mncedisi Shabangu in 1999 when he came to QwaQwa to
fieldwork our play in preparation for The Market Theatre Laboratory’s
Community Theatre Festival. He was a fieldworker for the Laboratory.
I connected with him.
After 1999, when he finished matric, his parents wanted him to become a
lawyer, but his marks were not high enough. So he went to Johannesburg
1 Prince Lamla, Standard Bank Young Artist Award, 2013. Programme National
Arts Festival.
Ten Contemporary Directors 7

and stayed with his aunt and studied to upgrade his marks.
Lamla comments on a chance meeting:
One day I past the Market Lab and saw Mncedisi, told him about my
study plans. He was sorry to hear I would not continue in the arts and
said, “We are losing many good artists in the industry.” I was haunted by
what Mncedisi said until one day I decided to go to the Lab to inquire
about the school. I never looked back afterwards.
Lamla got interested in the Lab, prepared himself for an audition and
was accepted:
The reaction of my parents was not positive at all. But the challenges
they had during that time, especially financially, might have played a
role in allowing me to enrol at the Lab. But if they had money to take
me to university, I think it was going to be war between me and my
parents. It took a very long time for them to support my choice of
career, especially my father.
In the Lab for the first time he was exposed to different acting techniques,
such as the ‘poor theatre’ of Jerzy Grotowski. He was overwhelmed:
Grotowski’s soul belongs in Africa, he was born in the wrong place,

never went to Africa. But his work speaks to the body, it demands,
it tortures and sacrifices. South Africa always had artistic resource
problems, but Grotowski’s work spoke to our souls and it merged with
African storytelling, mainly because of the work that Mbongeni Ngema,
Percy Mtwa and Barney Simon in 1981 did on Woza Albert.
Prince Lamla was intrigued by strong physical theatre. “I got an

opportunity to be a director assistant at the Live Theatre in Newcastle
in the UK after the former Artistic Director of the Market Theatre,
Professor Malcolm Purkey and the former Dramaturge of the Market,
Mr Craig Higginson, both noticed a potential in me as a director.” Lamla
was exposed to the work of the UK-based Simon McBurney (Theatre de
Complicite) combining physical theatre (influenced by the French Lecoq

mime training) with technology, projections, cameras and live musicians.
For Lamla the work and writings of Simon McBurney brought the work
of Grotowski to a new level.
About those who inspired him during those years, he says:
I feel the spirits of the artistic fathers who inspired me in my work, but
a lot more inspires me, nature, animals, trees, the ocean or just meeting
someone in a bar. I never leave without something that inspires me.
After he was trained in the Lab (2002) he started developing his own shows
in an open and engaging manner that invited collaboration with actors:
When I start working on a play, I go in another world with the actors.

It disconnects me from the real world. I need that disconnection to find
my own voice in collaboration with the actors. Together you dive in the
soul of the play or the story you are working on and by doing that you
find something that people in the real world are overlooking.
Lamla feels that he found his own voice for the first time in 2005 when
he won the Market Theatre Laboratory’s Zwakala Festival with Coal Yard
(co-directed with the late Ohentse Bodibe). He says that his signature
has to do with poor/physical theatre, but also with themes such as South
African identity, religion and politics.
Developing his own voice has to do with directing strong texts like
Woza Albert and Asinimali and making them relevant for today. In both
shows, Mncedisi Shabangu was part of the cast. He re-imaged them
successfully, and Woza Albert played to packed houses in 2012 in the
Market Theatre in Johannesburg and later had a successful season at the
Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. He won the Standard Bank Young Artist
Award for Theatre in 2013.
Lamla is still passionate about working with community groups,
commenting that:
That is where my own history started. The elder generation of theatre

directors should give back their experience to those groups, sparkle
something within them, and build proper artists for the future.

Zinzi Princess Mhlongo
Zinzi Princess Mhlongo, 2013. Photograph by Norman Maake.
Always work with a team of strong individuals

that you trust. When you want to do everything
yourself, you limit yourself.

Zinzi Princess Mhlongo was born in 1985 and grew up in eMalahleni,
Witbank. Her father was a soccer player until he was injured and
continued his involvement behind the soccer scenes. Her mother was a
professional nurse holding a position of area coordinator of development
and care for the Department of Correctional Services. Mhlongo has two
older brothers, one younger sister and two adopted sisters: “My mother
planned it like that and they loved us dearly, I was free to do what I
wanted and was always very confident with who I was.”
At home, she was not exposed to any forms of art. She notes that
maybe for the first time she recognised art in her final year of primary
school, during poetry sessions from Mrs Griffeth, who was a “creative
crazy spirit” who advised and stimulated her.
Her parents, being Catholics, put her into a convent high school.
The tomboyish rebel girl, who always wore what she wanted to, felt
somewhat oppressed: “I spent my entire schooling life in a Catholic
school where we were mostly exposed to good and doing things right.
I think knowing that, my work gave me an opportunity to explore a
different side.”
That different side came during after-school activities in the Witbank
Theatre. Ismail Mahomed (the current Director of the National Arts
Festival) was at that time in charge of youth productions in the Witbank
Theatre. She still remembers telling him: “I have this passion inside; I
have to release it, because it will be part of my life.”
Mahomed cast her in a musical that went to the National Arts Festival,
which was a pivotal moment for her:
For the first time I was exposed to a wide variety of theatre. You are not
the same any more after you see 20 shows that were carefully selected.
I saw another world on all these stages, outdoor theatre and in old
buildings. I loved the vibe, I felt at home.
She studied Drama on the Tshwane University of Technology. Janine

Lewis, one of the lecturers and an experimental theatre director, was and
still is her biggest inspiration:

Her physical and visual theatre excited me, very free and experimental
with unexpected cross-overs with other disciplines. She had something
in her work that I recognised in myself and she knew how to nurture it.
Also Mr Tredoux taught me how to relate to myself and the actors. How
to break down my own and others’ walls, how to take off your mask
and show the pain you have.
Mhlongo feels that she has some mentors in theatre, such as Paul
Grootboom (playwright and director) and James Ngcobo (a director and
the Artistic Director at the Market Theatre), who are always there when
she has questions or does not know what to do next. For the rest she is
inspired by community theatre groups: “Sometimes they have nothing
but they have a drive. I like and I recognise that drive, to talk about what
is not talked about.”
Talking about her own voice in theatre, she comments:
Sometimes I have it, sometimes I lose it. When I lose it I always go

back to the first show I made during my time at Technikon, The Naked
Goddess. When I made that I felt no limitations in my thinking, no
outside voice would affect my choices.
Mhlongo comments that she struggled a lot with working out what her
voice is and what is the voice of others. She feels that she is still exploring
her possibilities and everything out there can be part of it. She feels she
is on a learning curve: “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”
Another learning experience for her was watching You Can Speak, You
Are an Animal by the Swiss Italian director Massimo Furlan:
That blew me away. He broke all the rules. Everything we were told you
can’t do or shouldn’t do in theatre, he did. When I spoke with him later
I learned you should always work with a team of strong individuals that
you trust. When you want to do everything yourself, you limit yourself.

Mhlongo believes that maybe the only way to grow is to work with people
who are better than you. In 2008 she left the Technikon and went to
Johannesburg. There she felt strong competition. Her first professional
directing work came in 2008 – it was And The Girls in Their Sunday Dresses by
Zakes Mda, for the State Theatre in Pretoria, mentored by Paul Grootboom.
It was followed by a successful season at the Edinburgh Festival.
She continued learning as an assistant director to Janine Lewis,
and developed her own shows and new work that was bold and full of
edginess. She was the winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award
for Theatre 2012, and created the work Trapped, as a result of this award.
Mhlongo realises that although new work is made in South Africa, it
is not exposed and not visible enough. Together with Hlengiwe Lushaba,
she took the initiative to create a platform “from artists and for artists”
and called it Plat4orm, for creative and dynamic minds. Not only theatre
artists, but also jazz musicians, hip hop artists, and emerging directors
of her age, like Pusetso Thibedi, find their way to the small street, in
Bez Valley, part of Skills Village, with the warehouses, offices and gallery
spaces and her own rehearsal studio: “It’s my own space of inspiration,
I don’t need to go far, it comes to me in so many forms.” Plat4orm
addresses a certain portion of the theatre-going public.
Creating her own work and being an entrepreneur is important for
Mhlongo:
I need to pay my bills so I have to sell myself. A lot of artists are waiting,
sometimes they have work and sometimes not. It means you are always
in a stop-and-go mood. That interferes with your creativity. You start,
stop and restart, but you don’t come in creative flow. I can’t do that. I
need to work with or without money. Plat4orm is one of the ways to
inspire myself and others.

Neil Coppen
Neil Coppen directing Animal Farm, 2014. Photograph by Val Adamson.
We have to attract and excite new audiences into our theatres,

and to do this we have to compete with the relentlessly visual
realms of film and television. It is for this reason that I often
employ and reference cinematic devices in my plays. Working
cinematically simply means I am working in a storytelling
vernacular that younger generations have access to.

When he was a boy of six years old, Neil Coppen saw the theatre
production Singing in the Rain at the Natal Playhouse, and was transfixed
as whole worlds transformed and evolved before his eyes. It is something
that a lot of boys might love. But when a boy, after seeing it, realises
deeply that he wants to spend every minute of his life creating something
like that, and forces his mother to see that same show six more times, an
obsession with theatre is born.
Coppen’s mother was a nurse, but now spends her time as his co-
producer at Think Theatre, a company with emphasis on development
and educational theatre. Coppen calls his father a creative entrepreneur
who carved a niche for himself in various professions and business
ventures including law, politics, timeshare, community and eco-tourism,
as well as technology. Coppen comments: “We come from a family of
inventors, jewellers, artists and florists.”
He notes: “My father inspired me to multi-task and work across
disciplines and take creative risks, and my grandmother made me want
to be a storyteller.” As a child he spent a lot of time with his grandmother
who was bedridden and would tell him stories that focused on her own
childhood and her father’s experiences in the prison camps of World
War II.
One could say that from my grandmother’s stories was born my first
real impulse to write. In my later exploits as a theatre-maker, I was
consoled by the idea that my grandmother’s stories (in fact any stories
that interested me) could be replayed or relived every time a group of
actors set out to perform them on a stage.
As a child, Coppen wrote small scripts for his sister and himself. He
notes how many of his plays have children at their centre, where South
African life and history is viewed through the eyes of child (or child-
like) protagonists: “This allows me as a theatre-maker to utilise more
fantastical and imaginary theatrical conceits. Think Tin Bucket Drum and
Tree Boy. This allows me to take a whimsical, off-centre approach or lens
on what is often a cruel and brutal reality.”

Throughout his childhood, his mother exposed Coppen to
various aspects of the performing arts. He encountered opera, ballet,
contemporary dance, as well as the works of Shakespeare, Athol Fugard
and Mbongeni Ngema. He joined a community drama group headed up
by theatre activist Kessie Govender (the founder of the Stable Theatre),
and it was here that Neil came into contact with workshopped and
devised theatre practices.
During this period, the Coppen family had become friends with
theatre-maker Nicholas Ellenbogen, who ran the Theatre for Africa
Company, and allowed the young Coppen to sit in on rehearsals and later
travel to his first Grahamstown Festival to sell programmes at the door of
the theatre. It was during this festival that he came into contact with the
work of South African theatre legends Andrew Buckland, Ellis Pearson,
Bheki Mkhwane and Yael Farber.
After high school, Coppen chose not to study Drama or theatre-
making but rather obtain a creative writing degree through UNISA.
During this phase, he worked predominantly as an actor for various
theatre companies around the country. He also began to travel the world
and immerse himself in a range of diverse experiences: teaching at a
theatre summer camp in New York; working as a dialect coach and stand-
in on film sets; producing a large-scale musical project; and working as
a freelance journalist and travel writer. He says that all these experiences
shaped and inspired his work as a playwright and theatre-maker. He is
most fascinated by the concept of ‘total theatre’ and comments:
Peter Schaffer’s play Royal Hunt of the Sun inspired me with the notion
of ‘total theatre’ in the way the visual symbols and elements were
as seminal as the text was. Most playwrights focused exclusively on
dialogue without considering the overall visual impact and context of
their plays, but Shaffer was adamant that music, lighting, sound design,
costume, set were important tools to creating a powerful and immersive
theatrical experience. I loved Schaffer’s notion that theatre should be a
visceral and all-encompassing experience for an audience, and I set out
to achieve this in the work I created by paying equal attention to the
text, design, lighting, score, sound and staging conventions.

Talking about his work, Abnormal Loads, Coppen notes:
I wanted to free-up the theatre, avoid pandering to the idea of South

African drama as static, a bunch of talking heads around the kitchen
sink or one location. I wanted to show audiences that stage plays can
be as dynamic and engrossing as the big-budget stories one sees in the
cinema. I adopted various cinematic devices of flash-back and flash-
forward, close-up and long-shot and attempted to whirl the audience
through time and history while keeping track of the fated trajectories
of four (hopefully) well-developed and believable South African
characters.
Coppen explains that his plays are a product of a long incubation period
of research, devising and writing. Abnormal Loads took him five years
of research and preparation before he produced it at the National Arts
Festival 2011, where he was featured after winning the Standard Bank
Young Artist Award for Theatre.
Coppen likes to focus on character studies and stories that fall outside
the norm and offer audiences more complex alternatives to what they
have come to expect. He says he is constantly looking at and exploring
the idea of ‘freedom’ in his narratives – examining his characters’
relationships to the societies they live in and under. He believes it is the
duty of theatre-makers in South Africa to work very hard at subverting
stereotypes and reductive clichés as opposed to simply pandering to
audiences’ expectations of them. “We are a complex, contradictory,
beautiful and pretty fucked-up nation and people,” he says, “and theatre-
makers should embrace this, use their platforms and stages to interrogate
these notions both critically and imaginatively.”
Coppen is currently working on several new stage plays and
screenplays set in and around the province of KwaZulu-Natal while
collaborating with a variety of community theatre groups and emerging
playwrights in the region. He is one of the 12 South African playwrights
commissioned to write a new work for the Royal Court Theatre in London.
Coppen’s newest play Unconscious Entities opens in 2014 alongside his
local reworking of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom
Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom directing Relativity. 2005.

Photograph by Ruphin Coudyzer.
I know young emerging directors watch my work.

Some of my more known shows have a lot of violence,
sex and nudity. I know why I want that, but they
imitate it for the wrong reasons.

Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom was born in 1975 in Meadowlands, Soweto.
He doesn’t know who his father is, and his mother left him with her aunt
and uncle when he was nine months old. He calls his mother’s aunt and
uncle his grandparents. They were both teachers, and his aunt was the
principal at Moruta Thutho Primary School, where he was a pupil:
They were very strict, worst kind of strict; they didn’t allow me to play
outside with friends. I could read books in the house. They were slave
drivers. I would do the housework and get beaten up when they thought
something was wrong. It made me bitter. I remember once I was angry
with a boy and wanted to prove I was streetwise and not a sissy. So I
sneaked out the house and took the axe from my grandfather but was
caught by the police. My grandparents were so angry; they sent me to
my aunt in Garankuwa, north of Pretoria where I attended high school.
In his time at high school, he started to see at least two films every week.
It was a way to release his fantasies and anger. He wanted to be one of
those film characters, especially Steven Segal, because “he always wins
his fights. Bruce Lee got beaten up too much, but was still one of my
favourites.”
While attending Odi High School, he developed an extreme interest
in Shakespeare’s English Literature and Drama. He was not involved in
any school plays.2
Grootboom did not set out for a career in theatre:
My grandparents had a strict idea about my future and wanted

me to study medicine. I started as a student at the University of the
Witwatersrand, studying for a Bachelor of Science degree, but stopped
after a month or two, without telling my grandparents. In that time I
saw an advert for an acting class, somewhere downtown in Jo’burg.
He followed classes and met Percy Langa, who lectured the acting classes
and taught him how to write a film script. He posted his scripts to many
2 “Mpumelelo Paul ‘Cosmo’ Grootboom”. Rafadi, K., South African History

Online, 2011.

production companies, but the only reply came from John Rogers. “When
my grandparents found out what I was doing, they kicked me out. I was
homeless and went to live with John in Fourways, north of Jo’burg.”
John Rogers studied in the UK, was a film producer and director, and
taught him everything. He allowed him to come onto the set when he
was working. Rogers also ran programmes for young emerging directors
called ‘Young Visions’ in which Grootboom could sit and observe: “He
taught me to write film scripts and write for television.”
Through John, Grootboom met Aubrey Sekhabi, playwright and
television producer, who was working at that time in Mafeking, North
West. He moved there and adapted Electra for stage, with a group of
young kids.
As well as these mentors, he comments that:
My other inspirations are the German film director Leni Riefenstahl.

She could emerge herself in the work to a point that nothing else exists.
And the South African director Lara Foot, because in her work there is
always a deeper meaning and more to find than the surface suggests.
Grootboom adapted many novels and plays, directed and co-directed,

until he started to create his own work:
Once Aubrey told me that he was more interested in what I had to say
than me recycling others’ voices and stories. I was irritated by that but it
made me reflect and think about my own voice. I think my own voice is
considered to be controversial and liberal. They say my work is cinematic,
I don’t know, when I would work for film, I would do it different. I have
those images in my head, images that I want to see on stage.
He won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Theatre in 2005 and
together with Presley Chweneyagae created the new work Relativity:
Township stories.

Since 2002, Grootboom has been working as the Development
Officer at the State Theatre, under the artistic leadership of Aubrey
Sekhabi, to develop his writing. He also works as an advisor and mentor
with community groups and young, emerging theatre creators. He calls
himself a dramaturge.
He is aware of the sometimes negative influence of his work and is not
always happy with it, commenting: “I know young emerging directors
watch my work. But it influences them often in a bad way. Some of my
more known works have a lot of sex, violence and nudity. I know why I
want that, but they imitate it for the wrong reasons.”
The State Theatre runs a programme called STIPP (State Theatre
Independent Productions Programme), giving independent theatre a
space, where Grootboom notes that his role is to “help them to make
their plays better”. For the future he is not so positive about the ability of
young people to survive in the industry. He says that he sometimes feels
that he doesn’t want young and new talents to come into the industry,
and warns about the difficulties of finding work:
Some of them are really good. I would tell them to find another job,
how are they going to live? But they will say to me: “But you are not in
another job.” You have to be an entrepreneur to survive. Even the top
directors of the industry have to do all sorts of extra jobs to supplement
their life. As long as our political leaders don’t understand it is hard to be
hopeful. I am scared to lose my job in State Theatre, where would I go?

Greg Homann
Greg Homann. 2014 Standard Bank Young Artist for Drama. Photograph by Timmy Henny.
Theatre in South Africa is director driven. It’s

rarely driven by the writer or producer. As an arts
entrepreneur I almost always find the project, the
project rarely finds me.

Greg Homann was born in Johannesburg in 1979. His grandfather was a
third-generation German who originally worked as an ambulance officer
on the mines of Johannesburg. His father left school after Standard 9,
and later returned to complete matric, followed by a degree in chartered
accountancy. His mother was English and immigrated to South Africa
when she was eight years old with her parents and older sister. She later
worked in auditing and eventually became a bookkeeper in the charted
accountancy company that his father started.
Homann grew up in the middle-class suburb of Northcliff and is the
youngest of four brothers. When he was eleven, his parents divorced. He
first stayed with his mother but, after a few years, followed his brothers to
live with his father. He says his teenage years were a difficult but healthy
time: “A time during which I grew up and had to deal with my sexuality
as a gay young man.”
His father, brothers and that side of the family had little or no interest
in the arts, but with his mother and grandmother he would go to the
theatre. He remembers the annual Christmas pantomimes directed by Janice
Honeyman, where he recalls wonder and magic that was created on stage. At
the age of eight at primary school he participated in a production of Peter Pan
and, the year after, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In both he played minor
roles. He still remembers his ambition to stage Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory in a different way than was done by the teacher, using bubbles on
stage. He even collected money to buy one of the props to use later in his
own version. He never re-staged that production, although his need to direct
and his entrepreneurship in theatre were clearly evident from an early age.
In his first year at Parktown Boys High School, he felt isolated in class,
but after school he participated in the productions that were directed by a
small group of teachers who, with dedication and love, nurtured the cast
in popular high-school musicals. These musicals influenced him greatly.
Later, when he studied architecture, he came back to the same school to
direct the learners, adding drama into their extracurricular offerings with
shows like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Lord of the Flies and
Romeo and Juliet. In total, between 1997 and 2006, he directed a dozen
or so productions at Parktown Boys High School, Fourways High School
and Bryanston High School. At these schools, he developed and honed his
sensibility in creating strong visual images with large casts.

Homann describes the environment in which he grew up as a world
conditioned by apartheid society and traditions. His older brothers and
parents understand South Africa in a very different way from him. The
high-school musicals that he cut his directorial teeth on were rooted in
the Broadway and West End traditions. He knew little about home-grown
theatre in South Africa before beginning his tertiary studies in Drama at
the University of Witwatersrand.
After two years studying architecture, he switched in 1999 to the
Drama Department of Wits where he later headed up the writing and
directing programme and lectured in South African theatre history.
Although he hadn’t been part of that period of protest and resistance work
that has become the identity of South African theatre, he says he is deeply
influenced by studying with, and being an unofficial assistant to, Malcolm
Purkey, the artistic director of the Market Theatre between 2004 and 2013.
Malcolm was the first professional director I worked with as an actor.

Later I managed projects for him. Sometimes I was his student stage
manager and sometimes actor. Without him I think I would have been a
playful director without a social or political conscience. From him I was
conscientised into the complexity of South Africa and started to connect
my work with that. My other main influence comes from Sarah Roberts,
a prolific theatre designer and a lecturer in design and performance in
the Drama Department at Wits, a mentor figure who I have worked
with as a set and costuming designer. I learned a lot about visual
aesthetics through her work and teaching, and by looking to her work
and the many dinner conversations we have had. Her understanding of
playfulness, wit and theatricality has been very influential in my work.
After studying at Wits, he continued his arts study for another year at
Kings College in London.
There are clearly two worlds in the work of Greg Homann: one he
describes as entertainment, playful and very visual; the other engages
more with social and political issues, but even then the entertaining value,
the visual aesthetics and the playfulness are there. He says: “Theatre is so
much a visual medium, especially in South Africa, where the relationship
with the English language is very complex. The need to communicate
through the visual is strong.”

Homann does it all: comedy, new South African plays, world drama,
musicals and the classics. He says that he is not influenced by strong
South African musical directors like Mbongeni Ngema and Gibson Kente;
but this is a world he learned about at Wits University. He is fascinated by
the key moments in South African theatre history and those connections
between local theatre traditions and Western influences.
The musical King Kong from 1959 is one early example of this clash or
fusion, with a tragic structure based in Aristotelian drama, but with local
musical influences. Key moments for Homann are when he was involved
in the collaborations between black and white theatre practitioners like
The Serpent Players where Fugard joined forces with John Kani and
Winston Ntshona on The Island, the work of the mid-’80s under Barney
Simon’s direction, and in collaborations with Phyllis Klotz.
Homann has plotted for himself a narrative of South African theatre
history. As he tells it:
One of the quintessential plays made in South Africa has to be Woza

Albert, with its multiple influences in style and genre, traditional
storytelling and physical acting influenced in part, by the Polish theatre
director Jerzy Grotowski.
South Africa’s theatre history has to do with the chemistry between the two
worlds of local theatre tradition and Western influences. Homann grew
up in one world, and learned the history of the other when he went to
university. One of the skills he did take from his family environment is his
business sensibility, and he notes that “I am an arts entrepreneur”. Like
many successful South African theatre directors such as Gibson Kente,
Mbongeni Ngema, Barney Simon and Brett Bailey, he organises his own
projects. Homann says: “Theatre in SA is director driven. It’s rarely driven
by the writer or producer. As an arts entrepreneur I almost always find the
project, the project rarely finds me.”
The productions Homann has directed have been nominated for over
30 awards and have won no less than 13, including multiple Naledi awards
and Standard Bank Ovation awards at the National Arts Festival. Homann is
the recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Theatre for 2014.

Pusetso Thibedi
Pusetso Thibedi rehearsing, 2014. Photograph by Mamta Ramjee.
The biggest influence in my work comes from music, the jazz

music of Miriam Makeba and Judith Sephuma. I feel they are
my theatrical mothers. There are stories behind their music,
stories and rhythms that keep everything together. In theatre,
rhythm is the most essential. How are lines delivered, what
is the set rhythm, and how do the bodies move in space?
Theatre should sound like a jazz story.

Pusetso Thibedi was born in 1987 in Thembisa, Gauteng. His parents
were active in the struggle. His father was a big name in the working-class
movement, a strong Marxist and inspiration for many whom he trained
and helped to find their own voice. His mother supported his father, and
her strength came from church. The family always travelled, avoiding
being caught by the police. He comments: “The picture is always on the
move, but never knowing what was going on; there was a constant sense
of excitement. I never felt in danger, but one never belonged.”
He would sometimes be with his parents and siblings, sometimes
with his mother’s eldest sister, where he had to clean up the house every
day: “When I would forget one detail, I had to do it over all again. I
learned to look for details and had to become a perfectionist.”
Thibedi notes that this childhood meant that in the first ten years of
his life he had a lot of blocks and gaps: “Mostly I can’t connect the places,
schools and friends any more. There was always jazz; the voices of Miriam
Makeba and Judith Sephuma. There was always jazz on the radios and
many conversations with uncles happened around jazz music.”
Once he was at high school in Bedfordview, his life become more
stable. But he felt isolated, spent most of time in the library, reading
the encyclopaedia, and horror and adventure books. His favourites were
the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books. Arts and theatre were not
prominent, but he was introduced to theatre while at school:
Because I screwed up all after-school activities being too much

rebellious, I ended up in the drama group. At St Benedict College,
which was a boy’s high school, I once played a woman. Being on stage I
felt a power I never felt in real life, I was more in control. I liked it but
never considered it as a career.
At the end of high school, one of his older sisters considered acting and
went to audition for a course at the Market Lab. He accompanied her.
They were addressed by Francois Venter, and Thibedi remembers that he
told them: “If any of you are here to become rich, famous or to be on TV,
leave now, this is not a platform for you.” Before he knew what was going
on, he auditioned and was chosen out of hundreds. That day he saw a
show at the Market:

I don’t remember the story; I remember African instruments, storytelling
and dancing. But most of all there was this woman actress/dancer, the
way she moved electrified me. Through her the images I had in my
head came to life. I felt this strong and deep connection, I loved it. I saw
more shows that evening and I knew I wanted to be part of it.
Every Saturday he went for acting classes and saw shows, and at the end
of the year he was chosen to do a two-year course in the Market Lab.
Telling that to his family was not good news for them. They were upset:
My father called a family meeting about my choice. Aunts were shouting

to me, “You cannot do that to your life”, but I explained I love it, I
feel complete doing it and I finally found something where I can say: I
belong there.
After that confrontation, the family accepted and supported him. He ended
up not going to the Market Theatre course but studying Drama at the
University if the Witwatersrand: “For my dad, a university was a better start,
and when I would be in, I would find my way to a serious subject, he hoped.”
At Wits, Thibedi had a hard first year, felt behind the rest of the
students, and being trained as an actor he felt locked in particular roles.
He felt that “as an actor you have no choice but to follow the director, so
why not become the director?” He chose directing and performance and
was taught by Greg Homann and commented: “He taught me to unpack a
script. He would make sure you understood every word of the text.”
Along with Homann, Pusetso acknowledges other influences on his
work:
The biggest influence in my work comes from music, the jazz music
of Miriam Makeba and Judith Sephuma. I feel they are my theatrical
mothers. There are stories behind their music, stories and rhythms that
keep everything together. In theatre, rhythm is the most essential. How
are lines delivered, what is the set rhythm, and how do the bodies move in
space? Theatre should sound like a jazz story. My own signature in theatre
also has to do with rhythm. It brings the space to life. Rhythm is the tool
to unveil the story, a human story, bringing out the voice of the voiceless.

He recognises other influences in his work such as the writer and American
film director, David Mamet, about whom Pusetso comments: “He is
pushing his characters to extremes. When a person wants something, he
would do whatever to get it, even backstab his best friend. They would
do it but also cover it up; creating a web of stories.” He also notes that
Peter Brook, the English theatre director and innovator, influenced him
with his concepts of ‘truthful moments’ and how actors can relate to true
emotion and bring the empty space to life.
After feeling the limitations of being an actor, exploring scripts as
a director and not really finding the script that suits him best, Thibedi
realised he wanted to tell his own stories as a creator/writer. He loves the
story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame: “It speaks of someone in isolation
until someone takes you out and you have something to be said.”
He won the Percy Tucker Award for Best Theatre Director in 2008 and
finished at Wits in 2010. He feels fortunate to be able to create shows.
In Cape Town, he won the Emerging Theatre Director bursary in 2011,
meaning he could work with the technical staff of the Baxter Theatre, and
write, cast and direct a piece. He made Capturing Sanity in which three
characters in a mental asylum try to tell a story.
Thibedi has his own thoughts about how to continue a career in the
theatre industry in South Africa:
I don’t like the attitude of artists who allow people to see their work for
free. When people don’t have to pay, how can they understand the value
and how can I measure my success when people only come when they
don’t have to pay? We as artists made it a norm that it is more important
that people see our work than pay for it. We must understand our own
value!
Thibedi wants to do that with his own company, Green Gooze Collective (a
company owned by three artists), where he creates ‘cultural experiences’
in unexpected places like restaurants and public spaces, noting that
“we need places of inspiration”. Thibedi is also a regular guest at Zinzi
Princess Mhlongo’s Plat4orm in Johannesburg.

Lara Foot
Lara Foot, 2013. Photograph by Mark Wessels.
The power of theatre is that we can rewrite the plots of our

lives and biographies; we can find healing of our country.
That can happen in the safe environment of the theatre,
sitting in the dark, being part of that community that an
audience is, engaging together with life on stage.

Lara Foot, born in 1968, is an adopted child and grew up in a white
Pretoria suburb. Her father was an architect, and her mother took care of
the kids. She comments:
My mother was a thinker, critical, didn’t support the apartheid regime.

She was also very ambitious for me and my older brother Brendon. My
parents were poor, and my mother was sick, bipolar and epileptic. That
made my observation of life around me very focused and sharp.
In spite of these difficulties, her parents loved her dearly, and she says,
“I was just one of those white, safe, innocents, as kids should be.” She
comments on this sense of innocence:
My parents always took me to the movies, not only children’s stuff. At

the age of nine I saw The Godfather. I wanted, of course, the good guy
to win. When a movie had a bad end, I would rewrite in my head the
whole story to a happy ending, driven by a sense of justice, only then
I could sleep.
Much later, being a successful director and writer she says:
The power of theatre is that we can rewrite the plots of our lives and
biographies; we can find healing of our country. That can happen in the
safe environment of the theatre, sitting in the dark, being part of that
community that an audience is, engaging together with life on stage.
Theatre can bring people together, people from different race, age and
social backgrounds.
In 1985, at high school at the age of 17, Foot saw a theatre play for the first
time. The white class of girls attended Born in the RSA, directed by Barney
Simon, in the political, non-racial Market Theatre in Johannesburg. The
show was a ‘docu-drama’, a living newspaper with images from the streets
of the explosive townships, a world she had never experienced. She
comments: “I was watching that play with an audience totally engaged
with the life on stage and I realised that I wanted to be part of that.” It
changed her plans of becoming a lawyer to an artist:

Although I changed my life from becoming a lawyer to a director/writer,
I never lost that sense of justice. An obsession to make things right, an
obsession with light and dark, how do we find the light.
Having little financial support from home, she first had a bursary and later
lots of jobs to pay for her study of Drama and English at Wits University,
often working as a waitress or cleaning the windows of a skyscraper.
During her studies, she found acting was not her favourite, noting that
she was “a lazy actress” but that she had directing talents and started to
make show after show: Ways of Dying, End Game and many others. She
graduated in 1989. Barney Simon became her mentor and she his assistant:
I always hung out with him. From him I learned about the life of stage
characters, the deepest point of their vulnerability and how an actor
shows that during in-between moments of acting. In his directing there
was always an echo of sensuality.
She was Barney’s assistant until his death in 1995, and she continued
working in the Market Theatre as resident director and associate artistic
director. She wrote and directed her own scripts. Her own voice as a
director/writer she found with Wombtide in 1994. This was a story told
though the memory of a child set in mid- to late-twentieth-century
South Africa; it follows an eccentric and somewhat dysfunctional family
through a story of love, loss and hope:
I write as a film. It is narrative visual theatre, with some influences of

French movies like Bleu, Blanc and Rouge. Physical theatre influenced
by Lecoq and Simon McBurney. African storytelling. But also by absurd
writers like Becket and Pinter.
In 1995, Foot won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Theatre.
Another major influence in her career was Sir Peter Hall, English
director and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. She met him
in a year of mentorship, initiated and funded by Rolex Artist initiatives.
He chose her out of three directors to mentor and be his assistant in the

UK. He says about Foot, “I found out Lara’s really a primary creator. Not
an interpreter or re-creator, though she can do that too. Writing plays,
making films, that’s where she belongs.”3 He influenced her writing more
than her directing. She realised she wanted to write more and explore
those possibilities: “I felt like an artist who only worked in watercolour,
who finds out you can also work with oil or with clay.” She loved the
talks with Sir Peter Hall about how theatre works, how we should run
theatres, what responsibilities they have towards new written work and
an audience. Becoming the Chief Executive Officer of the Baxter Theatre
in 2010 might have a lot to do with those talks.
Foot comments on the inspiration for one of her most well-known
works, Tshepang: “In 2001, the country is devastated by a storm of
darkness, with headlines in the papers ‘Nine-month-old baby raped by
six men’.”4 Tshepang became one of the most powerful plays written in
South Africa and ran for years in South Africa and abroad. She says, “I
wanted to make society the protagonist, seeing the landscape, the whole
village, the whole country, as the rapist.”
She is happy that her plays are published:
What should we as playwrights do if our work is not published? Becket

and Pinter were also reading each other’s work. In South Africa there is
a lack of published plays, a lack of visibility of playwrights, also a lack
of infrastructure for emerging writers.
Another concern for her is the social responsibility that writers have: “We
shouldn’t be too responsible about our past. Our fundamental right as
playwrights is to be creative and playful. We shouldn’t be too absorbed
by the truth, then we become incurious.”
With those concerns, Lara Foot creates opportunities for writers.
The Zabalaza Festival at the Baxter Theatre will make publications of
the winners’ plays, and where possible she says she will support any
initiative that helps to develop script-writing in South Africa.
3 Interview with Sir Peter Hall. (2006) www.rolexmentorprotege.com.

4 “Rewriting the plot of our life”. Lara Foot at TEDx, CapeTown, 2012.

Amy Jephta
Amy Jephta, 2013. Photograph by Reneva Newman.
My generation are born-frees. We think we don’t have to deal

with the baggage of the past, we can move forward. A lot of us
feel outside history, like the world is ours, and it should be. We
think apartheid should be over because 1994 happened, but it
isn’t. In South Africa, colour blindness is not yet possible.

Amy Jephta was born in 1987 and raised on the Cape Flats, where she
still lives today. She has a Christian mother and a formerly Muslim father.
Both her parents serve in the South African Police Service: her father in
training, her mother in management. She has one brother, a jazz musician
and double bassist. Although her parents had very traditional jobs, she
was raised in a liberal household. But her upbringing was sheltered – she
was not allowed to play on the streets or outside her house, and spent her
childhood reading and making up stories. The house she grew up in was
never quiet. Although there was a television, a record player was, and is,
the family’s preferred form of entertainment. While she was growing up,
Jephta and her sibling would be taken to see the children’s shows in the
foyer of the Baxter Theatre.
As a child, I started to make my own books and draw the covers and
pictures. My first title was Lizzy’s Adventures. I would write my own
versions of the books I read. Mostly I read the books to my grandfather;
we’d walk to the library together to find new books almost daily.
At high school, Jephta thought she would become a journalist or a writer

of novels:
There was an English teacher called Mr Kuit. He enjoyed spotting kids

who had special interests. He’d give me Faulkner and Dostoevsky while
the rest of my classmates were reading Grade 8 setworks. In Grade 10
I was asked to write the school production, my first play called A Class
Apart. I was 16 at the time.
After high school, Amy chose to study Theatre & Performance at the
University of Cape Town and notes: “During my undergrad I was forced
to act so I didn’t do very well. Only in my final year did I find my feet –
that’s when I began to write and direct.”
A big influence on her professional life was Sandra Temmingh, a
lecturer who confirmed her writing skills. Jephta writes:

She works with a specific style, I recognised an expression of what I
was trying to accomplish in my work – with heightened language and
landscapes. Her work taught me not to fear theatre and to work with
the possibilities of the stage, to think beyond kitchen scenes and literal
drama. To tell the story with space and repetition, with poetry and
elevated language.
Jephta also recognises the influence of Chris Weare, an award-winning

director and her supervisor for her thesis production, who taught her “a
sense of rhythm, and that theatre is not film – an appreciation for space
and music; but I am still trying to find out which stories I want to tell”.
She talks about what inspires her and the content of her work:
My generation are born-frees. They tell us we think we don’t have to

deal with the baggage of the past, we can move forward. A lot of us
feel outside history, the world is ours. Most of my generation think
apartheid should be over because 1994 happened, but it isn’t. In South
Africa, colour blindness is not yet possible. Only recently I found
out my stories are those stories I am trying to get away from. As a so-
called ‘Coloured’, those stories are in the colour of my skin and the
history of my parents and grandparents, in segregation, in District Six.
That history still determines what I am. I didn’t directly experience
apartheid, but I still experience the after effects. Every day it makes me
angry, something is not right here. I use my writing to explore that. I
don’t want to go back to the canon of South African theatre, protest and
political theatre; I have to write my own stories.
In 2010, she was awarded the first Emerging Theatre Directors bursary
from UCT’s Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts. This
spurred her to write, direct, fundraise, design and produce her own
shows immediately after graduating. She has worked with Rob Drummer
from the London-based Bush Theatre, adapting Euripides’s The Trojan
Women into a dystopian South African future. In 2012, she attended the
Director’s Lab at the Lincoln Center in New York, an achievement she
says finally acknowledged her as a director as well as a playwright.

Jephta is careful about what art she chooses to consume:
I love jazz concerts more than I love theatre, which is ironic. I love
reading plays – rather reading than seeing them staged; the purity of
a text on the page is exciting. In South Africa, I feel we are still too
much focused on looking inwards, I don’t feel like there’s a sense of us
belonging and having our eyes open to the continent. We should know
the names and work of other young, new African playwrights, people
like Meaza Worku from Ethiopia, Zainabu Jallo from Nigeria, and
Angella Emurwon from Uganda. I only found out about their existence
in Sweden at the Women Playwrights International conference. I find
it funny that I have to leave my continent to learn about playwrights
from my continent.
In 2015, this conference will be held in Cape Town. Jephta is currently

one of the conference directors, working to help realise a goal of bringing
more than 250 female playwrights from around the world to South Africa.

Brett Bailey
Brett Bailey preparing Adama Cissoko for Exhibit B in Avignon, 2013. Photograph by Pascal Gely.
I believe that theatres ‘protect’ us from deep feeling. Theatres

are extremely safe, neutral spaces where we sit comfortably
and watch and listen. I take audiences out into very charged
environments beyond the borders of safety.

Brett Bailey was born in 1967 in Sea Point in Cape Town, and grew up in
a white middle-class family with his sister. His father worked for Shell and
his mother for IBM. Later they moved to Tokai, a suburb of Cape Town,
directly opposite Pollsmoor Prison. Bailey recalls: “I could often hear
sirens going off. There was a constant fear of a breakout from prisoners.”
He was a withdrawn child, imagining stories in which you would go
out through the bath plug with the water, coming out in another world in
which everything was possible. That other world was also present when
he visited his grandmother in George, who was a spirit medium:
I was about 7 years old and she would tell us about our previous lives:
she told me I once was a monk who was strangled; and one of the
two princes that Richard III killed. She believed that family members
reincarnated together, and spoke with the spirits of the dead in séances.
Much later, as a successful artist and theatre creator, this influence is

visible, and he says: “The outside order of things looks very smooth, but
what is behind the reality we see? What is operating behind it? Who is
creating it and to what end?”
At school he was a solo child: “When we were playing soccer, I didn’t
understand why everyone could not have their own ball instead of
fighting over one ball. I still see life that way.”
An all-boy’s high school was a shock for him, and he was teased and
bullied: “It made me angry and I withdrew into myself, but it also made
me clever. I would become the president of the drama club, the editor
of the school magazine. It was a way to make friends around me, to be
more in control.”
Bailey comments on growing up under apartheid:
The only black people I saw were the domestic workers, and later in the
army, the black people were the enemy. It was always us and them. I can’t
deal with master–servant roles; I have problems having a domestic cleaner
at home. I look with a jaundiced eye at authority because I question its
motives.5 The walls that contain society are erected to keep the lowest
5 Interview with Brett Bailey. Krueger, Anton, October 2009.

common denominator in place. Those who erect them do so out of fear
that they might be displaced. They are the barriers of control.6
After high school at the age of 18, he joined the army for two years to
fulfil his compulsory national service: “Because I didn’t know what to
study. It was a boring time, I never had to fight or kill anyone, we were
trained and we had to wait. I hated that world.”
In 1988 he started to study English at UCT and later also did a course
in Drama:
It was more theoretical but also had a practical side in which we had to
make performances. I remember I made my first show not in a theatre
but in an underground space where cleaners stored their equipment. I
liked to take my audience into another world, my world beyond reality.
Bailey comments that he often feels frustrated by the linear conventions

of theatre with plot and story, and the psychological life of his characters.
This removal of the audience from reality has prompted him to use
spaces other than theatres:
I believe that theatres ‘protect’ us from deep feeling. They are extremely
safe, neutral spaces where we sit comfortably and watch and listen. I
take audiences out into very charged environments beyond the borders
of safety. A walk on the mountain or a visit to a desolate factory at night
leaves one feeling open and invigorated. I simply drop a sequence of
images and a soundtrack into that experience.
He notes that he was deeply influenced by Richard Schechner from the

Wooster group in New York. Schechner came to Cape Town and did
some Master classes when Bailey studied at UCT, and showed some of
his work. Schechner’s work on rituals intrigued him. In his book Between
Theatre and Anthropology,7 he looks at how events such as carnivals,
6 Interview with Brett Bailey. Krueger, Anton, November 2004.

7 Schechner, R. (1985) Between Theatre and Anthropology. University of
Pennsylvania Press.

funerals and weddings are constructed, and how they can be viewed as
performance. The work of Grotowski also intrigued him: his theatrical
works and a particular performance where he let an audience run
blindfolded downhill through a forest. Another influence in his work
is Laurie Anderson, the American performance artist and musician, her
soundscapes and ‘sonic environments’ have been an inspirational element
in how Bailey constructs his works and uses trance elements to take his
audience into another world. His work Exhibit A was a ground-breaking
piece in the performance art genre, combining theatre, art, sound and
music into a new form.
After graduating in 1991, he worked with performance groups in
Cape Town townships and directed productions at the National Arts
Festival in Grahamstown. He realises he comes from the world of the
privileged, and has to think about how this plays out in his work: “How
to understand people from the other side and not think in terms of ‘we’
and ‘them’.” Bailey comments on this:
I had the benefits of apartheid and there will always be that sense of
unfairness. The most interesting place is to go as far away as possible.
In 1994, I spent a year in India, and in 1996 I lived with sangomas in
a village in the Transkei for several months. Life there was pervaded by
ritual, dancing, drumming, singing, brewing beer and animal sacrifice.
Music and rhythm underlaid everything. During this time I got away
from my ‘we/them’ thinking; living with people, getting to know them
intimately, which shows one that we are all deeply human, no matter
what our cultural background.
He went on to create his ‘plays of miracle and wonder’. In one of them, Ipi
Zombi?, Bailey evoked a 1995 witch-hunt in which several women were
blamed for the death of 12 boys in a minivan accident. It combined Xhosa
and Christian rituals. Zakes Mda acclaimed Ipi Zombi? to be “a work of
genius that maps out a path to a new South African theatre”.8
Bailey has worked in Zimbabwe, Uganda and Haiti. His journey has
8 Graver, D. (1999) Drama for a New South Africa: Seven Plays. Indiana
University Press.

also brought him more and more to the big European festivals. He feels
he has something to tell European audiences: “I believe a great deal of
the world’s wisdom, beauty and complexity has been (and continues to
be) despised and destroyed by European cultural arrogance. With my
work, I aim to show the wonders and the difficulties of a world beyond
the great walls of the West.”9
Reflecting on his work in 2013, he realises his audience at the moment
is a European, white, international festival audience:
My work is too costly to produce in South Africa. Abroad I feel alien.

I enjoy the success, but that audience is not the audience I deeply care
for. It would be so fulfilling if I could do more works in South Africa.
9 Interview with Brett Bailey. Krueger, Anton, October 2009.

Bheki Mkhwane
Bheki Mkhwane workshopping in UKZN Durban, 2014. Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
You must inspire the actors to invest their personal involvement

in the storyline. Guiding the actors is crucial, giving them all the
freedom and making it a democratic process in which everyone
decides and agrees on what should be in the play and what not,
will not create a strong show. Guidance is finding the balance
between taking control and giving the actors space for creation.

Bheki Mkhwane was born in 1964 in KwaMashu in KwaZulu-Natal.
His father was a bricklayer and worked for the municipality building
locations. He was the last born, and had two brothers and two sisters. His
mother ran the household. The family was poor: “After school we would
play in the dust, with nothing but some stones, or hunt some fish down
by the river.”
Mkhwane tells that:
While rehearsing, I still like to play, play as a child with nothing, free
and without thinking. Giving that child, which is still inside of us,
space, means freedom. Freedom of creation. I played like that to survive
as a child.
On his childhood, he comments that: “There was no sense of hoping we

would become something, the family was poor and just survived like so
many in those days. There was no guidance.” Art was something never
heard of, although when his father died in 2013 at the age of 93, he
found out from his relatives that back in those days his father played the
banjo and told funny stories. Mkhwane was never exposed to them.
He notes that he once saw a community theatre group, and at the
age of 13 he saw his first Gibson Kente show, The School Girl and the Taxi
Driver, somewhere in a packed hall in KwaMashu. He was overwhelmed
and still remembers walking home imitating all the dances and songs
from the show. “I wanted to be like that.” Later as a child he would watch
more of Kente’s work; he learned every move and every line making
similar shows with his community group.
He finished high school and started working as an admin clerk with
a company, but after work and on the weekends he still played with his
community group, where he became the leader. Once a white man with
a long beard walked in and watched them play. It was Rob Amato, an
English lecturer at the then University of Natal. They presented their play
at the university. His work was seen by Nicholas Ellenbogen, who invited
him for an audition. Ellenbogen was the head of the drama company
within the then Performing Arts Council of Natal (NAPAC).
Mkhwane remembers that he had a vision and wanted to create a

multiracial company. Meaning he was allowed to have three black actors
in his troupe of 20. His parents were irritated by his choice to be an actor.
When he showed them that he would get paid, they were astonished:
“Paid for playing?” Especially my father hated my work; years later he
once came to see my work, and he walked out crying, never ever seeing
my work again. When I was on TV, he would switch it off.”
The time with Nicholas Ellenbogen in the drama company was his
education as an actor; for eight years he played all kinds of different roles
in classics and world drama. At the beginning of the 1990s, Ellenbogen
created a group of five within his troupe, three black actors and two
white, and one of them was Ellis Pearson.
At that time the government didn’t allow groups to travel anymore.

Before that groups from Cape Town would exchange with Pretoria,
Durban, Jo’burg and vice versa – Theatre that was more and more a
tool in the struggle became a thread. We made a show, Horn of Sorrow,
the story of a black rhino, and decided to leave the company and travel
alone to Cape Town. In 1991, we played that show in Cape Town when
Mandela was released. We were part of the march. I was there! We
waited for hours, and I heard his first speech. That was the moment
we called our new company Theatre for Africa. Nicholas Ellenbogen
resigned from NAPAC and joined our new company.
Theatre for Africa made new political works in an unexpected and creative
way. They played in schools and factories, mostly playing outside:
At the beginning of one of our shows, an actor played he was waiting,

looking where the others are. Than a taxi would arrive, three black
actors would come out, step in a wheelbarrow, carried by a white actor,
carrying them into the factory grounds, while the black actors were
singing a song.
Their shows travelled in South Africa and were played at many

international festivals. In 1993 they won the Fringe Festival Award in
Edinburgh. Theatre for Africa moved to Johannesburg and Ellis Pearson

left for three years to be trained by Jacques Lecoq in France. Lecoq was
famous for his methods on physical theatre, movement and mime, and
influenced actors, theatre directors and choreographers all over the
world, many of whom went to study at his school in Paris. When Pearson
came back in 1994 just before the first elections, he asked Mkhwane
if they could work together. A duo was formed at the same time as
democratic changes in South Africa were heralded as the transformation
of the rainbow nation. They stayed together until 2008, travelling around
South Africa and to all the major international festivals.
Bheki Mkhwane and Ellis Pearson created a style of physical

theatre that was unique, drawing from their respective training and
experiences. Mkhwane brought the perspective of township theatre
and Zulu traditional storytelling and performance forms, while Pearson
contributed his training with Jacques Lecoq and local university drama
education. Their work combines to suggest an inter-cultural aesthetic of
interracial collaboration in South Africa.10
Mkhwane feels he is not an actor, not a director, not a writer; he calls

himself a theatre creator. He found his voice, “that took many years, it is a
long process” as a creator during the beginning of the work with Pearson.
He found not only his voice but also his signature and identity.
It takes years for every director to find that, you don’t learn it at a drama
department. You’ll have to find it while working, and still every show
that I make I learn, I am inspired by something new, an idea, a book,
something I read in the paper.
Mkhwane continues working as a creator, workshopping his plays with

the actors, sometimes being part of it as an actor, sometimes outside
as a director. The award-winning Sitting around the Fire was created in
10 Veronica Baxter and James Aitchison (2010) “Embodying ‘lightness’ in the

New South Africa – the theatre of Ellis Pearson and Bheki Mkhwane 1993–
2008”. South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 24.

this way, and his own play Born Thru the Nose was self-penned and self-
directed.
I had to prove to the world that I was not only Ellis’s boy, but had my
own voice. Ellis never made me feel that way, but white people always
thought I was Ellis’s boy, a stupid apartheid reflection.
About his way of workshopping that he has practised all his life, he says:
You must inspire the actors to invest their personal involvement in the
storyline. Guiding the actors is crucial. Giving them all the freedom
and making it a democratic process in which everyone decides and
agrees on what should be in the play and what not, will not create a
strong show. Guidance is finding the balance between taking control
and giving the actors space for creation.
Mkhwane’s method of workshopping is discussed in more depth in Part

Three of this book.

Abnormal Loads directed by Neil Coppen, 2012. Photograph by Val Adamson.
CHAPTER 2
Contemporary
Directors in Context
I
n this chapter we provide an overview of the roots and routes of these
ten different directors, starting with their personal background and
following their key experiences, main influences and the choices that
they made to each become the director they are today with their own
defining voice. It is not possible to generalise about the South African
theatre industry based on these ten interviews, but there are some
common threads that we have drawn together based on what we see in
their personal journeys.
Selecting the contemporary theatre directors

The desired outcomes of these interviews were clear when we originally
selected the ten contemporary theatre directors and traced back their
personal routes. We would be asking them about their mentors, their
fathers and mothers in theatre, those who inspired their work most.
That would automatically connect them with the canon of South African
theatre; those directors, playwrights and works that are always mentioned
in an overview of the last 50 years of theatre in South Africa.
We expected to hear about the canon studied and taught at every
drama department in South Africa and abroad. For his lectures at Wits
University, Gregg Homann plotted an interesting grouping of that canon,
based on the idea that the most successful and influential works are
mostly combinations of local African cultural traditions like storytelling,
township theatre, singing and dancing, with Western influences on
dramaturgical structure and acting methods. This involves a mixture
of multiple influences from Africa and the West on specific moments
of modern history of South Africa, starting with King Kong, the first
successful musical with a full black cast in 1959, which went abroad.
This South African story about a boxer has an Aristotelian structure and
a musical format that links it to Western drama.
We expected influences of Gibson Kente, the father of township
theatre on both professional work and community theatre. We expected
to hear reference to The Serpent Players in 1972, where Athol Fugard
created famous works such as The Island with John Kani and Winston
Contemporary Directors in Context 49

Ntshona. We thought we would hear about collaborations between black
and white theatre creators, workshopping their shows and adapting and
recreating classic Greek structures. We expected to hear about Black
Consciousness theatre in the 1970s, and works like Zakes Mda’s We Shall
Sing for the Fatherland. Some of these texts might look didactic now but
the performances were done by great actors and the result was socially
and politically provocative and important.
We expected to hear about the highly political plays of the 1980s. The
creation of Woza Albert in 1981 by Mbongeni Ngema, Percy Mtwa and
Barney Simon is for many reasons one of the most important shows made
in South Africa; a successful collaboration of traditional storytelling with
influences of the Grotowski acting method and the absurd structures of
Becket and Pinter. Between 1985 and 1987, South Africa was in a State of
Emergency. In this period, at least four crucial works were made. The two
musicals Sophiatown (workshopped by Malcolm Purkey and the actors)
and Sarafina (written by Mbongeni Ngema), the theatrical docu-drama
Born in the RSA (Barney Simon) and Have you seen Zandile (written by
Gcina Mhlophe). We expected to hear about these and the more popular
musicals such as District Six by Taliep Peterson and David Kramer.
Beyond the commercial mainstream, we also expected to uncover
inspiration from the wealth of unpublished political plays, workers’ plays
and other works that were created by artists and activists of the local
anti-apartheid movement, which were performed regularly at ‘cultural
events’, which were a front for political meetings that would otherwise
be classified as illegal gatherings. Many of these plays were banned, and
consequently many more were never written down, to prevent them
from being banned.
We expected to hear links to the ’90s, the time of truth and
reconciliation, the time of the rainbow nation ideology and the works
of Nicholas Ellenbogen, the post-apartheid satirical work of Mike
van Graan, such as The Dogs Must be Crazy and Dinner Talk, the semi-
autobiographical work of Greig Coetzee such as White Men with Weapons
and Reza de Wet’s Afrikaans dramas Crossing, Yelena and Drie Susters Twee.
Our expectations and thoughts that the ten contemporary theatre
directors would link with the South African Theatre canon is only

partly true. Of course, they all know their history but only four of them
mention a specific moment or person connected to the recognised canon
as their biggest inspiration. Prince Lamla mentions the work done in the
Market Lab. He directly connects with the canon through his adaptations
of Woza Albert and Asinimali. Greg Homann also connects, having been
an assistant of Malcolm Purkey, artistic director of the Market Theatre
and director of Sophiatown. He is also inspired by the designs of Sarah
Roberts, who worked as a costume designer for Sarafina and many other
legendary shows. Lara Foot was for many years the assistant to Barney
Simon, the director of Born in the RSA and her work in the Market Theatre
is a strong connection as well. Neil Coppen mentions being inspired by
the work of Bheki Mkhwane and Ellis Pearson and Theatre for Africa.
Bheki Mkhwane is the only one who mentions and actually saw the
original work of Gibson Kente.
Besides these four directors, the others don’t mention the canon as
their biggest inspiration. For them there is a gap with the past. Being an
assistant of a recognised theatre director is still an important way to learn
the skills, grow your passion and explore the network of the industry.
Not every aspirant director is afforded this opportunity. So how do they
find their route into the theatre industry?
Looking at ways of making theatre, the traditions most often
mentioned by the selected directors are traditional African storytelling
techniques and township theatre in combination with Grotowski, and the
French mime school and style of Jacques Lecoq, which are dominant in
the work of Prince Lamla and Bheki Mkhwane. Influences from ‘absurd’
writers such as Becket and Pinter are mentioned often.
There is a big influence of films on these contemporary theatre
directors. Paul Grootboom, Lara Foot, Brett Bailey and Neil Coppen
all mention the cinematographic influence of movies on their theatrical
work. Lara Foot says, “I write as if I write a film.” They all try, in different
ways, to transform cinematographic qualities in their work. Grootboom
mentions the film director John Rogers who taught him everything.
Grootboom still writes for television. Coppen worked in different jobs
on film sets. Jazz music is mentioned as a major influence by two of
the young directors Pusetso Thibedi and Amy Jephta, who refer to their

parents and the music that was always present when they were young. It
influenced their writing and directing through a strong sense of rhythm.
Teachers and lecturers at departments of drama or in places like the
Market Lab are often mentioned as artistic fathers and mothers whose
presence is still visible in the current work: Sandra Temmingh and Chris
Weare (UCT), Janine Lewis (Technikon Pretoria), Sarah Roberts and Greg
Homann (Wits) and Mncedisi Shabangu (Market Lab).
While there are some practitioners in the industry who argue that
the drama schools are removed from the professional theatre world,
the influence of these teachers, both local and international, cannot
be underestimated. It is their teaching and influence that shapes the
directors who are winning awards and creating the theatre aesthetic that
we see on today’s stages.
These teachers often turned their attention to the global village for
inspiration and connected with famous theatre directors who never came
to South Africa themselves. Janine Lewis, for instance, trained abroad in
‘View-points’ acting with Anne Bogart and ‘Tanztheatre’ (dance theatre)
from Pina Bausch, and used their ideas in her lessons at the Technikon
in Pretoria.
The work of Simon McBurney, who was never in South Africa
himself, is also influential. His works were played on video every year
to the students of the Market Lab. That is where Prince Lamla and
Lara Foot were exposed to his work. It connected with the physical
theatre that was already popular in South Africa, and brought it to a
new level, adding multi-media elements such as projections, musicians
and computers. European theatre directors who have been in South
Africa have influenced them by their writings, works or mentorships.
These include Peter Brook, Richard Schechner and Sir Peter Hall. The
importance for aspiring directors of watching, reading and learning from
these experienced and influential practitioners is vital if they wish to
expand their base of ideas and find their own artistic voice.
Seven of the directors discussed are trained as actors, and some
are recognised for excellence in this field, such as Neil Coppen, Bheki
Mkhwane and Greg Homann. Some find out that it is not their calling.
Lara Foot thinks she is a lazy actress. Pusetso Thabedi feels the limitations

of an actor locked up in a character. Most feel the need beside acting and
directing to write their own stories and can be seen as theatre creators.
Beside Greg Homann, who is not a writer himself, all of the other directors
are familiar with writing or workshopping their own scripts and many of
them work this way on a regular basis.
There are perhaps more commonalities in content rather than style
for these directors. Most South African writing is strongly rooted in
the social political context of the country. Many of the works of Paul
Grootboom and Lara Foot have been published and directed by others
in South Africa and abroad. More recently, Neil Coppen’s published
plays have also had this international exposure. It is surprising that the
popular works of Bheki Mkhwane and Ellis Pearson, like so many others,
have never been published. Without broader formal arts education, it is
likely that the audience for published local work will remain small and
therefore publishing local work is not economically viable.
South Africa doesn’t have an infrastructure for playwrights.
Unfortunately, drama departments of universities focus predominantly
on acting, performance and directing. There is a recognised shortage of
strong script-writers in the country; a fact that has given rise to a number
of innovative writers’ development programmes facilitated for South
African writers by both local and international organisations. However,
too few locally written works are published and made accessible for
others to direct and to study.
Overview of the roots and routes

Lower-middle-class or middle-class environments are most mentioned
when the selected directors talk about their parents. This includes
teachers, police officers, nurses, architects, civil servants, accountants
and computer technicians. Some worked for a union or were professional
soccer players or creative entrepreneurs. None of the families were
extremely poor or rich, with the exception of Bheki Mkhwane, who says
his family was very poor.
None of the directors’ parents were professional artists themselves.

Exposure to art was often not present in the family home, with the
exception of jazz music and storytelling. This perhaps suggests that
there is a percentage of the middle class in South Africa that does not see
art as an important part of the world they live in. However, the middle
class is considered to be a potential audience and consumer for arts.
This disjuncture provides a strong argument for audience development
in South Africa, starting with the younger generation.
None of the interviewed directors had considered a career in the arts
from a young age, except for Neil Coppen who knew from the age of six
that he wanted to dedicate his life to theatre. For most of the directors, art
was alien to the environment in which they grew up. Parents had mostly
planned a future path for them as doctors or lawyers. All of them grew
up in a world conditioned by apartheid society and traditions. From their
interviews it is obvious that their skin colour has made a difference in
their work, as it has determined their thinking in different ways.
Their first exposure with theatre is often at school, through school
musicals and plays, watching a community theatre group or as a child
taken to the theatre. Historically, it was the white schools that allowed
space for arts in the curriculum, and disadvantaged schools had less
exposure to theatre, music and dance. The positive influence of arts
education emphasises the value and importance of introducing arts
in all South African schools, and supporting a strong arts curriculum.
However, arts education in schools is often personality-driven. If you are
lucky enough to have a good and enthusiastic teacher with skills, then
there are opportunities for inspiration and the nurturing of talent from an
early age. There are still many challenges related to resources, time and
skills that prevent arts in schools from being developed to a level that will
make a difference to the industry.
The issue of arts education continues beyond the school gates. This
education need not be formal. Those directors who did not have the
opportunity to study drama mention the strong influence of community
theatre groups on their decision to follow a career in the arts. These groups
play a vital role as the voice of their own communities and are especially
important for young talents that have no access to tertiary institutions, as
they can be a first step into the industry. Many South African directors,

playwrights and actors started their careers in one of those groups.
Community theatre is praised for the drive of the young artists involved,
and for being a source of stories that are waiting to be told.
With the ten interviewed theatre directors, their first exposure to
theatre had, in many instances, an electrifying effect. This exposure
was a key experience that changed their entire thinking and defined
their future. Some had those experiences as a child, and some later.
Neil Coppen saw Singing in the Rain at the age of six: “I realised deeply
that I wanted to spend every minute of my life creating something like
that.” Pusetso Thibedi was blown away by a theatre/dance show, having
“a strong and deep connection with what was happening on stage,
and loving it, and realising that was where I belonged!” Zinzi Princess
Mhlongo’s life changed after going to the National Arts Festival for the
first time: “I wasn’t the same any more. I loved the vibe. I felt at home.”
Lara Foot, watching Born in the RSA at the age of 17 realised on that day
that her life would change: “I wanted to be part of that!” Bheki Mkhwane
remembers seeing a Gibson Kente show, and imitating every line, dance
move and song: “I wanted to be like that.”
Some of them wrote small stories and plays as children, or, like Amy
Jephta, rewrote the books that she read. Lara Foot changed the plots
of some of the movies she saw. Greg Homann re-staged in his head the
school play he was cast in as a child. Brett Bailey wrote and drew little
books of imagination.
Watching films at a young age is mentioned by half of the directors
as a huge influence on their current artistic achievements. It influenced
their writing: “I write as if I write for film” (Lara Foot); and how they
stage their shows using cinematographic effects (Paul Grootboom) or
using the stage as a film set (Neil Coppen).
Only Neil Coppen and Amy Jephta say that were stimulated in their
creative thinking at home. Mostly grandmothers and school teachers are
mentioned as people who support and recognise their creative talents. In
other homes, this support was hard won. It is not surprising that in many
cases, hell breaks loose when the family finds out about their future plans
to choose a career in the arts. Pusetso Thibedi’s father called for a family
meeting where aunts were shouting, “You throw away your life!” The

grandparents of Paul Grootboom were so angry that they simply kicked
him out of their house. Greg Homann, Prince Lamla and Bheki Mkhwane
mention a strong rejection of their decision to get involved in the arts by
those at home.
It takes strong personalities with clear visions and dreams to overcome
and fight these negative rejections and to accept the consequences of
their choices. The descriptions of the routes that were taken by these
directors makes it clear that there is a connection between the personality
at a young age and how this is shaped by the environment it is living
in. Rejections or support can sharpen the creative profile. There is also
a lot of coincidence and luck, allowing those who are prepared to meet
these opportunities to make a big jump forwards. Especially for the white
directors mentioned, the world changed totally after the end of apartheid.
Some of them were never exposed to the world that most black South
Africans were living in. Greg, Lara, Brett and Neil grew up in more or
less isolated white suburbs. The black directors also grew up in isolated
communities. Apartheid and its after-effects are a major influence on the
work of all the directors. The white directors, all in a unique way, want
to heal the country of the injustices of the past. The black directors want
to recognise that the past is still with us.
Lara Foot talks about an obsession of healing the country and finding
the light; Brett Bailey talks about a sense of injustice; Neil Coppen wants
to create empathy, saying: “Imagination is the only way to heal this
dislocated society we are living in.” However, for the black directors there
is often a different feeling: “Apartheid is not over,” says Amy Jephta.
Paul Grootboom writes:
In all fairness, shouldn’t a lot of apartheid heads have literally rolled like
the Nazi heads? Why shouldn’t we compare? Of course six million Jews
did die, but who bothered to count the fallen blacks here? Would the
world have accepted the TRC after the fall of the Third Reich?1
1 Paul Grootboom communication. Facebook, 2013.

Prince Lamla expresses his irritation about the notion of the rainbow nation
that is confusing and covering the scars and anger that is everywhere,
especially in non-white people. Bheki Mkhwane talks about his own
feeling about some white people’s perceptions of him as ‘Ellis’s boy’.
South Africa is referred to by all of the directors as a dislocated society,
with scars and wounds under the surface; a county where irritation and
anger come more and more into the open. Populist politicians in South
Africa openly play the race card. Globally, race and religion become more
and more the centre of identity.
Does it mean that theatre in South Africa is still divided by race?
And do different theatre scenes operate ‘apart’ from one another, without
connection? Is this about language, class, culture and aesthetics or race?
Afrikaans theatre does tend to be more separate and operates within
itself at two national festivals that are almost exclusively dedicated to
Afrikaans: the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees and Aardklop. Many
theatre audiences and casts in South Africa are not fully integrated, as
interests among audiences are often still divided. The National Arts
Festival plays a major role in bringing together different interests and
multiple influences that go beyond race, language, social background
and age.
Before starting with these interviews, we had the expectation that
the younger generation of directors like Pusetso Thibedi, Zinzi Princess
Mhlongo and Amy Jephta, were the ‘born-frees’, not affected by apartheid
– the generation that moves forward and feels the world is theirs. But
the interviews uncovered that they know where they and their families
come from and that there are inescapable links between the past and the
present. “My stories are in the colour of my skin and in the history of my
parents,” says Jephta. Mhlongo, talking about her work Trapped, notes
that: “Everyone wants to be free. Free from pain, free from suffering, free
from destruction, free from rules, free to choose, free to move, and free
to be… how to break the chains that keep us from moving forward!”2
2 “Getting to know Princess Zinzi Mhlongo”. www.blog.standardbank.com,

2012.

Artistic inspirations of the directors
When we consider the artistic inspirations of these ten directors, we can
categorise them into five groups:
1. The theatre canon in South Africa (Gibson Kente, Mbongeni Ngema
and others)
2. A group including the international theatre canon (Jerzy Grotowski,
Peter Brook and others)
3. A group including lecturers and directors from the tertiary institutions’
drama departments (Janine Lewis, Greg Homann, Chris Weare and
others)
4. The mentors, who are working in the industry as directors (James
Ngcobo, Malcolm Purkey and others)
5. A special group of inspirational artists (including Miriam Makeba,
writers like David Mamet and different film directors)
For the above-mentioned directors, their artistic mentors are linked

to places of inspiration. The Market Theatre, with artistic directors
Malcolm Purkey, Barney Simon and currently James Ngcobo and its
talent incubator, the Market Lab is mentioned by many. In KZN, the
Loft Theatre run by the then Natal Performing Arts Council and director
Nicholas Ellenbogen was inspirational. Smaller venues such as the Stable
Theatre in Durban, run by Kessie Govender, also had this function. Those
were the places to be, that is where things happened and where inspiring
artists hung out. The young James Ngcobo started his career there. The
State Theatre and the Baxter Theatre are mentioned as having special
programmes and festivals for young emerging talents. The National Arts
Festival is talked about as a continuous place of inspiration and a place
for networking.
Places of inspiration
Places of inspiration is a term we use for a ‘place to be’ for young
emerging talents in the arts. These are places where artists meet, talk,
work and present their work. They are places that are important for the

routes and careers of writers, directors and creators. One of South Africa’s
historically most interesting places of inspiration, in the late 1950s, was
Dorkay House. It is described by Rolf Solberg in his book Bra Gib.3
Dorkay House was an old clothing factory in Eloff Street, downtown
Johannesburg. The African Music and Drama Association was housed
there, where artists Barney Simon, Athol Fugard and Mbongeni Ngema
met and worked. It also housed Union Artists, a production company
that created the successful export musical King Kong in 1959. A year
later, Union Artists got a young new director, Gibson Kente, who was
in touch with musicians like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela. Next
door to Dorkay House was the Bantu Men’s Social Centre founded by
Herbert Dhlomo, a playwright in the ’30s and ’40s. Athol Fugard’s early
works, No Good Friday (1959) and Nongogo (1959) were performed here.
In the same building was the ANC Youth League, where Nelson Mandela,
Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and others met.
Eloff Street was in those days a real place of inspiration for young
emerging artists, writers, composers and activists. Imagine those
people interacting, walking in and out of the same building, talking,
workshopping, inspiring one another. Does the theatre and arts
industry in South Africa still have places like that? The National Arts
Festival generates that same excitement of sharing ideas as performers,
and many of the directors discussed above talk about centres like the
Market Theatre and its Laboratory as such a place. The importance of
these places cannot be underestimated, and we strongly suggest that any
young director seeks out places and people to share ideas and keep his or
her own inspiration alive. Some directors, like Zinzi Princess Mhlongo,
create their own place of inspiration – her Plat4orm in Johannesburg
attracts a lot of young artists and their work.
Finding your own voice as a director often takes many years of
apprenticeship and them exploration. Bheki Mkhwane says “that is a
long process, it takes years”. Owning the influences of other voices is
done during the creation of new work. Theatre directing consumes both
3 Solberg, R. (2011) Bra Gib. Father of South Africa’s Township Theatre. University
of KwaZulu-Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg.

time and money, and creating enough work to find and establish your
individual voice is not done overnight. Many young directors are still
searching. Princess Mhlongo says, “Sometimes I have it, sometimes I lose
it.” Amy Jephta only recently found out that her stories “are those I am
running away from”.
Established directors like Lara Foot, Paul Grootboom, Bheki
Mkhwane, Brett Bailey and also the younger Prince Lamla, Neil Coppen
and Greg Homann have found their own signatures. With their creative
work and their generous personalities, they inspire others. They will
be the artistic mentors of the next generation of students in drama
departments, actors and directors from community groups who watch
their work, or maybe just a child in an audience who has an electrifying
key moment, a moment that will change his or her life as much as the
lives of these contemporary directors were once changed by seeing the
magic and impact created by another director.

PART 2
The Basics of
Drama and Directing
This part of the book talks about the basics of

theatre, and some of the dramatic concepts that,
as a director, you will need to understand when
creating your vision of the work that you want to
bring to the stage. These theoretical and practical
concepts are linked with some of the ideas and
the work of the ten featured directors introduced
in the first part of the book.
CHAPTER 3
The Source
Foreplay directed by Paul Grootboom, 2009.

Photograph by Waldemar Photo Studio.
On drama and conflict
P
ainters have their brushes, their paint and composition.
Musicians, their instrument, their notes, rhythm and melody.
Dancers, their body and movement.
Writers, their words and story.
Dance, music, literature, painting and sculpture are the primary arts.
Theatre is not one of the primary arts, but a distinguished secondary art.
This means it uses elements from the primaries.
It uses composition from the painter to create a set and block the actors.
It uses words and a storyline from the writer for its script.
It uses movement from the dancer to make the actors change position.
It uses rhythm from the musician to give every scene its own pulse.
But theatre also has its own identity, its own source. The basic ingredients
of all theatre are conflict and drama. These are the source from which
theatre comes to life whether it is comedy, tragedy, a musical, drama,
visual experimental theatre, a soap opera or a farce.
Conflict
We all know what happens to you when someone brings you into a
conflict situation. You can feel it when someone is looking for trouble,
when you hear a burglar trying to get into your house at night, invading
your space, someone is threatening you or harming your beloved. When
there is a colleague or friend who is jealous and tries to get your job,
someone who takes something valuable that you need, maybe money or
secret information.
These are almost biological or instinctual ‘fight or flight’ feelings. To
understand that, you don’t need to study drama, it is nothing complex.
When you are in a conflict situation, you are taken out of your comfort
zone. Alarm bells ring and most people find this frightening. Fear is the
crucial emotion that comes with conflict. It is not pleasant, but we have
to deal with it because we want to survive, we want to be in power again
or we want back what belongs to us, our loved ones, our valuables or

identity. The things we own and are. We also learn not to flee but rather
to fight our demons and master the fear that goes with them.
“The human being strives to maintain equilibrium and we want to
restore the balance of forces. Conflict is the process of getting into trouble
and getting out again.”1 Maybe after the conflict we say it was not so bad,
we came out a better person, we learned from it or we gained something
out of it. But when we are in the moment of conflict, it is frightening.
Conflict and competition are everywhere: with your big brother, after
school with your school mates, with your peers, your parents, in a love
relationship; daily we look at conflict on television, in soaps and films,
finding a job, or winning a soccer game.
It feels different when you are taken out of your comfort zone by
someone or if you take someone else out of their comfort zone. Those are
two different roles you can play in the process of getting into trouble and
getting out again. Both roles are forces needed for conflict. So when we
want to create a conflict in drama, we also need those different forces. We
need a central character who gets into conflict (the protagonist) and we
need other characters who bring our hero into trouble (the antagonists).
Our source, conflict, is different from a disaster that happens at once
and ruins everything. A disaster could be a car accident or an earthquake.
A disaster is so big that you cannot escape. Conflict is different from
disaster in that there is always the possibility to overcome it, to fight it
and to win or lose.
Conflict also needs a person who wants to overcome it, who wants
to fight it, who won’t simply give in at the first sign of trouble. When
someone threatens you and wants all your money and your reaction is to
give it all up immediately (which might be a wise thing to do), we don’t
really have a conflict. We have a conflict when you don’t immediately
give up but you try to get out of that conflict situation with everything
that is yours, no matter what it takes. This takes time. The essence of the
timing of the conflict, its development and its resolution creates drama.
1 Dietrich, J.E. & Duckwall, R.W. (1983) Play Directing. New Jersey.
The Source 65
Drama and conflict
Conflict works during time, which can be an hour, days or years. Conflict
has its ups and downs, it destabilises and disorients us. Sometimes we
might think we are out of it, only to find out we are still in big trouble. We
call this process the ‘development of the conflict’ inside a person. That
development makes conflict into a drama. The unfolding of this drama
reveals where the conflict bring us, what direction it takes, whether we
will be able to succeed in overcoming the problems or whether we will
come to a bad end. A conflict might start small, maybe even without
us realising that there is a conflict, but it will grow and grow towards a
climax. In conflict studies and drama, we study how conflict develops, in
what direction it develops and how it is structured.
You can break down the development of the conflict into small
moments or units of action. Action means what characters do. It is not
about what they think. The through line of actions is a structure that
creates the basis for every drama. So when you put conflict into action/s,
you have a drama. The ability to analyse this drama and to understand
dramatic development and action is a vital skill for a director. To be clear,
in this sense ‘drama’ does not refer only to a serious play, but to the
unfolding of conflict and action. The best comedies have a very clear
dramatic structure. The director’s role is to interpret and realise this
structure of actions playing out on stage.
Directors need to coach actors through a script, and make the actors
aware of how their characters develop through the conflict and what it
means for their actions and acting in a specific scene. Most of all, theatre
directors need to understand their own personal conflicts, and know
how to use them in their art. This knowledge will give their directing
work its own signature.
Harmony and conflict

Most of us, in our daily lives, desire and try to live in a harmonious way.
We try to solve problems in a mature way, or we try to avoid them. We
master this harmony model and we avoid people who attract or create
conflict or want to force us into conflict situations.

It is strange that those characters that we avoid in normal life are
those we like in theatre; we want to see them, we pity them. In theatre,
conflict loses the negative or frightening meaning that it has in everyday
life. It is one step removed from us. In theatre, the dramatic structure of
a play tries to master the conflict model in a creative, confronting and
surprising way.
Living in conflict is not nice, we all agree; we love harmony. Why then
do we go to theatre and watch other people get into trouble, die or lose
everything? What can be so interesting about this that we choose to pay
money and sit in our best clothes on a comfortable chair in the dark and
watch those conflicts develop in front of us? Why do we get pleasure out
of tragic situations?
To find an answer to this, we need to know what goes on in the mind
of the audience; we need to understand the psychology of the spectator.
The psychology of the spectator

To understand this psychology, let us start with a simple example:
The jackal and the bird on its nest

You walk in the bush and you see a bird sitting on its nest. It might
be interesting, and if you are a birdwatcher, your attention might be
stronger. This is the moment of exposition. Then you see from a distance
that a jackal is approaching. The jackal sees the bird and the bird sees
the jackal. This is the moment of inciting action. As a spectator to this
situation, you can automatically feel who is taken out of their comfort
zone: the bird. The jackal comes closer and the bird sees it coming. If
the bird wants to survive, it has to fly; but then the jackal will eat the
bird’s eggs. The jackal comes closer and closer and the conflict in the bird
between its own survival and the care for its eggs gets bigger and bigger.
This is the moment of development.
As the audience for this scene, we feel the suspense rising. What will
the bird do? Will it stay too long on its eggs? Then the jackal will eat the
The Source 67
bird. Will it fly? Then the jackal will eat its eggs. This is the moment of
crisis. The moment the bird makes a decision to fly and leave the eggs,
the conflict stops. This is the moment of peripety. The rest is spectacle.
The bird and the jackal. By Roel Twijnstra, 2014.
The conflict that we are watching starts at the moment the bird sees the
jackal and ends when the bird flies or when the jackal gets the bird.
Visualising this story we can feel the conflict of the bird from an audience’s
point of view. As the audience, we connect with its problem, we can
understand the conflict, but we don’t feel this as a negative emotion, with

fear and panic, like the bird itself will feel. Being an audience member
places us outside the conflict that evolves in the main character.
Let us focus on the psychological aspect of ourselves as an audience.
We watch someone getting into trouble without the danger of being
harmed ourselves. Pity and fear are emotions that will be aroused when
we are watching a conflict. We pity the main character and it frightens
us to imagine that it could happen to us. There is a kind of emotional
identification. This identification is not absolute. We never end up
identifying ourselves totally with the main character and thinking that
we are him or her. There is always a kind of distance, where we know
that we are not the one in trouble. This distance is called ‘emphatic
response’.2 It means that we feel what is going on, we connect with the
conflict from a safe distance, and we have compassion with the character
in trouble. Even when we recognise the conflict as something that may
have happened or be happening to us in the past or in the present, at the
moment of watching a play we are sitting in a comfortable chair in the
dark of the theatre, and we know we are safe at that moment.
Lara Foot reflects on the power of theatre and how it can work in the
audience watching it.
That can happen in the safe environment of the theatre, sitting in

the dark, being part of that community that an audience is engaging
together with life on stage. Theatre can bring people together, people
from different race, age and social backgrounds.3
Aristotle
The process in ourselves when we are watching drama is something
human that all cultures share, so it must be one of the basic elements
of our instinctual behaviour, the human condition. The process we
are talking about is one that you can feel every day when you watch
2 Schoenmakers, H. (1984) Passies in Pluche. Theaterwetenschap, Utrecht.

3 Interview with Lara Foot. Twijnstra, R., 2013.
The Source 69
television, witness a fight on the street, read a newspaper, listen to an
interview with a victim of abuse, or sit in the theatre. It is analysed and
described by the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics.
Aristotle describes how drama works and gives a reason as to why we
are so attracted to tragic conflicts. He explains why we have pleasure in
watching it and have compassion for our hero. Experiencing emotions of
fear and pity will finally bring purification of our own emotions. Aristotle
calls this ‘catharsis’. Catharsis is a safe way to channel our own fears and
reflect on them.
Theatre is most interesting in times when society is in transition. This
is usually a time when, as an audience, our fears are at their greatest.
Wars, liberations, struggles and revolutions often produce great writers
and directors, people such as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, Harold
Pinter, Athol Fugard, Mbongeni Ngema, John Kani, Barney Simon and
Lara Foot. In these times of transition, writers (just like the audience)
don’t feel comfortable with their situation. They don’t like what they see
in society and feel that they have something to say about this. They try
through their work to restore the balance of forces.
Prince Lamla, a contemporary South African theatre director, explains
the motivation of his work: “The stories I want to tell have to do with
what made us and what do we need to become a real beautiful country.”4
The writer and director Neil Coppen also tries to restore the balance
of forces in South Africa through his work:
It is only through imagination and fantasy that you can find freedom,
personal, social and political. I want to create empathy... For me
imagination is the only way to heal this dislocated society we are living
in. There is so much dishonesty and lack of accountability. People are
blind and don’t want to be involved to change society. I don’t think
theatre can do that, restore, but using imagination we can at least try.5
Writers and directors have an opportunity to inspire an audience and to

show them a way out of their own conflicts. As an audience watching
4 Interview with Prince Lamla. Twijnstra, R., 2013.

5 Interview with Neil Coppen. Twijnstra, R., 2013.

theatre, we are curious about what powers our hero will use, what creative
ways of overcoming the conflict they will employ. We are not interested in
just a hero, we want someone who is prepared to fight, who wants to do
everything that they can to get out of trouble in an unexpectedly creative
way. We want to see new solutions. This presentation of an unexpected
way out will give the catharsis a deeper purification and allow for greater
reflection on the conflict resolution by the audience.
Aristotle also gives us a recipe as to how the conflict should start,
develop and end. As an audience, we need time for our emphatic
response, time to get used to the characters and the story before we
can feel compassion and recognise the conflict. Every conflict has a
beginning, a middle and an end.
Let us first focus on the simplest conflict before going into more
complicated contemporary dramatic structures. The beginning is like a
code, an exposition of the main ingredients: who are these characters,
where are they and what do they do? In our small story, the beginning is
the bird sitting on its nest, protecting its eggs.
The middle of the story gets interesting. The middle starts with the
beginning of the conflict – Aristotle calls this the inciting action, the thing
that sparks and starts off the conflict in the protagonist and where we, as
the audience, start to feel the conflict. In our story the inciting action is
the moment that the bird sees the jackal approaching, where it realises it
is in trouble. The middle is where the conflict develops with its ups and
downs to a crisis, in which the bird makes its decision. The climax is the
action that follows this decision.
In our story, the moment that the bird flies away or is caught by the
jackal is the climax. It is also a turning point (the peripety) where there is
a change in perspective as a result of the crisis. This is where the middle
stops and the end starts. The end is often called the resolution.
In the resolution, the conflict ends with either expected or unexpected
consequences. The disequilibrium instituted by the inciting action is
resolved. This is the moment where the jackal is eating the bird, or the
eggs, or both. It all builds up to this moment and here is where the
conflict makes its point, it scores. This is the where the conflict leads to
its resolution.
The Source 71
Aristotle describes what ingredients we need to create a strong
dramatic reaction in the audience. We need characters, we need a
plot and we need to know what the main thought behind our drama
is. The idea of the ‘main thought’ is the moral background rooted in
the intentions of the writer. In addition, we need actors, a set, music,
movement and costumes to send the message towards the audience.
These are the signs that the show transmits and are received by the
audience. As part of understanding the psychology of the spectator,
a director needs to understand these signs as well as a range of other
influences on an audience.
Signs and receivers

You can look at a theatre show as a transmitter that sends signs over a
certain period of time to the audience. You can see the audience as a
receiving body that takes in the signs during the show. This dual view of
the theatre means that there are two distinct physical spaces where the
show takes place.
One space is on the stage, where the actors deliver their lines and block
the scenes, where the physical set is placed in different lighting states.
The second space where the show takes its shape is in the minds of the
audience. That is where the signs are given meaning. That is where, step by
step, the show is recreated in the experience and emotions of the audience.
For a theatre director it is vital to understand how the mind of
the audience works. That is why most directors see themselves as ‘the
audience to be’. The director needs to imagine him- or herself as an
audience member in order to understand how the play will be received
and responded to.
We have described theatre as a secondary art, meaning it uses elements
of the other primary arts. It draws words and storylines from literature,
composition from the visual arts for its blocking and staging, including
the set and costume designs. Theatre draws elements of movement from
dance and rhythm from music. You can look to these elements as signs,
used by the theatre director to send a message to the audience.

We can categorise the different types of signs as the options that the
director has. These signs are the medium for the director, in the same
way that a painter has a medium of paints. A director can decide to use
two actors, in black costumes, in an empty space, focusing on the text
and their characters. In this way, the director is only using some signs
and leaving out many others. Another director of the same piece of work
may use live music on stage, historical costumes and a complex lighting
design. This director chooses different signs to get a message across to the
audience. The choices are not necessarily better or worse, just different.
A theatre director must know all the possible signs and what they have
the power to do in the head of an audience. Only after exploring all the
options, combinations and consequences of using these signs should the
director choose what signs to use for a specific show. The combination
of chosen signs is part of the directing concept; those signs will become
a signature or personal stamp for the director. We will come back to this
when we discuss the director’s concept later in the book.
There is another type of sign that doesn’t come from the primary arts
but is vital to understand how a show gets its meaning and resonance
in the minds of the audience. This sign is called ‘the frame’. The frame
includes all the things that also influence the audience but are not part
of the show itself. The frame is the context in which the theatre event
happens. It includes the audience’s expectations before they walk into
the theatre. Did friends tell them how great the show is and that they
must see it? Did they read something about it in the paper? Maybe they
know one of the actors and are looking forward to seeing him or her
again on stage. Maybe their expectations are low and they are surprised
by what they see.
These elements or signs that make up the frame are already in the
minds of the audience before they come into the theatre. An audience
member has a different expectation when he or she goes to a fancy
theatre building than when he or she goes to a community hall in a
township. Those signs are important for a theatre director to know, as it
affects how the audience views and receives the work. As a director, you
can sometimes influence this frame by working on the publicity released
before the show starts. Some theatres give an introduction before the
The Source 73
show. Schools bringing students to a theatre often prepare the young
spectators for what they are going to see and where it comes from. All of
these activities are also signs that give the show its meaning.
The philosophy of signs and receivers comes directly from the French
Language School of Philosophy and has been adapted as a way to better
understand theatre by Keir Elam (2002), Martin Esslin (1987) and others
in a semiotics of theatre that helps to analyse theatre practice.
Twists and surprises

Following this concept of signs and receivers brings us to how our
minds work as audience members. Signs can play tricks with our minds.
Sometimes we think we understand a situation on stage, but it might
turn out to be the opposite. The bad guy turns out to be the good one.
The beautiful young lady is a vampire. The rich man is actually poor. The
one who is in jail for murder is innocent. The shebeen queen actually
wishes to have a proper husband and a family. In theatre, things are not
what they seem to be, and characters may cover up their true identities
and needs. This creates surprises for the audience, who may be expecting
something else.
The director Pusetso Thibedi says:
You have to push your characters to extremes, when a person wants

something he would do whatever to get it, even back-stab his best
friend. They would do it but also cover it up; creating a web of stories.6
These twists and unexpected changes are crucial tools for theatre. Drama
is driven by these twists; the surprises make us laugh and shiver. Comics
and spoken-word poetry have punch lines at the end to make the twist in
the audience’s head. The construction of these twists is not easy.
6 Interview with Pusetso Thebedi. Twijnstra, R., 2013.

A development with an unexpected twist. By Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
A good twist is already prepared by the character who wants to cover up

something. Drama is created when that cover is taken away by a change
of situation or a conflict with another character. You must already have
seen there is something different with that beautiful young girl, before
understanding that she is a vampire. The preparation of this revelation
should, however, not be too obvious, as then there is no surprise. Good
scripts have these unexpected changes and twists. It takes a good director
to prepare them. A good director must be able to coach the actors in how
to balance the signs that they give to the audience, and how to time the
revealing of these signs.
The Source 75
On theatrical convention
Theatrical convention also influences an audience. Suppose we see a
woman in a park who has dug herself into the ground, and only the upper
part of her body is visible above the surface. When we see something
like this, we will probably think she is mentally deranged, or maybe we
would call the police or social workers. When we see that woman in a
theatre, on stage, and she is stuck in a pile of sand with only her upper
body visible, we are prepared to look at this image in a different way. As
an audience, we hope she has something interesting to say and maybe we
will see the image as a metaphor of life and death.
This is a situation from the monologue Happy Days by Samuel
Becket.7 During the show, she sinks deeper and deeper into the sand.
The action loses its disturbing meaning because we know that what we
are watching is not real, but is created by artists who are aware of the
fact that we, as an audience, are watching. Because of that, what we see
loses its negative and frightening aspect, we look at the situation from a
distance and are prepared to see it in a more metaphorical way – we start
to give an aesthetic meaning to it in a way we that would not do to a real
life event. This sense of safety and distance is taken away by some theatre
directors such as Brett Bailey, who create site-specific work, avoiding the
theatre and going ‘beyond the borders or safety’.8
But even being part of the experience that Brett Bailey takes his
audience through, the audience will know that this is not reality but a
constructed work of art. There is still an aesthetic distance that allows us
to reflect on it in a way that is different from the way we reflect on reality.
One of the greatest English comedians, Tommy Cooper, died on
stage during a live performance in London in 1984. The audience was
laughing because they did not realise that they were looking at something
real. Being in the theatre, they looked at this ‘action’ in a theatrical
way, convinced that this must be an unexpected joke. Only when the
management stopped the show did the audience understand that they
had witnessed Cooper’s unexpected death live and on stage.
7 Becket, S. (1961) Happy Days. Grove Press.

8 Interview with Brett Bailey. Twijnstra, R., 2013.

Having an understanding of the source of the play and the elements
of drama are essential before you take the next step of working on a
specific script for production. We will explore this in the next chapter.
The Source 77
CHAPTER 4
The Director
and the Script
Delirium directed by Greg Homann with David Dennis and

Fezile Mpela. 2012. Photograph by Ruphin Coudyzer.
I
n the previous chapter, we looked at conflict and how it can develop
to a climax. We call this process of the development of a conflict a
‘drama’. We can study this process and break it down into different
stages, different phases. We can look at any script as a dramatic structure.
As a director, you must understand how the script that you are directing
is constructed. Only then can you understand fully what the author
wants to express. A director does not always know what the writer wants
to express, but as a director you must know how to read and analyse the
work. Only then can you coach your actors in the different scenes. Only
then can you evoke compassion, surprise and entertainment in your
audience.
In this section, we look at two different tools that explain how to break
down and understand a script. The first tool, the Aristotelian method,
we have already introduced. This method starts by identifying and
understanding the characters, the plot and how it works. The second tool
views a script as a sequence of action moments; some of these moments
refer to actions that will happen in the future in a way that builds the
tension to major actions in the script, the action units. Of course there
are many more methods and tools, but we will focus on just these two.
In drama theory, there has always been a discourse about the script’s
structure. Is it a structure of action or is it based on emotion and
character development? Both angles give interesting views. For further
reading, see Playwriting: The Structure of Action by Sam Smiley and The
Art Of Dramatic Writing by the Hungarian writer Lajos Egri. Interesting
also is the Viewpoints method on composing a drama, developed by Ann
Bogart and Tina Landau. This method comes from dance and focuses on
action and movement while composing a script.
Script breakdown method using

character and emotion
Aristotle described a way of breaking down, analysing and understanding
a script beginning with the identification of the central character. An
author who writes drama wants to express particular thoughts, and
The Director and the Script 79

knows the conflict that he or she wants to present on stage. The author
knows the story he or she wants to tell.
Those stories can be described very simply. Terry McCabe1 mentions
one of these archetypal stories as: ‘boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses
girl’. Another popular story is about the obscure person who possesses
hidden qualities that lift him or her to greatness. Or the tragic story about
a person who is successful and loses everything, including his or her own
life. In Part Three of this book, we’ll talk more about basic stories.
By describing the essence of the story in its most simple form like
this, a director can start to understand the conflict and how it develops.
The following understanding is essential: In most scripts, the writer
introduces the conflict in the main character, the protagonist. The other
characters (the antagonists) are grouped around the protagonist to
develop and to stimulate the conflict inside the main character.
Using the Aristotelian method to understand your script can be done
through the following steps:
1. Identify the protagonist. The protagonist is the hero who gets deeper and
deeper into trouble and ends up in a crisis. The protagonist embodies
the drama, the conflict on which the story is based. To simplify this,
every script has one protagonist. The rest of the characters can be
seen as forces to get him or her into trouble or out again. Those others
are called antagonists and tritagonists. For an actor it is important to
know what type of character he or she is playing. Playing a protagonist
demands a different angle and attitude than playing an antagonist or
tritagonist.
2. Identify the other characters as antagonists or tritagonists. An
antagonist is a character that gets the main character into trouble. A
script can have more than one antagonist.
The tritagonists are the helpers. The tritagonist can be the helper of
the antagonist or the protector of the protagonist. These are the girls
everybody wants and fights for, or the spy who is sent by the enemy
into the king’s castle, or the bad guy who is paid to kill the hero.
3. Identify where in the script the conflict starts, where it develops (the
1 McCabe, T. (2001) Mis-directing the Play. Dee, Ivan R., Chicago.

middle) and where in the script we can find the climax, where the
conflict ends. We discussed this structure when we talked about the
bird and the jackal. Every script has a beginning, a middle and an
end. But the beginning does not have to be the first written line of the
script, it is the beginning of the conflict and might only be in Scene
Two. This is where the protagonist for the first time feels the conflict.
You can point out this moment in the script. Maybe it is the entrance
of someone or it is something said by one of the other characters. The
start can be a small detail, but you can see clearly that here is where
the main character feels the trouble. Aristotle calls this the inciting
action, the moment that the conflict starts. This is the moment that
the conflict takes the protagonist on a journey of getting into and out
of trouble.
4. Identify where the crisis of the script is. The crisis is a scene or part
of a scene where the conflict in the protagonist is at its highest. The
antagonist(s) use their strongest powers to unbalance the hero. By
doing that, they bring the hero into a crisis, where the hero needs
to decide what to do, what to choose. Usually this scene is close to
the end of the script and leads to the climax. The script has been
working towards this point of confrontation. Take care, as the crisis is
a moment of total confusion in our central character, it can be during
the attack by the antagonist(s), or after that, but it is always before the
protagonist makes his or her crucial choice after which the conflict is
over. To find exactly where in your script the crisis is, you must find
the moment in the text where the attack is the strongest. Aristotle calls
that the lowest point. Next is the point when the protagonist makes a
choice and the climax follows and the protagonist turns out of the
crisis. That turning point is called the peripety. So now we know
the crisis in the script is between the lowest point and the peripety.
The crisis and the choice are not always the end of the script, often
there are one or two scenes after the resolution, which reflect on what
the central character went through, how he or she is doing after the
drama, and how the other characters are coping with it.

5. I dentify the full dramatic structure. The beginning, before the conflict
starts is called the exposition (E). It shows some of the characters, who
they are, where they are and what they are doing. Identify when the
main character (protagonist) realises that he or she is in trouble: the
inciting action (IA). Scenes follow that moment, in which the conflict
develops through the drama (D). This brings the main character into
a final moment of confrontation with the antagonist, the hero feels
the conflict at its strongest and he or she is in the most trouble and at
the lowest point (LP). Now the crisis (C) starts and continues until the
protagonist makes a crucial decision. To leave or stay, to live or die.
This is the peripety (P). What is left of our script is the resolution (R).
All good scripts have these distinct moments described, it is for the
director to know exactly where to find them (see images on page 84
and page 85).
When we look at the development of the conflict, we think about the

emotions that the protagonist has to go through. We use the term crisis to
describe an emotional state of mind. The term climax is used to describe
an action, mostly directly after the crisis. It is something that happens.
Peripety is a term that describes the emotional turning point, a change of
perspective after the crisis.
Bheki Mkhwane talks about using this method to understand scripts:
You need to identify the inner conflict of the individual characters

first, before looking at their relationships with other people and the
plot or action. This is a challenge as a director, and you are constantly
investigating how these inner conflicts work and how they link and
cross with the inner conflicts of the other characters. This provides a
journey for the rest of the plot to unfold.2
Pusetso Thibedi echoes this sentiment:
For me, everything starts from the inside, the internal conflict that
either drives or slows down the character’s journey. Before the action
2 Interview with Bheki Mkhwane. Durden, E., 2013.

is done, a decision is made (internally) by the character for something
to happen. The conflict in the character is the root cause of the conflict
between characters.
He goes on to explain how this plays out in an example from his working
processes:
The actors need to understand what informs each character’s decision

before the action is justified. When a character slaps another character,
for example, the slap is not important. The cause of the slap is most
important. The root cause is actually not from the other character, but
from the character that did the slapping. The other character would
have just been the trigger that allows the slap to happen.3
Understanding the rise and fall of the hero

In a classical tragic drama the main character, the protagonist, normally
starts off very well. He or she is at the top of their success or power.
Hamlet is a young, bright, good-looking prince; Othello is happily
married; Romeo is a nice boy from an influential family; Medea has two
beautiful kids and loves her husband.
The protagonist has no idea what is going to happen to him or
her. Hamlet’s conflict starts when he finds out that his father did not
die naturally, but is killed by his stepfather. Othello is put out of his
comfort zone by Iago, suggesting to him that his beautiful wife might be
interested in another man. Medea gets into trouble when she finds out
that her husband is cheating on her.
In a tragic drama we witness the fall of the hero. This fall is not a
straight line down, as that would not be interesting and is not how a
conflict develops in real life, or in any play. It develops with ups and
downs, finally arriving at its crisis.
3 Interview with Pusetso Thibedi. Durden, E., 2013.

Conflict with tragic development. By Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
There are stories in which the development of the protagonist follows

a different route. Like the story in which an obscure person gets into a
conflict that evokes hidden powers that lift him or her to greatness. In
this type of story, we meet the main character who is not at a successful
moment of his or her life. The main character is in big trouble or is not
happy at all. This is the story that is the basis of all escape films. It can be
recognised in the classical story of Oliver Twist, living in an orphanage,
bullied and abused, but then he escapes and survives difficult situations,
and finally finds out that he is from a rich family who takes care of him.
In this type of story there is a moment that the development of the
central character starts, his or her way to success is not a straight line up,
but it goes up and down. In this type of story there is also a crisis. This is
the moment that the antagonist(s) tries to break the upward movement
and development of the hero, and brings the development of the central
character to its lowest point (LP). Maybe they succeed for a moment and
our main character thinks he or she will fall back to where they came
from – or even deeper. This forces them into a crisis (C). But by making
the right choices and through the assistance from other characters, the

hero fights his or her way to a successful ending. The hero turns out of
the conflict and continues with the upward line.
The only difference between the Oliver Twist conflict and Hamlet’s
one is the starting point and the direction in which the conflict develops.
But in both stories our main character develops to a crisis. Hamlet is the
tragic one, as he dies and almost everyone dies with him. Oliver Twist has
a happy ending.
Conflict with a happy ending. By Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
It is possible to find combinations of this rise and fall in a story. The

two extremes are described and visualised in the images above. In the
South African play Nongogo4 by Athol Fugard, we can see that the central
character first rises out of her life as shebeen queen and is able to realise
a stable romantic relationship with a man she can trust. But when this
man finds out about her past as a prostitute, he leaves her. It is the story
of rise and fall, and not being able to escape your own past and all the
characters that are attached to it.
4 Fugard, A. (1959) Nongogo. Oxford University Press.

It is crucial to understand that these breakdown methods are only
a tool to assist in the director’s understanding of a script. Many writers
do not use these methods when creating a script. They simply want to
share a story with us, a story about life and conflicts in life; stories about
passion and tragedy, hope and despair. It is for us, as theatre directors,
to break these stories down, to do our homework before the rehearsals
start, and to understand the script so that we are able to bring it to life on
the stage with the actors and to share it with a live audience.
Script breakdown method using action

moments and action units
In the above Aristotelian method we use character to break down a script.
We analysed the script by identifying the different characters and how
they develop in terms of emotional conflict. It is a psychological method
often connected with the methods the theatre director Stanislavsky used
to induce emotion and feeling. We could also understand a script and
its characters in terms of actions, which is what the ‘action breakdown’5
method does.
In this method, a script can be understood as a through line of actions.
An action is something that a character does. It can be a physical action or a
plan about a possible action, or something that happens to our characters,
maybe someone wins the lotto, or a storm destroys the house. The killing
of someone on stage by a character is an action, but also the line “I am
going to kill you!” can be seen as an action, even though it is a threat. It is
not just a thought, it is a line that refers to an action (whether it is finally
carried out or not). The entrance or exit of a character is also an action.
Some actions are actions that do not refer to anything that will happen
or has happened. For instance if a character drinks a cup of coffee on
stage, it might mean nothing. But if someone has put poison in their
coffee, it refers to something that might happen if the character drinks it.
When a character puts a gun on the table, it refers to something that
5 Hummelen, W.M.H. (1989) Van Moment tot Moment. Coutinho, Muiderberg.

might happen in the future. This action creates tension by referring to
another possible action, such as the use of the gun by the character or
by someone else. This type of action we call prospective action moments
(PAMs). The action points to something that could be a prospective
(future) action. These moments push the story forward. Any script has
lots of these actions, which build up towards the major actions.
Every script has a few major actions that are prepared by lots of
prospective actions. The major action can be the elimination or death of
the bad guy; it can be the tragic suicide of the main character; or a big
celebration for the coronation of the new king. Mostly a script has three
to five of these major actions. The writer W.M.H. Hummelen calls these
action units (AUs).
Finally, there are also actions that refer back to these action units.
We call them retrospective action moments (RAMs). For example, if a
character mourns over the death of a beloved who has just been killed,
the mourning is the small retrospective action referring back to the major
action, which is the killing. These actions referring backward also make
us understand the action units better, and are of great importance for the
script. They give the action units a deeper significance.
In a soccer game, everything that comes before a goal can be seen as
a preparation for it. All the tactics to build up the attack, and to pass the
defence of the other team, are prospective action moments. When our
team scores, this is the action unit. Celebrating the goal can be seen as
the retrospective action moment.
In a script, the action units can be seen as moments where the story
scores. The moment of action excites the audience in a happy or tragic
way and it only achieves this response when it is well prepared. As a
theatre director, you need to realise that when the story scores, the
audience doesn’t always know. In the same way, the audience watching a
soccer game doesn’t know who will ultimately win or lose. As a theatre
director, you and your actors must know how to score. It is action, not
thought, that a director directs.
While many actors find it easier to work from the perspective of action,
many directors feel that the action comes only from understanding the
character. Pusetso Thibedi comments:

Some actors I encounter are prone to looking at things from the angle of
action more than the angle of character. It is seemingly easier for them
to discover the character by assessing the actions. But for me, once the
internal drive is discovered, then every decision the actor makes for
the character will be true because he or she understands the reason for
the action from the character’s most honest point of view. When you
direct from an action point of view, you can easily miss the value of the
internal journey that the character undergoes.6
In contrast to this, Amy Jephta approaches her directing projects from the
angle of action units, suggesting that this gives her a clear starting point,
and that it is more useful for actors to be directed based on concrete
physical actions that they can play:
As a director I am always looking to move the action on stage forward,

to never have the piece be static and for the characters to always be
‘doing something’ or reaching towards something. Whether that doing
is in the way the characters relate to one another with language and
teasing out conflict in that way, whether it’s in trying to physically get
the other person to do something, all of drama is trying to get or achieve
something.
The most helpful piece of advice I’ve gotten in terms of directing is
to always be asking the actors ‘what are you trying to make the other
person do?’ Characters on stage can’t exist in isolation. When two or
more people are on stage (and even sometimes when only one person
is on stage), they’re there to make someone else do something: I want
you to love me, to understand me, to trust me; or more detailed and
minute actions: I want you to sit down, I want you to kiss me, I want
you to walk away.7
As a theatre director, an approach starting from these building blocks

of action will make your actors move and they will not get stuck in
misconceptions about emotional acting – where actors only focus on the

7 Interview with Amy Jephta. Durden, E., 2013.

inner life of their character and don’t connect with others and actions that
are happening on stage. Actors that tell you, “My character would never
do that” focus too much on misunderstanding the Stanislavsky system of
method acting. This involves thinking that the evoked emotions are the
only starting point of their acting.
Using action as a starting point for analysing the script and training
the actors is well described in the so-called viewpoints method, originally
coming from movement and dance but also used for understanding
a script by analysing actions and training actors in the principals of
movement, time and space.8
Action moments prepare the action units. By Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
Dramatic concepts and genres

You can find the dramatic concepts in the descriptions of the films played
on your television and in a DVD shop above the different sections:
action, drama, comedy, family, science fiction, horror, erotic, road
movies, musicals, etc. By reading these keywords, we already have an
8 ogart, A. & Landau, T. (2005) The Viewpoints Book. Theatre Communication

B
Group, New York.

idea of what type of film we will be looking at, how it is constructed and
what type of feelings it will arouse in us when we watch it. Every one of
those genres also has a specific acting style and design. That is why it is
important as a director to know and understand the dramatic concept on
which the script is based.
As a director directing a written script, you need to know what genre
you are working in, as this influences acting styles and staging choices.
Understanding different genres is necessary for you to develop a good
director’s concept. In the discussion below, we explore some of these
genres more closely, focusing on those that have been popular and worked
well in the context of South African theatre, how these genres influence
acting styles, and how these should be understood by a director.
Tragedy versus comedy

The difference between comedy and tragedy is the way in which the
main character responds to the conflict. Most plots start with a situation
in a society that is held together by shared rules. The natural order
is disturbed by something, a decision made by one of the characters,
something supernatural, the entrance of a stranger or a sudden quarrel.
We call this the inciting action after which the conflict develops and takes
our main character out of his or her comfort zone.
A comedy approach has a happy ending, everything is forgiven and
resolved. The bad guy is punished and banned. It ends with a group
celebration; often with music and dance. A comedy celebrates the
reintegration of our main character into the group, family or community;
it is an ending where “they all lived happily ever after”.
A tragedy approach ends with the death of our main character. All
their attempts to control the conflict did not work out, and the hero finds
out that the conflict lies inside him- or herself. The balance of powers can
only be restored by the sacrifice of the main character. Carrying out the
corpse of the hero is often the sad ending of a tragedy.
When the twist at the end of a play is the difference between tragedy
and comedy, it is easy to rewrite a tragedy into a comedy. Shakespearean
tragedies were often transformed in this way. At the time, a tragic

approach was considered far less acceptable and popular by the general
public, and tragedies were often changed to play as a comedy. But it is
important to note that this final outcome (the tragic death or the happy
ending) at the end of the dramatic structure is not the only difference
between comedy and tragedy.
A comic vision celebrates the individual’s participation in a community,
it means that the main character finally has the ability to adapt and learn.
A comic hero is sympathetic. The hero finally conforms to community
demands and brings about social harmony. Popular comedy endings are
family reunions, reconciliations between parents, and weddings. A tragic
hero wants to do things on his or her own terms. Heroes are passionately
egocentric and unwilling to compromise. A tragic version celebrates the
individuality; tragic heroes take all responsibility fully on themselves.
They do not listen to others.
Theatre critic Murray Krieger said of heroes:
They fight community morality and conventional vision. A tragic

dramaturgical concept celebrates our desire for individual integrity;
some things are not prepared to compromise.9
The difference in the tragic and comic approach of the world is acceptance
or avoidance. A writer who chooses a comic concept for his plot sees
identity in terms of social relationships and activities that should be
celebrated (family and community values). The hero accepts these values
and integrates into society. The writer choosing a tragic concept wants
to criticise the shared rules of a community or family. Identity is seen in
terms of personal integrity and responsibility. The hero rejects the values
of the day and avoids society.
As a director, you need to understand this motivation, and it should
inform how you direct the play.
9 Krieger, M. (1959) “Tragedy and the Tragic Vision”. The Kenyon Review, Vol. 20
no 2.

Thriller versus detective story
Most people will recall the tragic story of South African ‘Blade-runner’,
Para-Olympic champion, Oscar Pistorius. He shot his girlfriend, a
successful model, claiming in court that he thought she was a burglar.
His actions destroyed not only the life of his girlfriend but also his career
as a sportsman and role model for millions. This story can be placed in
different dramatic concepts to create the plot.
Let’s use the thriller and the detective story concept. In the thriller
plot, we would build scenes towards the tragic killing at the end. In the
detective plot of the same story, we would start after the killing with Oscar
Pistorius claiming his innocence in court. Through different witnesses,
the truth will unveil itself bit by bit and might create another action
line in the present and future. In the detective concept, the plot runs
backwards.
The writer using the thriller concept is interested in evoking fear and
pity within its audience, building suspense to a high level and finally,
maybe in an unexpected way, ending the story. The writer creating a
detective story is interested in the motives behind the actions. That’s why
the play will start with the killing or after the event, only describing it
through the mouths of the witnesses.
Knowing the difference between these two structures might influence
your decisions as a director with regard to the acting style, the timing
and the rhythm of the piece, the building up of suspense or the slow
unravelling of the tale.
The exploding past

The dramatic concept of the exploding past is often used if our central
character has an unresolved past, a traumatic past experience or hidden
secrets. The plot starts with a situation, society or family that looks stable,
happy and successful. A disturbance of this situation is created because
of the unresolved past. It can be an unexpected guest or visitor that is
linked to the past. It will reveal what our hero is covering up or trying to
forget. The disturbance will take the hero out of his or her comfort zone,
and the conflict will develop.

Many plays in South Africa’s post-apartheid period deal with the
past as a dramatic concept. Greg Homann describes this and asks: “How
do we shape our future when we are still dealing with the trauma of
our past?”10 As the past is such an integral part of contemporary South
African theatre, there is great potential for dealing with this through
work that focuses on contemporary characters who have to deal with an
exploding past.
In Lara Foot’s play Solomon and Marion,11 Marion, who does not like
to reflect on the pain of the past, is visited by Solomon, the grandson of
the woman who used to do the washing for her. Solomon states that his
grandmother has sent him to take care of Marion. As their relationship
develops, we begin to wonder why he is really there. Unbeknownst to
Marion, Solomon witnessed the murder of her son years before, and feels
that it is his duty to talk about this, as he was the last person to see her
son alive. As the play moves forward, the truth comes out, and the past
explodes in a way that finally sets both Marion and Solomon free.
The exploding past does not immediately give away all the details of
that past. As the audience, we might know that something happened in
the past, but we don’t know exactly what this is. Step by step, scene by
scene, the past is unveiled and destabilises the present more and more. It
might be that the happy romantic relationship of our hero is put under
pressure, if it becomes clear that our hero had other relationships and
children from the past that he has kept quiet about. It might be that
our hero in the past killed a number of people. What if these people
are related to the love of his life, who he only met recently? What will
happen to that relationship if that explosive past finally explodes and
becomes clear to everybody?
A lot of the classic tragedies can be analysed in this way. Sometimes
the exploding of the past does not lead to the tragic death of the hero, but
provides an opportunity for them to make a change and to continue their
life in a more meaningful way. Sometimes you have to destroy something
10 Homann, G. (2009) At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa.

Wits University Press, Johannesburg.
11 Foot-Newton, L. (2013) Solomon and Marion. Oberon Books, London.

before you can rebuild your life according to your new ideals.
The concept of the exploding past giving rise to a more positive and
moral life is used by writers who have strong ideals about social norms
and values. They criticise conventions and the community values that
block new visions and prevent change. Athol Fugard’s Nongogo follows
this pattern, but after the past explodes, the central character very
quickly picks up the pieces and continues with her old way of living.
The script explores the idea that dreams and ambitions are ruined by the
past, and that it takes a strong character to face that reality, to accept the
consequences and to make the best out of it. Nongogo is a strong woman
who will not go for a tragic ending. Understanding this may influence
your decisions as a director with regard to casting, as well as the acting
style for the play.
Structure of an exploding past. By Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
The circle and the mosaic: more main characters

In most of the concepts outlined above, we have discussed the plot that
is constructed around one main character. It takes time to develop the
hero’s conflict and the theme before we can feel compassion. How does
a plot involving more central characters work? This involves not telling

a single story, but the different stories of multiple characters. It involves
the balance of character, not following one protagonist.
Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde12 is such a play. It is constructed around
ten characters, and every scene has two principle characters, one of whom
continues into the next scene. Scene One is between the soldier and the
prostitute; at the end of this scene they have sex. Scene Two is between
the soldier and the parlour maid; and at the end of this scene they have
sex. Scene Three is between the maid and a young gentleman, and so
on. We see every character in two scenes following each other and every
scene ends with the characters having sex. We see the characters before
and after their sexual encounter. In the last scene, the final character, the
count, has an encounter with the prostitute from Scene One. Now the
circle of encounters is closed.
The setting of La Ronde is in Vienna around 1900, a society in which
people from different social classes lived apart. They had their own
areas of town, their own schools, shops and places for entertainment.
Different social classes lived strictly separated, only meeting their own
kind. The only possible connection between characters of different social
backgrounds was sex. Or as the playwright himself called it, “The circle
of sperm”. In his plot the characters portray certain social groups; the
poet embodies the artists in the society, the soldier the army. The script
scrutinises sexual morals and class ideology.
In his dramaturgical concept, Schnitzler provides a brilliant and
unexpected map of the society of Vienna around 1900. He is connecting
the characters by one central activity, sex, showing their isolation, their
classes and the circles in which people live. The effect is clear, we don’t
follow one person. There is not a conflict in one character that advances
forward. More characters create different storylines.
In South Africa, Paul Grootboom adapted Schnitzler’s play to Foreplay,
re-wrote it and placed it in a South African setting, where a merry-go-
round of sex continued despite the real threat of AIDS.13 Grootboom’s
version of the play was constructed as a series of ten interconnected
12 Schnitzler, A. (1903) La Ronde (Das reigen). Vienna.

13 Grootboom, M.P. (2009) Foreplay. Oberon Books, London.

scenes on society’s moral hypocrisy about sex. The circular structure
allows the message to be clear:
The underlying theme that runs throughout the production is that we

all have sex, therefore it shouldn’t be treated as a taboo subject. Whether
you are a high-profile person, a low-life, an intellectual, a student, a
prostitute or a priest, we can all be reduced to that imbecile moment
just before you have sexual intercourse.14
Again, this structure affects the decision that you need to make as a
director. Casting will need to involve many strong actors. The rhythm of
the scenes will need to be balanced so that not one story outweighs any
of the others. Only once you have a good understanding of the structure
of the play can you hope to bring it to the stage successfully.
Absurdism
After World War II, many Western playwrights claimed that what
happens in life cannot be explained in a logical way. We call their work
absurdism. Harold Pinter, Samuel Becket and Eugene Ionesco provide
some examples of this genre of theatre. Absurdism is rooted in existential
philosophy, not just about a failure of logic, but about the ‘death of
God’. We can also find this philosophy about the world in which we
live in South African works, including some of the works of Percy Mtwa,
Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon (in Woza Albert) and Zakes Mda
(The Girls in Their Sunday Dresses). Other South African plays that have an
absurdist influence include Maishe Maponya’s Dirty Work and Gangsters
which focus on the South African state security apparatus.
In absurdism, plots don’t follow a clear dramatic structure, and
the conflict does not seem to develop. The characters are waiting for
something that never happens, like the two girls waiting in a queue to
buy cheap rice in Zakes Mda’s The Girls in Their Sunday Dresses, or the
prisoners waiting for redemption and the return of Jesus in Woza Albert.
Often the settings in these plays are unrecognisable and desolated.
14 Tlelima, T. (2009) Arts Review: “Foreplay Review”.

Sometimes just one dead tree on a crossing (Waiting for Godot by Becket),
or a woman buried in a mound of dirt in which she slowly sinks (Happy
Days by Becket). Characters have no clear past and are not realistic, such
as the two old people living in dustbins (End Game from Becket) or the
non-realistic characters that appear in Rhinoceros by Ionesco, in which
the animal portrays a strange disease.
Situation, not plot, shapes the absurdist play. The script explores
the situation that doesn’t move. The situation has its own rhythm and
circles. Repetition pushes the rhythm but not the story. There is a lot of
nonsensical babbling. At the end, the world stops abruptly and the play
begins again. The ending of Athol Fugard’s Nongogo, where the character
Queen, without hesitating, picks up her old way of living as a shebeen
queen, gives her no escape. The circle brings her back to where she
started, as if nothing had ever happened.
Storytelling
We include storytelling as a theatre genre in its own right because it
provides a simple way to understand how to construct a plot from a story.
Storytelling is a traditional pastime in many communities and is perhaps
the oldest form of theatre practised in South Africa. The genre derives
from the solo storyteller who tells a story directly to the audience. The
storyteller knows everything already and talks about the characters of the
story. The storyteller can easily use flashbacks, can add reflections to the
behaviour of the characters or criticise them.
Out of this basic form, other acting styles are developed. Sometimes
we see a group of storytellers who tell the story together – by simple
means like a hat or a wig, they can step into the characters of the story,
others can join in as different characters and a scene from the story is
acted out.
In the storytelling genre, the audience often already knows the story,
and historical epic stories are popular. The way the actors find their way
through the plot is new and surprising for the audience, as is how they
portray the often multiple characters of the piece.
The genre of storytelling in South Africa merged with physical acting
and the poor theatre of Grotowski in the beginning of the 1980s, with the

rise in inventive physical protest theatre and the solo performance, and
the work of theatre makers such as Paul Slabolepszy and Pieter-Dirk Uys.
The Well Being, a play by Andrew Buckland and Lionel Newton
(directed by Lara Foot) is typical of this creative storytelling, where a
few props are used and the actors are able, through great physical skill,
to portray many different characters and to create a universe that the
audience is able to understand, without any of the trappings of realistic
theatre.
Prince Lamla says:
Grotowski’s soul belongs in Africa, he was born in the wrong place,

never went to Africa. But his work speaks to the body, it demands,
it tortures and sacrifices. South Africa always had artistic resource
problems, but Grotowski’s work spoke to our souls and it merged with
African storytelling, mainly because of the work Mbongeni Ngema,
Percy Mtwa and Barney Simon did in 1981 in Woza Albert.15
This unexpected merging with African storytelling and poor theatre from
Poland realised one of the most interesting acting styles in South Africa
that generated a whole series of plays. Often it is not a storyteller but a
character that tells his or her story to the audience.
The traditional urban storyteller is seen in coffee houses, in markets
or in small theatres. In contemporary South African theatre, we see
evidence of this tradition in the work of solo storytellers such as Gcina
Mhlophe, Mary Steward, Craig Morris and Greig Coetzee. The solo show
has almost become a genre in itself. The dramatic structure of the play
is often non-linear, and plays out as a series of remembered moments in
the life of the storyteller, interspersed with a raft of other characters who
have an impact on the storyteller’s life. The Return of Elvis Du Pisanie by
Paul Slabolepszy is a great example of this, and perhaps one of South
Africa’s most-awarded solo shows.
Directing this kind of work involves an understanding of how to
balance narration with the showing of characters, the unfolding of the
story and moments of reflection on the plot.

In Asinamali by Mbongeni Ngema, five prisoners tell their stories
to one another and the audience, stories related to police violence,
forced separation from family and constricting racist laws. This way of
storytelling can create a plot from a story that is too big to be told from
a single person’s perspective. The challenge for a director with this kind
of work is to balance the stories and allow them to be strong enough
to stand alone, as well as being able to integrate and meld with each
character’s stories so that no one story dominates.
Tshepang, a play by Lara Foot, is based on the horrifying rape in 2001
of a nine-month-old child. In the story, the baby of a young woman
called Ruth is found outside, seriously injured. It appears that the child
has been raped. Witnesses suspect that rape has been perpetrated by six
men. From all over the country, journalists come to the village of the
young mother. Finally an examination makes it clear that the child was
not raped by the six men but by the father of the baby. He is put into
prison, the baby is in hospital, the mother stops talking and waits to see
if her child ever comes back to her.
A young man, Simon, who loved Ruth from childhood, takes care
of her. The play starts three years after the rape. Ruth is still waiting for
her child to come back, and does not talk. The story is told by Simon,
and he and Ruth are the only two characters on stage. Through his story,
step by step, we find out who the young woman is and what happened.
The text at moments is full of playful humour coming from the charming
character of Simon. We identify with him taking care of the traumatised
young woman, because that is what we all would choose to do. Nothing
happens that day, only the story is told. Tomorrow there will be another
day of waiting. This absurd construction, together with the storytelling
through a character about the issue of child rape, makes this play a small
miracle and teaches us how to construct a plot from a story.
In this kind of work, the challenge for the director is to allow the
story to play in a way that the character rises above the issue, so that the
audience does not feel that they are being bombarded with social issues.
For many less-experienced directors and theatre-makers, the focus on
the playing of the piece becomes more about the theme than the telling
of a story, and this makes for less watchable theatre.

Township theatre and musical theatre
The father of township theatre in South Africa is Gibson Kente, who
staged his popular musical productions between the mid-1960s and
early 2000s. His shows incorporated music, songs and dance with a
simple story. He developed a synthesis of narrative, mime, movement,
vocal dramatics, music, dance and traditional storytelling into township
drama, but it is noted that “essence of traditional Western stage drama,
was not of primary significance in his style”.16
The township theatre stories reflect the social conditions of township
life, but were never intended to be overtly political, as were the political
plays of Black Consciousness writers such as Matsemela Manaka
and Maishe Maponya. Township theatre is usually created as popular
entertainment, influenced by the spirit of Sophiatown and marabi dance,
and aimed at a non-intellectual audience. The music tells the story in
combination with the acting, dance and simple dialogue, touching a
deeper spiritual and everyday social level.
Township theatre can be seen as a specific genre of musical. In
township theatre, the music and the songs, together with the story, are
like identical twins. Often actors sing, dance and play an instrument.
While Western drama starts with words and a story, township theatre
starts with music and movement – the music already contains the
emotion and story.
Vicky Kente, who grew up in Kente’s household, describes how music
was a starting point for the action, and movement on stage was a starting
point for the music, which would then grow into songs:
When he [Gibson Kente] had a problem, and it was not the right time
to discuss it, he would just go to his piano and play a melody. During
this emotional interaction with his instrument, he would start writing
some of his songs because the solution to his problem would come to
his mind in the form of lyrics to a song.
He used the synchronisation with music and action on stage,
accentuating special moments or gestures and underlining particular
16 Solberg, R. (2011) Bra Gib. UKZN-Press, Pietermaritzburg.

features. One show started with three boys bouncing a ball on the
stage floor, and throughout the introductory scene the ball-playing was
accompanied by rhythmical punctuations from the band.170
In township theatre, the music and songs would always further the
story and enlarge the emotions of the characters. Witnesses describe
his shows as electrifying the audience who would participate by voicing
their comments throughout the performance. It is often claimed that
without the township theatre of Gibson Kente, more recent South
African musicals like Sophiatown and Sarafina would never have existed.
There is a clear line of inspiration from Kente to Mbongeni Ngema. In an
interview Ngema says: “As one of his protégés, I am proud to have been
baptised in the Kente school of theatre by Gibson Kente himself.”
The specific acting style connected to this genre is still popular in
South Africa, although the musicals themselves are often only staged
as nostalgic projects. As a director, you need to understand this period
captured the exuberance that existed despite the oppression if you are
directing work in this style.
Street theatre and site-specific theatre

Street theatre is played outdoors, usually with a non-paying and often
transient audience. The style developed out of the overtly political
‘agitation propaganda’ (agitprop) plays that became popular during the
Russian revolution in the early 1900s. Like agitprop, street theatre aims
to influence opinion or create awareness about an issue. It has become
popular in South Africa as a means to pass on messages about health,
voting, or even new products launched into the market.
Street theatre has to be loud in order to attract people. The acting
is exaggerated and sometimes makes use of masks, puppets, musical
instruments and other grotesque means. The storyline is simple so that
passersby can catch onto the plot, even if they have missed the start of the
play. Street theatre can be done in public spaces, in markets, shopping
malls or outdoors at theatre festivals.
17 Solberg, R. (2011) Bra Gib. UKZN-Press, Pietermaritzburg.

To avoid the high costs of technical equipment, street theatre is
often not amplified, and song, dance, mime and images become more
important than dialogue in this style. Large puppets are also a popular
tool. The AIDS puppet plays of arrepp: Theatre for Life, created in the
early 1990s, are an example of some of the first visible street theatre
productions in South Africa. The diverse forms of street theatre can vary
from huge masks in a parade on the street, to mime players as living
statues.
In combination with storytelling, street theatre in South Africa has
been energised by Bheki Mkhwane and Ellis Pearson, using physical
theatre, simple props and intriguing storylines in their ‘theatre of
imagination’.
In site-specific theatre, a site that is not traditionally used for presenting
theatre is used instead of a traditional indoor or outdoor theatre space.
Often the site is adapted for an audience that pays to come and see the
show. Historical places, old buildings, abandoned train stations, the
beach or the harbour are a few of the limitless possibilities.
Crucial to site-specific work is that the site is part of the story and
setting – possible exits and entrances of the site are used, often lighting is
built in and around the site. It is more story-focused than street theatre,
as it has an audience that stays for the entire production, and existing
texts are often adapted to work in that site.
Two well-recognised figures on the South African site-specific theatre
scene include Brett Bailey and Nicola Hanekom. Bailey’s work has
often been controversial, bringing audiences into spaces and forcing an
encounter between them and the space, as well as with others who are
linked to that space. In 2009, Bailey created Terminal/Blood Diamonds,
based at the Grahamstown train station, which was an encounter
between audience members and young local children, many of them
street children.
Hanekom’s work has won her a number of awards, and many of
her works (most of them in Afrikaans) have played at the KKNK in
Oudtshoorn. Her 2010 work, Betésda, a play about healing, was set in
a municipal swimming pool. Babbel looks at issues of language and war
and is performed around a cellphone tower or radio mast.

For site-specific work, it is important that the director is part of the
creative conceptual process. Both Bailey and Hanekom create their own
work and then direct it. If, as a director, you choose to stage a scripted
work in a site-specific way, you will need to adapt the piece to work in
the site you choose. Rehearsals also need to happen on site, as the site
becomes integral to how the piece is played, and can feature as a silent
character in its own right.
Understanding the theatrical concept and the script with its particular
genre is essential for you to develop your own vision for how you want
to direct a play. The next chapter explores this notion of the director’s
concept and vision.

Set for Orfeus directed by Brett Bailey. Set Grahamstown 2007. Photograph by Brett Bailey. (Part two, Chapter 3)
CHAPTER 5
A Concept for a
Theatre Director
T
his chapter explores how you, as a theatre director, should develop
a concept for your play. A theatre director working with a script
from the first rehearsal has to have a plan, a concept, a vision, and
an approach on how to work with the artistic team and the actors.
From the start the director needs to have analysed the script, and
possibly to have adapted it. You must have studied the characters and
know why they behave the way they do. You need to understand the
conflict and how it develops. You need to make choices for the set and
have a ground plan for the staging, have costume designs, have completed
the casting and know in what style of acting the actors will be working.
You will make decisions about whether to use music or not and whether
you will add other disciplines like dance or video.
Finally, you must have prepared all of these decisions and must be
able to explain these decisions to the actors, designers and other crew
working on the production. This is not a quick and simple process.
Neil Coppen describes his preparation time, and explains that his
stories are a product of a long incubation period of research, devising and
writing. Abnormal Loads took him five years of research and preparation
before he produced it at the National Arts Festival in 2011.1
The first rehearsal marks the difference between the preparation and
research period and the actual bringing the script to life on stage. Of
course, the director will need to test some options to see if they work
in the way it is imagined. Of course, during rehearsals the director and
the actors will find new creative solutions that will change or adapt the
original directorial concept. That is part of the process of rehearsing.
But the theatre director who thinks he or she can start rehearsals
without good preparation and a concept will find problems with the
actors in rehearsal and later with the audience. A director’s concept
determines how he or she wants the audience to leave the theatre
after they have watched the show. What will they feel and think? Are
they supposed to be shocked, entertained or enlightened? A director’s
concept is based on an analysis of the script and consists of a director’s
note and a description of what means and in what planning the concept
comes to life.
1 Interview with Niel Coppen. Twijnstra, R., 2013.
A Concept for a Theatre Director 105

A director’s note, a vision
A directors’ note is about you as the director, talking to the audience
before they see the show. It is your personal vision. It explains why the
themes of the script are relevant for you. It outlines why the situation of
the script, even when it is an old Greek play, is relevant for an audience
to watch today. A director’s note explains why you are passionate about
it and how you found the courage to leap over a number of hurdles to
bring the play to the stage. It can describe what the social and political
context for the play is today.
Your director’s vision should be ready long before it is given to the
audience as a small note or put into a programme. It is a statement of
your personal motivation that you deliver on the first day of rehearsing.
This vision gives you as a director a reason and a personal assignment to
work intensively with your team and actors. A director’s vision is short.
It can be a page, half a page or even less.
Tamar Meskin, a drama lecturer at UKZN Howard College mentions
a few of these director’s notes in Directing and the Actor.
• “I want to, in this play, break the bars that confine us, to take a
tentative step towards real connection. To understand and just
possibly be understood. I want to live outside the fetters of sanity
and love.”
• “The issues of this Greek play first performed in Athens approximately
441 BC have great resonance in Africa and South Africa. We live in
a country in a state of transition and faced with hardships such as
poverty, crime, HIV/AIDS, corruption and greed. It is time to fight,
to live!”
• “If we wish for a change in our lives, we are fooling ourselves; wishes
and miracles are not going to help us. We alone can change our lives.
We are our biggest obstacles in life.”
• “Sarah Daniels’s work had a profound effect on me. Perhaps it was my
own laziness, but I had never read a play with such a feminist flame
before.”

• “Welcome to our home. This piece of physical theatre explores the
intimate, personal and everyday experiences of seven South Africans.
A key question surrounding the creation of Home was: What is a
home and what does invasion of the home mean?” 2
Making your choices

Based on your personal vision (your director’s note) and analysis of the
script, you make your choices as a director. The analysis is necessary to
understand the script and to be able to explain to the actors what type
of character they will play and how a specific action should be done.
To inspire your actors you must have a thorough understanding of the
plot. This understanding will guide you to ask for the actors to be more
vulnerable in a specific scene, to make the conflict clearer. Or to show
more obviously that the character doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t
know what to choose, and will allow the actors to stretch that moment of
doubt, not going too fast but taking time and, step by step, acting out the
different colours required by that moment of development.
The analysis of the script and your personal vision bring you to the
choices that you have to make concerning adaptation, casting, acting
style, set, costumes and the use of other disciplines. These choices are
the signs that we use to send our vision to the audience. These signs are
drawn from the other artistic disciplines of literature, acting, visual arts,
movement and music. Of course, these choices are also driven by budget
and the practical situation that you find yourself in. But even with an
ultra-low budget you are able to make choices thinking in a creative way.
Making choices is the key to your signature. If all the choices are already
made, then you are not a director but an assistant who is working with
someone else’s vision.
Finding your signature and your own voice takes time. Bheki
Mkhwane comments that:
2 Meskin, T. (2013) Directing and the Actor. UKZN-Press, Durban.

Theatre is about finding your own individual voice, whether as a
director, an actor or a writer. You find that voice by working with one
group. Peter Brook says you must work with one director for three years
before you move on. When you are ready to move out, then you will
have found your own voice.3
To be able to make choices you need more than an analysis of the plot
and your vision. It is helpful to place that vision in a particular socio-
political context. How do you connect your vision with social issues that
take place in the world around you? How do you adapt and link certain
characters of a play to the world we are living in? What references do you
use in costumes, set design, music or soundscapes? Do you add specific
lines that link the text to historical persons or occasions? Or do you take
out lines that link to events in the past and that are not relevant for your
context?
Adaptation and author’s rights

There can be many practical reasons for you to choose to make an
adaptation of a script for direction. A script you like might be too long
or you might want to rewrite it in Zulu to make it more accessible for the
audience you have in mind. Maybe you don’t have enough actors for all
the characters. There might be other reasons.
Directing adaptations comes with responsibilities, and also with costs.
Old scripts from the great Greek writers or Shakespeare are free of rights,
but scripts and novels written in the last 50 years usually have associated
rights for which you must pay.
By law the rights belong to the author as long as he or she is alive
and for 50 years after the author’s death. This means that you must have
permission to stage the play and must explicitly be given the rights from
the author, the author’s family, publisher or agent.
You need to pay for the creative work that the writer has done, in the
same way that you want to be paid and respected for the work you do.
Even when you are not paid at all, you need the rights. For adapting a
3 Interview with Bheki Mkhwane. Durden E., 2013.

script, you may also need rights or permission from the original author
or their agents. Securing these rights takes time and, in most cases, takes
money. But that is how it is – it is part of the job. If you need to secure
rights for another person’s work, then you should ask for assistance from
experienced directors or theatre companies, or contact the Dramatic,
Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO) which deals with
rights of authors.4
There are many ways that a director can relate to a text in the
process of adaptation. Robert Benedetti5 describes three attitudes, the
conservative, the liberal and the radical. In the conservative position, the
director does not adapt the script but recreates it in the way the writer
originally visualised it. Sometimes this will include the original theatrical
conditions for which the play was written.
Benedetti cautions on this conservative approach:
This is not to say, however, that the original form and context of a play,
however ideal for the play itself, will necessarily best serve the needs of
the contemporary audience. The main shortcoming of the conservative
position in fact, is that such directors sometimes consider their
responsibility to the text above their responsibility to the audience.
In the liberal position, the director feels that the value of the script is
relevant to the present moment, and adaptations can be made because
of this relevance. Benedetti writes: “It requires a dominant sense of
responsibility to the original, which both inspires and limits the director’s
purely personal creative impulses.”
In the radical position, we see the director as creator. The director will
use the script as a source of inspiration for his or her own creation, and
will not interpret or adapting a script but allow the original to inspire a
new creation. Some texts ask for a more liberal attitude and others open up
for a radical approach. Benedetti notes that as a director, “your artistic life
will be richer if you are capable of functioning from different positions.”
4 See their site at http//www.dalro.co.za.

5 Benedetti, R. (1985) The Director at Work. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey.

As described in Part One of this book, many of the featured South
African directors create and write their own work. Sometimes this is
through a process of workshopping, and sometimes as a solo writer.
However, some, like Paul Grootboom, Prince Lamla and, more recently,
Neil Coppen, have all worked on adaptations for the stage.
At the time of writing this book, Coppen was in the process of
adapting George Orwell’s’ Animal Farm for the stage. This was a relatively
new challenge for him, but he had toyed for some time with the idea
of a South African theatrical adaptation of the novel, saying that the
book’s commentary is “timeless and hugely pertinent to a South African
context in the way it reflects on the human condition, power, class and
the everyman trying to make sense of the whole darn mess.”6
Coppen recognises that adapting a novel to stage can be a difficult
process:
Of course what speaks to us on the page doesn’t always hold up on

the stage, so it’s really about mining the theatricality from the material.
Animal Farm’s episodic nature works well in the novel format but
dramatically I had to find a way to pull it together and hone the focus
a little. Theatre needs a pace and structure that the novel doesn’t rely
on so it’s about being mindful to the source material but also feeling
free enough to interrogate it through an entirely different medium and
storytelling format. Theatre is also a visual medium so it’s also about
working out what to show as opposed to tell.
He also speaks of the respect that an adaption needs to show to the

original text, in the liberal position of Benedetti:
With a popular text like Animal Farm I am aware that it is an oft quoted
and beloved text and that one must be careful not to tamper too much.
But I always set out to examine how I can breathe fresh life into a
project, make people see and experience things a little differently. So
with Animal Farm I had been constantly thinking of how I could set this
apart from all the other adaptations out there.
6 Interview with Neil Coppen. Durden, E., 2013.

Neil comments, though, on one radical departure for his adaptation,
which is to do an all-female version of the production:
We are so used to seeing African women playing submissive,

subservient and dis-empowered roles on stage and I thought this would
be a wonderful opportunity to subvert these stereotypes, play against
type if you will. Having women playing men in power also lends to
the humour/satire of the piece while commenting on issues of gender,
patriarchy, sexuality, etc.
Prince Lamla comments that he has asked himself questions for many
years about adaptations and classics, including Shakespearean works:
In the SA context, I really never understood why we embrace

Shakespeare so much. I never got answers for many years, until I
realised there’s actually nothing wrong with people doing Shakespeare’s
works all the time... The powerful thing about our stories is that they
are also universal. We live in interesting times in South Africa. And
when one looks at the great works that were written and performed
in the past... I realised they are still relevant and ring true even today.7
There are challenges in adapting historically significant work for a

contemporary audience. Prince talks about his experience of adapting
Woza Albert, created at a specific time in South Africa’s history, for current
audiences in South Africa and abroad:
The challenge for me was that how do I place this powerful classic in
the democratic South Africa? Who is the Morena character (at the time
of the original version, it was the imprisoned Nelson Mandela) in the
now South Africa? But there was none. Hence they don’t have any. But
we can only hope for the one in the future.
7 Interview with Prince Lamla. Durden, E., 2013.

Paul Grootboom also considers why he has chosen to do adaptations in
the past:
In answering the question, some of these classics are timeless. Their

adaptation to today often interests me as an exercise to try to prove
that fact. I love these classics and wish to share my love for them with
a modern-day audience, but exploring their non-parochial nature
by transposing them from their often Western setting to black South
Africa. For me this has the effect of showing how we are all part of one
big global community.8
On his adaptation of La Ronde, Grootboom comments:
Although it was quite easy to transpose the archetypes from 1800s

Vienna, I struggled to make the original dialogue contemporary. I even
had to resort to making my young cast read out and re-read out the
original just to listen to what works and what doesn’t for a modern black
South African language. It was only then that I went to the computer to
work on the text. Another struggle was the ‘class system’ that is in the
original. I finally resolved this by accepting that because of apartheid,
we do not have a generic class system. But I knew that I didn’t want to
deal with race issues. And so I decided to deal with status differences
and dynamics with individuals.
Style
There is no formula to direct a script. But before starting to think of
casting, adaptation, set, costumes and other choices to be made, it
helps to get a feeling of the play. You need to understand its general
tone, qualities and emotional values and how these may be sensed by
an audience. What is the mood of the play? What is the image that takes
shape in your head? (This can be a mental image or a metaphor.)
These questions bring us to the idea of theatrical style that determines the
manner of directing. Loosely defined, style is made up of the distinguishing
characteristics of a play that reflect certain conventional practices.
8 Interview with Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom. Durden, E., 2013.

Style is about more than the dramatic concepts like tragedy and
comedy mentioned earlier. It is not only the writing schools of classic,
romantic, realistic and absurdism. Style includes the methods of
theatrical presentation, ritual theatre, poor theatre, epic theatre, protest
theatre, multi-discipline theatre (cross-over), musicals and storytelling.
These styles incorporate stylistic manners that can be used by designers,
actors and composers. Most directors, when they think about style, use
combinations of different styles to support the different layers of meaning
in the script.
Defining a theatrical style for your play involves understanding certain
conventions regarding the actors, the script and the design and how these
are going to be treated by you as the director. Are you going to accept
these conventions or turn them on their heads? What consequences does
this have for how the audience understands the play?
Casting
Casting is an important director’s tool to bring a script to life using your
personal vision. Maybe the script describes exactly what type of actor
has to be cast, but this is not always the case. Even if it is described, you
as the director are free to make your own choices. Consider all of your
options. You can cast a very old couple for Romeo and Juliet, visualising
it in an old-age home. Unusual casting decisions include examples such
as A Midsummer Night’s Dream cast for a performance using actors from
Pakistan speaking a local dialect, as well as English-speaking actors. The
two major groups in the script talked only in their own language even
when talking to one another. Waiting for Godot was once performed by a
full cast of black actors, visualising it in a squatter camp.
We have seen the character of Hamlet played by an actress instead
of an actor, where no line was changed and no other characters were
removed or adapted. This directorial decision gave the show a feminist,
lesbian touch.
But besides age, cultural background and sex, the physical appearance,
personality and presence of actors differ greatly. Most important as a
director is to be flexible in your reading and interpretation of the script,
so that it works for you. If your script calls for a brown-haired Michelle,
but you like a blonde, don’t panic, simply rewrite the hair colour.

Choosing a specific actor is choosing the way in which you bring the
script to life. There must be a match between the profile that you are
looking for and the profile of a specific actor. Always explain that during
an audition. When you don’t choose a specific actor, it doesn’t always mean
that the actor is not good, he or she might be great, but when there is not a
match with the profile that you have in your head, you can’t cast that actor.
Acting style
The style of acting is another strong tool for you as a director to interpret
and own the script in your own way. Physical acting coming from a
Grotowski background creates a different meaning than realistic acting
with strong subtexts. Waiting for Godot was once staged in a boxing ring,
using real free-style wrestling as a physical acting style. This setting
emphasised the fight between the characters that were not able to escape
the space in which they were waiting.
Naturalistic acting creates a meaning for the audience that is different
from the meaning created by using stylistic acting, such as a comic or
cartoon-like acting style. As a director, you don’t have to choose just
one acting style for your show. It is possible to use different styles. But
you need to understand what the effect on the audience is going to be.
What would be the effect when, in a realistic show, a specific love scene
is done in a comic or an operatic way of acting? You will probably think
the characters do not mean what they say, and maybe that is what you
want to express. Paul Grootboom notes: “For actors, I don’t care about
acting style, as long as it works”. The point is that all directorial choices
regarding style have consequences as to how the audience receives and
understands the play.
Some scripts will ask for a specific acting style, mostly related to how
they were created. This is at the discretion of the author, or the creators
of workshopped plays. Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon
were influenced by Grotowski, and his writings on physical theatre
combined with traditional African storytelling influenced workshop
sessions to create classics like Woza Albert. Playing the script in any other
way would make a difference to how the audience understands the play.
The work of the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and the style of his

plays have also influenced theatre in South Africa, particularly political
theatre. In the Brechtian acting technique, the actor deliberately presents
a character in a way that isn’t a realistic impersonation of the character,
to remind the audience that they are watching a play and should not
develop any emotional attachment to the characters. This is a technique
specifically designed to allow the audience to be critical of what they
see and to be able to evaluate the social realities of the play. The best
protest theatre in South Africa dealing with political ideals and Black
Consciousness found a fine line between this didactic style of Brecht’s
and more entertaining styles, using appealing characters. These Brechtian
techniques in theatre have inspired directors and writers to create plays
such as The Hungry Earth by Maishe Maponya.
The dramatic works of Zakes Mda, such as The Girls in Their Sunday
Dresses, are written in a more literary style, rely heavily on the text,
and require actors with an amazingly good text treatment in a verbal
naturalistic acting style. Tshepang from Lara Foot calls for a storytelling
style of acting. Musicals like Sarafina have a physical acting style
combined with entertaining supporting songs.
As a director, you need to study the historical time and specific conditions
in which the script was conceptualised, as this influences how it should be
played. Many South African scripts are not written behind a desk, but are
created in close collaboration with actors and directors. A brief overview
of the evolution of some of South Africa’s theatre scripts shows that acting
styles are part of the creation process, and it is therefore important that these
styles are taken into account by the director when making decisions.
Cross-over with other disciplines

The stage can be seen as a playground where you can do anything. A lot
of contemporary theatre includes other disciplines or involves adapting
cinematic devises to theatre. Award-winning director Neil Coppen does
this, and notes:
My head doesn’t sit in a room, it moves. I am always frustrated by
‘kitchen-sink-drama’. I create long shots by using a shadow play in the

distance and place the actors before that as if I create a close-up.9
In his play Abnormal Loads, Coppen made actors carry miniature houses
and create a village on stage. They would walk through them and start
their dialogue. In a theatrical way this is the equivalent to going from a
long shot to a close-up, which is a common cinematic devise that sets a
scene and then leads the audience into the story. Coppen often uses video
projections in the background or on parts of the set.
The hybrid of theatre that we see today may use video projections
or cross-overs with dance and acting. In musicals and musical theatre,
live music is part of the style, but there is nothing wrong with using a
musician or singer on stage in a realistic setting for a drama, like Yael
Farber did in her South African adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie for
the Baxter theatre in Cape Town in 2012.
Young director Zinzi Princess Mhlongo also notes that she uses any
form she can find to integrate into her shows as long as it tells her story.
When she talks about her show Trapped, she notes: “Physical/visual
theatre excited me. I was very free and experimental with unexpected
cross-overs with other disciplines.”10
The possibilities are endless, but every choice has its consequences,
and while some choices may open doors for you as a director, others may
impose limits on yourself and the work.
Set, ground plan, lighting and costumes

Designing a set, costumes and lighting are jobs that are not usually done
by a theatre director.
They require specific creative and technical skills that are not part
of this book, but as a theatre director you have to work closely together
with the designers who bring the set, costumes and lighting to the stage.
As a director, you need to be in charge of this process, and the designers
need your input to be able to create something that supports your vision;
they are part of your artistic team and the collaboration starts long before
the first rehearsal day.
9 Interview with Niel Coppen. Twijnstra, R., 2013.

10 Interview with Zinzi Princess Mhlongo. Twijnstra, R., 2013.

Costume drawings from Neil Coppen, 2014, Animal Farm. Drawing by Neil Coppen.
As soon as you know that you will direct a play, you should start
talking to the designers you will work with. As soon as you have your
first thoughts about your concept, it is good to share them with your
set and costume designer. In many cases, the lighting designer comes
in when the set and costumes are already designed, so that the lighting
makes the most of what is already there. Directing is team work and
the input from them will also help you in shaping and realising your
vision and concept. Your social or political vision is important, as it can
give clues for your artistic team about how to integrate specific visual
elements of these social or political circumstances.
The first step is to make a first draft of the ground plan with the set
designer. A ground plan is a map of the necessary elements that you
need, it is not a creative design. It gives the entrances and exits (if you
need these), as well as possible set elements. In a realistic ground plan,
there may be chairs, tables, sofas, windows. In a non-realistic set it can
be black blocks in different shapes, sand, projection screens, a circus
environment, painted backdrops and curtains, a boxing ring or an empty
space. The possibilities are endless.

A ground plan gives you an idea of the practical requirements that you
need to create your blocking, but the ground plan is already connected
to the conflict. To understand this you must have an understanding
about what a dramatic space is, which we will talk about in the following
chapter when we discuss the director and the stage.
As the director, you will need to know where your play is going to
be staged, the type of theatre it will be performed in and the technical
equipment that it has. You will need to think about whether it will be
there for a long run or if the play will tour to different theatres requiring
lots of breaks and builds. You need to think practically about whether
the play and the set need to be transported in a big truck or in the back
of your own car. You need to be guided in all of these decisions by the
budget. All these practical conditions will determine the possibilities for
the members of your artistic team.
Some of the interviewed directors consider these elements of
theatre from the very beginning of their working process. Neil Coppen
comments on the process that he followed to get specific effects for his
work Abnormal Loads:
I studied the light quality of northern KZN (where the story is set)
and took hundreds of reference photos for me and the lighting
designer, Tina Le Roux, to try and replicate. Each landscape has a
particular feeling or rhythm to it. To cite an example in northern KZN:
the unbearable midday heat, the way storms clouds gradually build
through the afternoon only to erupt in a cathartic downpour, the
sounds of insects at night (pre- and post-rain). All these idiosyncrasies,
these sensations and sounds must be considered and woven into the
fabric of the play.
The final confrontation scene between the character of Moira and
Vincent was underscored by one of these building storms and this was
a simple yet effective dramatic device to use the exterior landscape to
mirror the building interior tensions between the two characters.

The theatre-maker must know everything about the world they are
trying to depict on the stage and set out to try to capture it as best they
can.11
Having made the decisions about the adaptation and treatment of your
text, the theatrical styles and performance styles that you will use, and
how to present the work, the next step is to formulate a plan for the
production. This will be explored in the following chapter.

Pusetso Thibedi directing Capturing Sanity, 2012. Photograph by Beatrice Lyl.
CHAPTER 6
How to Direct a Play,
from Concept
to Show
T
his chapter talks about the process for you as a director, bringing
your ideas and concept to life on stage.
On the first day of the rehearsal period, everyone who will bring
the show to life is gathered.
As the director, you need to bring together the actors, as well as
the designers, possibly the playwright if he or she is still alive and the
production team. At this moment, you and your creative team have
already prepared everything. You have already analysed the script,
researched its background, and developed a concept. Out of this you
have made choices for the style, you have cast the actors, you have a
set and costume designs and you have made hundreds of other choices
driven by your artistic vision, your budget and your given circumstances.
On the first day of the rehearsal period, all that is behind you and the
actual work in the rehearsal space can start. You also have a fixed period
of time and a fixed deadline, the first night already booked and planned
in a theatre (or whatever space you have chosen for the performance).
During the rehearsal period, you’ll have to bring the show to life for the
audience. But how do you approach that rehearsal period, how do you
make a plan, and how do you work with the actors?
Relationship with the artistic and production team

The artistic team consists of those who contribute to the conception of the
work. Usually it is the director, writer, set, costume and lighting designer.
Sometimes the team will include a composer, choreographer and video
artist. A lot of the work with the artistic team is done in the preparation
period, sometimes the director will have one-on-one sessions, but it is
also important to bring the team together to discuss and inspire one
another.
Making a show is a collective work coached by the director. Director
Zinzi Princess Mhlongo explains how she chooses her artistic team:
How to Direct a Play, from Concept to Show 121

Work with a team of strong individuals that you trust. When you want
to do everything yourself, you limit yourself. Maybe the only way to
grow is to work with people who are better that you.1
On the first day of the rehearsal, the artistic team will present their ideas
and support the start of the rehearsal period. They should listen to a
first reading of the work. They will then go back to their workshops and
studios to realise their work. Or perhaps they will stay during some of
the rehearsals. The designers will now and then follow the rehearsal,
do necessary fittings of costumes, but only in the last week before the
opening night when everything comes together in the theatre will they
be there to finalise their work as a team with the director. The production
manager (if you have one) has the task of ensuring that all the different
team members deliver everything at the right time.
The production team consists of those who make the show possible
– the producer, production manager, floor manager, light and sound
engineers, the director and possibly an assistant and somebody taking
care of publicity.
The production team has to come together before the first reading,
they need to prepare all of the practical requirements for the rehearsals
and work closely together with the designers to plan and oversee the
delivery of their work. The production team should come together
weekly to discuss the planning and concretisation of the work. Weekly
rehearsal schedules are made by the production manager or director’s
assistant and shared with everyone.
When a play is particularly challenging to stage, it helps to have the
artistic team and the production team to face these challenges together.
Greg Homann comments on the staging of Mike van Graan’s play Brothers
in Blood (2012), which has over 30 scenes and multiple settings for these:
When I first read the script it felt like the play was unstageable. How
were we going to move from a schoolroom to an office to a house to a
graveyard to a church to a bedroom, etc? Because the play had never
1 Interview with Zinzi Princess Mhlongo. Twijnstra, R., 2013.

been staged before, no one had solved these questions. I meet with
Denis Hutchinson who was going to design the set and lighting for the
production. We sat down for a day with the script and with some paper
and various coloured pens and we systematically worked through how
we could solve this problem, scene by scene...
This didn’t solve absolutely every progression from one scene
to the next, and so I asked Mike van Graan, the writer of the play,
whether we could move a scene or two, and in one instance I asked
whether he could write a new scene to help the flow. In the end we
managed to create a production that plays in performance as one lone
sustained series of events without any breaks at all. It is only through
the close collaboration between Denis Hutchinson as the lighting and
set designer, Mike van Graan as the writer, and me as the director that
we could come to such a simple but effective creative and conceptually
strong solution to this challenge.2
As the director, you are the central person in the artistic and production
teams. The director inspires but also coaches the teams. The director also
controls the evolving concept with its growth into the show. Direction
involves directing not only the actors, but also facilitating the members
of these teams.
Rehearsals
An approach to rehearsals
Every rehearsal period is determined by the intrinsic needs of the
concept and the script. There is not one format that you have to follow.
Some concepts require a long process of improvisation and an intensive
collaboration between the director, actor and writer. The rehearsal
period for a comedy with absurd characters will be quite different from
the rehearsal period of a contemporary text that can start with long
discussions about the idea and the writers’ philosophy. Some casts are
2 Interview with Greg Homann. Durden, E., 2013.

put on their feet immediately on the first day of the rehearsal, exploring
the space and the characters in a specific acting style.
The approach to rehearsing a certain script is partly linked to the way
it was originally written. To bring a script to life, you can go back to the
dynamics that gave it conception as discussed in the previous chapter.
Those specific techniques will determine how the present rehearsal
period unfolds, and any special physical training and improvisation that
has to be part of the daily rehearsal schedule.
Consider a play by Zakes Mda marked by an extraordinary facility in
both language and dramatic technique based on a complex analysis of
contemporary issues in the South African context. A rehearsal period of
a Zakes Mda script can start with round-table discussions on the ideas
of the playwright, with early rehearsal emphasis on lines that might best
bring this script to life.
Another script, which is more character-driven, such as Mbongeni
Ngema’s Zulu (2013), might justify an extensive period of probing into a
character’s background with visits to different locations and environments
to enrich the actor’s perception.
The nature of a rehearsal period of a script for two actors will differ
for a musical with a big cast which will include musical rehearsals,
individual work with the main characters and special rehearsals for group
scenes. Every script has intrinsic needs that determine the approach of
the rehearsal period, needs that a director needs to take into account,
along with their own specific creative individual approach.
Prince Lamla describes his approach with his team and the actors as
follows:
When I start working on a play, I go into another world with the actors.
It disconnects me from the real world. I need that disconnection to find
my own voice in collaboration with the actors. Together you dive in the
soul of the play or the story you are working on and by doing that you
find something that people in the real world are overlooking.3

This quote talks about a fictional world and a real world. Creating art
always has to do with you as the director creating your own world,
which sometimes looks far away from reality but is always inspired by
it. Ultimately, you have control over your fictional world and not over
reality. Many of the interviewed directors enjoy that sense of control that
they have over the world they create as it gives them power to express
their vision.
Preparation: basic and specific

Before rehearsals, the actor should always warm up his or her voice and
body. Doing a collective warm-up for 10 to 15 minutes will be sufficient.
It helps to wake up the body and the voice to prevent injury, and can
also serve to build concentration and allow the actors to focus on other
members of the cast.
Warming up is necessary because the actors will do things with their
bodies that they do not normally do. Actors will also be asked to express
emotions that they are not used to in daily life. Warming up is resetting
the body and voice as well as the emotions to move from daily life to a
work situation. Games are often used to create bonding and ensemble
spirit, and you should include them in the preparation. You can find
them in the work of Viola Spolin’s Improvisations for the Theatre,4 and in
Ensemble Theatre Making,5 as well as in many other books. Warm-ups can
be done in many ways, where the director can lead, or the actors can be
in charge. If the actors lead, then ask a different actor to lead the warm-
up each time.
Beyond simply warming up, specific preparation most be focused on
the scene work. Maybe an acting style must be mastered before exploring
a scene. Training in these styles is necessary to prepare the actors before
scene work. It is like learning a new (body) language. You might focus
on physical acting, using exercises from Grotowski and Lecoq. You might
train the actors in Epic Theatre using the works of Bertolt Brecht. Or use
4 Spolin, V. (1963) Improvisation for the Theatre. Northwestern University Press,

Illinois.
5 Burnett Bonczek, R. & Storck, D. (2013) Ensemble Theatre Making: A Practical
Guide. Routledge, New York.

the viewpoints method6 focusing on movement, time and space.
When specific storytelling is needed, you will need to prepare your
actors. When singing, dancing, stage-fighting or acrobatics is part of the
show, you should start with these specific rehearsals from the beginning.
If you have not mastered these techniques yourself, you will need to
bring in an expert to work with the actors. But be careful that you don’t
start a theatre school with your cast, as your time is too limited for that.
You need to simply train them in those techniques and skills that they
will use in the show.
Where to start: the process of rehearsing and planning

Given only a limited period of time, the theatre director should plan the
rehearsal period carefully. The deadline won’t change and the work has to
be completed in the time that you have. The director should understand
the nature of the process of rehearsing. To master and plan this process
of rehearsing takes years and can only be learned through practise.
Every rehearsal period will be different, but the guiding principles are
the same for every process. Every work of creation will go through the
same planned periods of preparation, study, exploration, enrichment,
elimination, polishing and presentation. We will briefly explore the
fundamentals of these processes below.
Study and exploration

After the preparation period described earlier, and a first reading, the
process of rehearsing usually starts with the director working with the
actors to explain and study the plot, characters and their background,
the acting style and concept. Before going on stage, a study period is
needed for the actors to grasp all these ideas that drive the play.
Amy Jephta highlights the need for the actors to do this exploratory
work thoroughly, and for the director and writer not to provide all the
answers to their questions:
6 Bogart, A. & Landau, T. (2005) The Viewpoints Book. Theatre Communications

Group, New York.

I always find it challenging when I direct my own work where I wrote
the play. Having to then present a text to actors as an objective director
can be tough – it’s easy to want to give actors the answers because I think
I know them... To remember that the answers are and must be found in
the text is important. You can’t find answers – for your characterisation,
for your action – anywhere except in what’s written there.
Actors find it particularly challenging when the writer is in the room
to not keep asking me for all the answers. In all my processes I have had
to step back as a playwright and remind them to keep excavating what’s
on the page. I don’t allow them to ask me questions that spoon-feed
them the answers about what action to play, how a character behaves. I
keep asking “What does the play say? Go find the answer there.”7
When the time of exploration starts, the actors are introduced to the
ground plan. After reading a specific scene, with the help of improvisations
or with the script still at hand, the director will coach the actors on the
ground plan which outlines the approximate dimensions of the real set.
With specific assignments, you will need to explain what the characters
are doing and for whom, and why they are doing it. The director needs
to explain so that the actors understand what the character wants at a
specific moment in the scene. The solution has to come from the actors.
Here the creative role and resources of the actor come into the process.
At this point it is important to understand how you, as the director, can
inspire the actors and channel the stream of ideas, solutions, options and
feedback.
As the director, you need to first explore the different scenes before you
go to the next step of blocking them. The outcome of exploring the scene
might change later or may never be used. The exploration phase of your
rehearsal period is the most creative for you and the actors. The designs
of the set and costumes can still change or evolve. Allow the designers to
watch some rehearsals so that they also develop an understanding of the
play that can inspire their own creativity.
As the director you will need to have suggestions for blocking in the

back of your head and will need to test these out. You will have ideas
about how the characters are portrayed and how the scene will develop.
The exploration period leads to a first raw draft of a scene. This is much
like a first charcoal sketch that an artist makes for a painting.
Maybe some scenes need more time to explore than others. It is a
good idea not to start rehearsing from the beginning of the script, which
is often over-rehearsed. You might end up with not enough time for
detailed explorations of the middle and end of the script. When you
want to rehearse the scenes in the order of the script, plan your time
well. Some scenes might instantly come to life in a way that you can
leave them and then later block and polish them; others might require
a longer journey before you can make final choices. Allow yourself this
exploration, as it will enrich the show.
When specific training of the actor is needed, it should be part of
the rehearsals from the beginning of the process. The required acting
style should be studied, explored and mastered. Slapstick, physical
acting, epic acting, comedy, combinations with movement, dance and
text, or storytelling should be mastered before and during exploring
the different scenes. Warm-ups, improvisations and games can establish
good ensemble acting and have a bonding effect on the group of actors.
If needed, these should be scheduled in this period as well.
Exploration must stop somewhere – you can’t continue exploring
scenes, acting styles and characters without making choices and fixing the
blocking. Somewhere halfway through the time allocated to rehearsals,
you will have to stop exploring. Make choices, block, eliminate the
unnecessary and then polish. After that you will need time for technical
rehearsals, runs, dress rehearsals and previews.
Blocking and enrichment

The first exploration period is often followed by focusing on individual
actors, with the director trying to squeeze every last drop of drama out
of each word, line, movement or grouping. We’ll talk more about that in
the next section, exploring the relationship between the director and the
actor.

During this period you will work again on all the scenes and start the
blocking. Blocking is the process of planning the physical movement and
the positioning of the actors on the stage. From the start of the blocking
process, ask the actors to write down the blocking in their scripts. An
actor should not only study and memorise the text, but also the blocking.
You will also make choices for the acting style in every scene and
decide how actors colour the characters and actions at what moments.
The raw first sketch of the scene is now more complete, and colours are
added. You will find it easy to make this next step with certain scenes,
while others are still not ready or need more exploration. Give yourself
the time for this process but don’t make your choices too late. The actors
still need time to internalise and repeat the lines, blocking, characters
and situations and to commit them to memory. They have to find the
through-lines that bring them and their characters from the beginning of
the script to the end of the show.
Eliminating and polishing

Most directors will agree that the creative work has been done in the
exploration and blocking phase. Eliminating unnecessary action or
dialogue is done after discussions with your artistic team.
As the director you need to eliminate the unnecessary and to shape
the production according to the chosen style. You need to work out what
lines are used, what lines are scrapped, if the scene is too long or if scenes
are simply not working. Like a good film editor, a director needs to know
what scenes or lines simply are not necessary, and what is essential to
create a particular impression and to drive the play forward.
After the elimination period, you can ask the actors to learn the lines
by heart and not allow scripts on stage. This process is known as scripts-
down. Actors will then run their lines and can work on internalising their
characters and actions. The final blocking-out and polishing is not so
creative, but is a process of hard work; repeating the scenes, polishing
them and adding last details. You can still change details in the text if it
is required.
Important choices need to be made about rhythm. Looking at the
sequence of the different scenes, without changing the intention, blocking

or the lines, you can speed them up or slow them down. The rhythm and
tempo of a show is like a piece of music, it has its colours, the different
periods of light and shade, and it builds towards the end.
Of course you have explored the rhythm of each scene and found
its heartbeat. But now looking at the work from start to finish as a total
piece, it might be necessary to make changes and to finalise the rhythm
and tempo of each scene, blending them to obtain a rhythmic flow.
During the time of polishing, you will do runs that include more
scenes. The links and changes between the scenes must be fixed as well.
At the end of each day, you should run what you have made. At the
end of each week, you should bring the work that you did during that
week together in a run, even when some scenes are not finalised. These
processes will give you a chance to see the show’s full shape and colour.
As part of the polishing process you should give critical feedback
and notes after each run, and use those moments to make changes and
improve the scenes. During this period the costumes and personal props
will also come into the rehearsal.
Moving in to the theatre

The next big moment is to move out of the safe rehearsal space and to
move to the theatre for technical rehearsals with light and sound, dress
rehearsals, runs and previews. Be aware that this last technical phase is
focused on technical solutions, lighting and sound designers. They need
time with you to finalise all the technical aspects of every scene.
Often this is also the moment that the finalised set is built in the
theatre and used for the first time. These new elements will put the actor
and you out of the comfort zone of the safe rehearsal space where you
have worked and created for weeks or months. Entering the theatre
might make you feel lost in space, and that is exactly what is going on.
But you and the actors will have some time to bring all the work back
into the finalised set in the theatre.
You will need to coach and support your actors well in this period
because they may feel lost as well, seeing you give all your time and
attention to the technical team. The process of plotting the lights is
often boring for actors, as they just have to take positions on stage in the

blocking of the scene while the lighting designer, the director and the
engineers give the scene its colours and cues. Engineers, light and sound
designers have to rehearse as well, and this is their time.
This work will end in a technical run that will focus on the light, sound
and other technical elements of the show (including the amplification of
musicians, video and other elements). Actors can use this run to get back
the intentions of the work previously done in the rehearsal space.
Next you will need to prepare for a full dress rehearsal, meaning every
choice that has been made, all the props, costumes, sets, light and sound
are brought together and used to give a full picture of your vision. A full
dress rehearsal is attended by the artistic and production team to give
their blessings to the work, to give notes or make small last changes
before the first audience steps in for the first preview. During a full dress
rehearsal, the actors are able to master all the given circumstances of the
show and the theatre. They will not hold back, but should deliver the
show as if the audience was already there. Afterwards the director will
give the actors notes. In most rehearsal periods the designers will also
give notes and comments on the total work.
Rehearsal schedule
The time you have to rehearse is often not only driven by the complexity of
the script and concept but also by the availability of the people involved,
as well as the budget. Rehearsing full time in a professional setting can
take three weeks or three months, excluding the preparation time. Some
directors need just a few weeks for preparation, while some need a year
or longer to think about the adaptation, concept and visualisation.
The schedule presented here starts with the first day of the rehearsals.
Let us suppose we have five weeks between that day and the opening
night, and we make a possible schedule using the different phases
described above. Those five weeks are divided between the rehearsal
period and the theatre, and only in the last week will the rehearsals take
place in the theatre with the finalised set.
• Week 1 – The first reading starts with study and exploration of scenes,
possible extra training on acting style, improvisations ending in a first

raw draft of the scenes. This work is done in a rehearsal space, having
a rehearsal set or with lines of the ground plan drawn on the floor.
End this week with a run or raw presentation of the material that you
have created, even when it is not finished and actors still have their
scripts in hand. This run allows you and the actors to have a first
glimpse of some of the scenes you focused on this week.
• Week 2 – Continue exploring the rest of the scenes and start working
on a deeper level, focusing on individual actors, actions and group
scenes with ensemble acting. End every day with a run of the material
covered. End the week with a total run of all material.
• Week 3 – Start eliminating what you won’t use. Finalise the blocking
of the scenes, make the links and changes between them. If you use
music (background or live), add it where you want it. Run the work
at the end of each day, and at the end of the week run all the scenes.
• Week 4 – This is the week for polishing. Continue finalising and
polishing the scenes, add details (some costumes might be ready),
and focus on the rhythm and changing tempo of all the scenes. This
week will finish with a run in the rehearsal space, ask the artistic and
production team to be your audience, as this will prepare the actors,
as well as prepare the designers for the get-in to the theatre.
• Week 5 – This is the week for getting into the theatre.
- Before moving into the theatre with your cast for the last week,
the set will have been built in the theatre – this could take a day.
- Day 1 and 2: The plotting of light and sound, depending on the
complexity and number of scenes, will normally take two days,
and is done in the finalised set with the costumes. This plotting
ends in a technical run in which the main focus is on the light,
sound and other possible technical requirements.
- Day 3: This will end in a full dress rehearsal, mostly at the same
time of the day that the preview and first night will take place.
You might give the actors a break, give them the morning free, or
use the time to rehearse specific scenes and give notes. The focus
is on bringing in all the elements of the show, props, costumes,
make-up and hair if needed, microphones, lights and all the other
ingredients of your show. Actors (and stage assistants if you have

them) will prepare the dressing rooms and set props and costumes
in finalised positions on the stage.
- Day 4 and 5: On these days, at the same time as the opening
night performance is scheduled, previews will be presented to an
audience. This involves testing the show in front of a live audience
and giving notes to the actors, light and sound engineers once the
audience has left. Based on their reaction and how the piece read
in the theatre, last changes will be made.
- Day 6: This is your opening night. Make sure actors are not tired
or burnt-out for this opening performance. Don’t over-rehearse.
If possible, give them free time during the morning and let them
come into the theatre in the afternoon, take time to prepare and
concentrate, and together enjoy the work that you have created
with the actors and the team. Celebrate together after the first
night, whatever the outcome of the work might have been.
The director and the actor

The actors depend on the director and the director depends on the
actors. They cannot work without one another. The director, being ‘the
audience-to-be’ wants to realise the concept and script, and depends
basically on the actors to bring these to life. The director is the only
one who can coach the actors and help them bring their characters and
actions to life on stage. The director wants the actors to own the show, to
make it theirs. This means that the director has to let go before the first
night and trust the actors who have been prepared for the audience. It is
the actor who finally delivers the work to the audience.
The audience wants to be entertained, inspired, amazed or confronted,
but does not want to deal with a director or see how the show was made.
Maybe afterwards they might be interested, but not at the moment that
the show is presented in front of their eyes. At this point, the director
has disappeared behind the work, giving the actors all the credit. Bheki
Mkhwane comments on this, saying:

At some stage in the rehearsals, you need to find that moment when
the actors need to take ownership. Then as a director you can see
the surprises that the actors come up with. This allows you to see it
differently. As a director you have to let go and become a member of the
audience. Some directors want to own the actors, own the audience,
and own what they have created. But you have to hand this ownership
over; you give it to the actors.8
For a director to be able to work with a specific actor four things are
important: personality, talent, skills and experience. It is evident when a
director has a background in acting and knows the process of rehearsing
from an actor’s point of view, as this often results in a good understanding
of how an actor works. This can help a director in the communication
and building of relationships with the actors.
In the end, theatre directing is not only about understanding the
actor, but is about a vision that has grown into a concept. A director with
a background as a writer, designer or any other theatre background can
be or become a great director if he or she is able to inspire and coach the
actors. This involves giving them freedom to explore, but controlling the
given circumstances of the script and rehearsal process.
Auditions
The relationship between a theatre director and an actor usually starts
with the casting. There are many ways to do a casting. Maybe you already
know who you want in your show, and auditions might not be necessary.
Even when you think that you already know the outcome, auditions can
surprise you. If you have seen actors before, or know them well, don’t
think about the last time that you saw them, but focus on this time.
Have an open mind about the actors and don’t pre-cast your show. You
should make your casting based on true talent not on any pre-existing
relationships.
The audition is often the first moment that that actor and director
meet. Here the relationship starts or resumes if you have worked together

before. It is a moment in which you as a theatre director can set the
rules and make clear who you are and how you want to work with this
specific script and this cast. You can set a code of conduct from this initial
meeting which builds into a positive relationship with the actors.
When you have time and only a few actors to audition, then use
the interview method growing into an open conversation about the
background of the actor, their ambitions, strengths and weaknesses. Tell
them about the background of the project and about yourself. After this
go to the floor and work on a prepared text by the actor, improvisations
or a cold reading.
When you don’t have much time, and a lot of actors are lined up to
see you, then 10 to 15 minutes is enough time for you to see if you want
to call an actor back for a second audition in which you take more time
to work and talk.
Let us focus on the short first auditions. Be clear and open about what
you want and how you would like the actors to work in the audition
before they enter. Ask the actors to bring a CV and photograph. This
might help you to keep track of who’s who, and to see what kind of work
they have done before and with whom.
It is useful to run auditions with someone from your artistic and
production team so that you can discuss different actors and options for
casting after the audition.
Decide beforehand if you will do a cold audition, where actors are
asked to read a monologue that they have not seen before, or if you
will ask them to prepare a monologue of their own choice, or if you
want them to perform a dance or movement solo. You can ask them to
prepare a song even when singing is not part of the show, as it will tell
you something about the actor’s voice. Let them sing and dance without
music, as this will give you more information about their skills and talent.
Here are some useful guidelines for the audition process:

1. Welcome the actor in a professional way and make them feel
comfortable.
2. Go immediately to work, giving the actor their assignment.
3. Stop possible excuses or long introductions from the actor.

4. A fter the monologue is delivered, offer constructive criticism and
allow the actor to re-act by giving them another assignment.
5. Incorporate improvisational activity in the audition.
6. Don’t give a final judgement about what you have seen, but finish
with practical questions: “Are you available on the days of the
rehearsal period and shows?” And “Do you have any other obligations
in that time that might conflict with your schedule?” Be clear and
short about the possible contract, fee, per deum allowances, travel
costs, etc. You can give this information yourself or let the producer
explain. Ask the actor if he or she is still positive about the project.
An audition always has two sides – you are also auditioning as a
director for the actor. It might be that after the audition the actor
doesn’t want to be cast. If there are any special things you want from
the actor, this is the time to tell and discuss these, such as nudity on
stage, cutting or colouring their hair, growing a beard, etc.
7. Finish the audition by telling the actor when you will make your
decision and how the actor will be informed. If you have planned a
second round for auditions, let the actor know.
8. Be alert to the behaviour of actors before and after the audition.
It can give you information about attitudes and manners. A very
talented actor can sometimes be a pain to work with.
9. After the actor leaves, discuss the audition with your team.
10. Decide if you want to see the actor again.
11. Decide if you need to consult colleagues and other directors who
have previously worked with the actor.
12. Make a decision and let the actor know if you have cast him or her,
briefly giving your motivation. Talk about the match between your
casting profile and the actor’s profile. Keep the talk positive, clear,
short and professional.
Casting the individual actor requires a different focus than casting the
ensemble. Casting an individual actor means you might look at their
ability to understand the play and to respond to suggestions for the
character. An actor’s audience appeal and ability to project vocally should
be considered. His or her acting experience, personal tonality and ability

for the specific style of performance must also be considered.
When you are casting the ensemble, you will look for contrasts.
However, when you are casting contrasts, you must not lose sight of the
necessity for unity. Before making final decisions, the director should see
the entire group on stage and look at it as an audience might.
Zinzi Princess Mhlongo notes that she does not always call for formal
auditions, but is constantly on the look-out for talented performers.
When she is casting a new piece, different things attract her to different
performers:
Sometimes I watch amazing actors and think to myself, where could I

use this performer? Meaning actors are always being auditioned. I enjoy
the casting process because it’s a chance to see what different performers
have to offer but also to get a feel whether we would work well together.
I’ve met people who were brilliant during auditions but because of their
attitude, you fear you’ll have a difficult rehearsal process.9
Prince Lamla recognises that each director’s approach to casting is

different, but that directors should approach this with a sense of
responsibility:
I make sure that I do not cast irresponsibly. I do not do anyone favours.

I am not doing this to impress anyone... you don’t just cast nor do plays
just because your position in a theatre allows you to do so... you must
do things because it is the right time. You will know when it is the right
time if you are an honest director or writer. I really allow the intuitive
energy and the soul of the story to dictate and let me know who the
right actor for each role is. Overall, I believe in actors who are honest,
humble, loyal and always full of respect for the work. Theatre has no
ego. It is not about us, but the work at the end of the day.10
Paul Grootboom notes that when he thinks about casting, he is not

prescriptive: “I feel ‘anything goes’. It depends on the whims of the
9 Interview with Zinzi Princess Mhlongo. Durden, E., 2013.


particular director. I personally do not like working with star names, but
I do recognise their value to a play that has been in the dark.”11
The focus on the good of the work, rather than on personalities, is
a useful guide for directors who wish to make meaningful work and to
continue to build the local theatre industry. However, it is recognised that
well-known actors can draw in an audience to an otherwise unknown
theatre piece, and this also serves to enhance the industry.
Ensemble and individual work

In a good jazz ensemble, first there is a basic groove, carried by everyone.
Musicians focusing on one another create a specific sound, a mix of
different instruments working together. On top of this, the individual
musician can come out with a solo, supported by the rest of the group.
It is the same in theatre – actors must create a strong ensemble acting to
support the individual actor or actors.
Ensemble acting is focused on one another, on the space and the
activity that takes place. Individual acting is focused on the individual
character. But the individual actor is always part of the group and cannot
only concentrate on himself and forget about the others on stage. As in
the jazz ensemble, the solo musician must stay part of the group and
not forget about those supporting him. So too the ensemble player must
primarily focus on the group but not forget his or her own character.
Some actors are exceptionally good at delivering individual moments
and conflicts; those are your main actors. Others are good team players
and are best at their place in the ensemble. These actors are not less
important, but have a different role. It takes 11 players in a soccer team,
only one or two will be in forward positions and will score, but the whole
team works together to achieve that goal. A coach that positions 11 strong
front players will never have a team that scores. When casting your
team, don’t put strong individual actors in the ensemble and don’t put
ensemble players in main roles. Create a good mix for all your positions
so that your script can score at the right moments.
11 Interview with Mpumelelo Paul Grootbom. Durden, E., 2013.

In a film, the camera can go from full shots to close-ups to guide the
eyes of the audience. Theatre has to use different means to create this
emphasis. The need to create emphasis is the main reason for ensemble
acting. Clear blocking of a scene will help the actors to understand this
by their positioning. Everyone on stage has to know where the emphasis
of every moment of the scene has to be. Sometimes you will support the
one who is emphasised; sometimes the emphasis is on you.
During the rehearsal process, you will need to schedule moments
that you work individually with the main actors, one on one. A good talk
about the background of the character will help in the beginning during
the study and exploration period. Working on the stage with one or two
main actors without the ensemble hanging around and doing nothing
will give you results to bring back to the group rehearsals.
In these individual sessions you can focus on improvisations with
or without the knowledge of the script, focusing on character and
action. You can encourage actors to hold their own sessions for further
exploration. The results are then reviewed for comments and suggestions.
Towards the end of the study and exploration period you can ask the
actors for biographies of their characters. They should write about their
character’s schooling, parents, grandparents, favourite foods, ambitions,
loves, hates, what entertains them, how they spend their evenings and
the events that brought this character to the immediate situation.
Don’t make these biographies too early, as they can block the actor
and cause pre-planning in acting. The biography should be done when
the actor is settling into the character. It is also possible for you as a
director to ‘interview’ the character, to help in creating the biography
every character holds within him. It might contain facts that the audience
will never know, it might contain facts that are not in the script, but that
doesn’t matter – a good biography functions for reference material if and
when the need arises. Augusto Boal has good suggestions for character
development and other rehearsal techniques in his book Games for actors
and non-actors.12
12 Boal, A. (1992) Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Routledge, New York.

Making the actor act
How do you as a director use the creative source of the actor and how
do you channel the stream of options, ideas and feedback? How do you
get true acting in the acting style of your choice? How do you ‘season’
the actor (meaning that he or she stands in good relationship to their
part, the actions, the play and the other actors) so that they have an
ease of movement and flow of speech and, above all, they are aware
of their responsibility to the audience? These are basic questions that
need answers from the director in order to establish a good and effective
relationship with the actor.
Explanation and demonstration

A director who leaves no space for the creativity of the actor will find
it difficult to bring a scene to life. Within the given circumstances, as
the director, you should facilitate the actor’s creative freedom and allow
yourself to be surprised by the solutions the actors offer.
This brings us to the essence of acting, which is not copying a director
or doing exactly what is asked, but involves actors interpreting directions
themselves. An actor takes in the explanation and information from the
director and creates free associations within the situation of the scene, by
using their talent, body, emotions and personality.
Directors who dominate the actor in the initial stages of rehearsal will
find them acting artificially, because they do not understand how the
actor works and how actors need freedom within the given circumstances
of the scene.
Now directing becomes something more than just visualising your
concept. As a director, you should try to look at the actors with an open
mind but also with a beginner’s mind, free of concepts, analyses and
ideas. Just look at what the actors are presenting to you. Look as an
audience-to-be, and react to what you see, not to what you hoped for or
dreamt of. Work with what you get from the actors, offer constructive
criticism and let them explore the scene again. You will be amazed at
what happens if you plant a seed in fertile ground.
A good director doesn’t talk much, but knows how to trigger the actor

by giving simple assignments that make the actor show activity, desires
and solutions. What does the character do, what does the character
want, and what does the character cover up? A director shouldn’t talk
philosophy, but should give the actor concrete assignments to explore
the character and the space.
A director should say: “You are looking for an escape from this prison.
Explore the door that is locked, see if you can force the windows, etc.” or
“Explore the character that comes into your space as someone you have
never met before but vaguely remember. What is he wearing, is he hiding
something?”
In the explanation of your assignment always try to avoid the notion
of ‘how’, meaning how to do it. How a problem is solved must grow out
of the stage relationships. You need to ask questions, such as: “Where is
the character, what does he do, what is going on in the scene, and what
is the point of concentration?”
Real acting must happen at the actual moment of stage life, and not
though any pre-planning. Some directors use demonstration as a way
to communicate with the actor. It leaves little space for the actors to be
creative if they are simply supposed to copy the director. This might
work out if the director is not focusing on emotional acting, but uses
the ‘showing’ technique to demonstrate a certain practical problem,
how to use the space, or to show physical interaction with other actors.
For the director, demonstrating should be about visualising the given
circumstances and exciting the actor. It can also save time during
rehearsals. An actor might need a long improvisation period, while
demonstrating is more effective, using minimal time.
Side coaching
Side coaching involves the director helping the actor during the rehearsal
with short instructions from the side. This coaching creates a dynamic
situation. It is a method in holding the actor to the point of concentration
whenever he may have wandered away. When side coaching takes place,
the actor shouldn’t step out of his concentration. “Keep your eye on the
ball!” He should listen to the director’s voice but not pay attention to

it and keep right on going. This is much like soccer players who are
coached during the match by the coach. Side coaching is often about
energy, focusing on concentration or on what is happening around the
actor. It helps to keep the stage alive. Most of all, side coaching is a time
saver. The director steps into the excitement of playing in the same space
as the actors, and with the same focus.
Critical feedback and notes

Constructive criticism and feedback after rehearsing a specific scene is
no different from any other learning situation in which a teacher/coach
reflects on the work of the student/actor.
To avoid negative emotions during this process of feedback, you
should stay away from judgemental attitudes like good/bad and right/
wrong. You need as a director to create an objective vocabulary, asking
rather “What did you see?”, “Was the problem solved?”, “Did the actors
make something happen?”
Always start with the positive points of your observation, as this then
prepares the actor for the challenges that you see. In evaluation and
feedback, you need to inspire the actors in a critical challenging way that
makes them eager to go back on stage and try again.
Central to any feedback should be whether communication with you,
as the audience-to-be, took place. An actor on stage either communicates
or does not; the audience either sees it or does not. The very simplicity
of this confronts most actors, but as a director you have to be clear
and honest about it and give the actors feedback about whether they
communicated with you or not, that is all.
You can encourage the other actors watching from the side to
participate in the feedback as long as they don’t attack their colleagues
and they understand the point of concentration.
Giving feedback gives you as the director the opportunity to formulate
and explain the next assignment, digging deeper or exploring the
situation again, and bringing the feedback into a new activity. Everything
that is pre-planned is only the structure of the scene (where, who and
what); it is the field upon which the game is played that is pre-planned.

Notes are given in a later period of rehearsing, after a run-through
or a run of a part of the show. Mostly the notes are a list of small details
and things that you want to change. Focus with the actors on their notes
after a run-through, and ask them to write these down in their scripts.
Try to give technical notes about set, costumes and lighting in a separate
meeting with your design team, and get them to make the changes
required before the actors do another run-through.
Improvisations
We will not make a list of possible improvisation techniques from different
acting schools, but for any director it is useful to study them. Books
that we think are compulsory for any director are the writings of Julian
Beck, August Boal, Ann Bogard, Berthold Brecht, Peter Brook, Joseph
Chaikin, Jerzy Grotowski, Tina Landau, Jacques Lecoq, Viola Spolin and
Konstantin Stanislavski, and there are many others. It is not only useful
for a director to study these improvisation techniques but also to make
up some yourself, which work for your style of rehearsing. This can take
years, in which you will use different exercises and training methods to
find your own. Every director will find his or her own combination of
improvisation techniques that suits them best.
• Improvisations based on the script: Improvisations based on the script

can be done with or without knowledge of it by the actors. Some
directors don’t give the script to the actors at the beginning of the
rehearsals but first explore the different situations and characters with
the actors. This process leaves space for the actor’s imagination.
Another improvisation procedure is based on familiarity with the
script. After analysing the basic situation of a scene involving the
characters, the director will ask the actors to rehearse the scene by
improvising, using their own words. Study of script and dialogue can
be done outside rehearsal hours, leaving it to the actors to use the
author’s lines in the scene work. In this way, step by step, the lines are
integrated in the improvisations.
It is also interesting and useful to break the cast into groups, each
working separately on the same scenes, which they later present to

each other, even if their character does not appear in that scene. The
Russian director Boris Zakhava notes that: “Actors exploring each
other’s texts and character will gain an overall grasp of the play. Actors
too often have no interest in scenes in which their characters do not
appear.”13
• Improvisations beyond the script: Mostly a script refers to situations
and conflicts that are not part of the actual plot. These situations
might be conflicts that happened in the past or in moments other
than during the events that are portrayed on stage. During the study
and exploration phase of the rehearsal period, improvisations around
these situations will contribute to the actor’s understanding of their
character and of the script.
Directors can place a certain scene in another time and setting as
an improvisation exercise. A scene from a fairytale-like script can be
placed in Nazi Germany during World War II. A scene can be acted
out in a jail instead of a living room. Or it could be in a monastery, a
disco, a spaceship, a nightmare or in the Stone Age. The director can
stimulate and influence the course of an improvisation by sending a
new actor into the situation to play an objective which will produce
a new conflict. You can introduce new props or add music to change
the colour of a situation. All these improvisations can generate energy,
colour and emotions, and can help in the seasoning process of the
actor and exploring the situation on stage.
Games during rehearsals

Some basic exercises and games can help the actor to acquire total body
response. This means that all parts of the body are engaged in the total
expression of the actor. Total body response activates the body as an
instrument of expression. You could improvise a scene in Gibberish (a
made-up language of meaningless sounds substituted for recognisable
words) so as to force the actors to communicate by making everything
physical, i.e. showing, not telling. Use contact improvisations in which
13 Zakhava, B.E. (1983) “Principles of directing”. In Cole, Toby (ed.) Acting: A

Handbook of the Stanislavski Method. Crown, New York.

the actors focus on the sensory impact of their characters with one another
and the visual involvement with props and the set. Some directors use
animal improvisations to provide a physical and gestural sense of the
characters when they are working on developing character. You can use
games like dance or space exercises to release spontaneity and create flow
as these remove static body movements and bring the actors together
physically.
Impasse
What can you do if you as a director have done everything but still the
actor is not on the track of independent creativity? You have analysed
the scene and the character, you have explained, you have inspired, you
have used different improvisations and put all your energy into the work,
but still you feel it is not coming to life or you find that falsehood and
artificial acting has crept in. First you need to try to analyse what has
caused the problem before pointing a finger at the actor. When guilt
creeps into the rehearsal process it stops any creative process. Creating
art and considering the question of who is to blame if it doesn’t work
simply don’t go together.
Sometimes, when a problem with the actor arises, it has to do with
the script in combination with your concept. Or it has to do with weak
parts of the script that you are dealing with. You should have solved
this with the writer before starting the rehearsals, but sometimes you
are not aware of weak parts in the script that give the actor trouble
bringing them to life before the rehearsals start. If the script is the
problem, then you will have to rewrite or restructure a scene and try
again. Sometimes your concept and a specific scene do not match and
give the actor trouble. Remember that a concept is a tool to guide the
work, don’t be too absolute. Realise that where the concept doesn’t
work you have to adapt it. Don’t ask the impossible from your actors.
A concept that doesn’t come to life doesn’t communicate with the
audience.
Boris Zakhava describes parts of the impasse very clearly: “Before
assuming that the obstacle to creative work lies in the actor, it would be

useful for the director to thoroughly check himself to see if the impasse
may not be his own fault.”14
There are some mistakes that inexperienced directors make, having
to do with the management of the creative process of rehearsing, giving
too much space to the actors and not directing them, and causing
uncertainty for the actors about the way the director wants to go. Actors
need direction; we are not dealing with a democratic process in which
everyone can come up with their own concepts and ideas. Of course,
suggestions are welcome, but finally you as a director have to make
choices. If you don’t make those choices, you will end up in an artistic
vacuum.
Every director has to learn to handle the actors by giving them freedom
but also staying in control of the concept and the given circumstances of
the stage and rehearsal time. These director’s skills take years to learn,
and by trial and error you will find the balance that suits you best.
Another common mistake is a director overloading his actors with
research, history, backgrounds and philosophy. Remember that a director
has to make actors act and not only understand.
The director should facilitate the actor’s understanding of why the
character needs to be on stage and how to bring that motivation to life.
The actor has to search close to his or her own experience and personality,
the justification for every action on stage. The director must be sure that
nothing remains obscure to the actor. Personal talks outside the rehearsal
time, giving the actor who struggles some quality time, often work to
solve this kind of problem.
Peithman and Offen15 write about succeeding with difficult actors.
They are very clear that this problem is usually a discipline issue that can
occur in any creative learning process between a coach and a student.
Sometimes the behaviour of an actor can interfere with the process of
creating the show. At that moment you must make a decision to stop that
specific behaviour.
14 Zakhava, B.E. (1983) “Principles of directing”. In Cole, Toby (ed.) Acting: A

Handbook of the Stanislavski Method. Crown, New York.
15 Peithman, S. & Offen, N. (eds.) (1999) Stage Directions Guide to Directing.
Heinemann, Portsmouth.

Difficult actors come in many guises: the cross-examiner whose
questions and suggestions begin to disrupt the rehearsal process; the
antagonist who is not only questioning your directing in front of others
but also makes jokes or negative comments; the unprepared one who
doesn’t remember blocking or who ‘forgets’ to work on his lines; the
latecomer; and the show-off.
As a director you should make it a rule that you talk with difficult actors
outside the rehearsal time and not in front of the others; simply tell
them to stop their behaviour and contribute in a constructive way to the
process and your direction.
Prince Lamla talks about working with actors who are struggling to
do what you as a director are asking of them:
I think if an actor is unable to take direction, it means that there is

something a director is not communicating clearly to the actor.
Sometimes maybe an actor’s mind left the moment for a second or two
and that eventually becomes a challenge. So as a director that is why
patience and how you engage your actors to the work is critical. You
always have to continuously search for the truth and depth of each
moment together with the actor. Sometimes you can’t find answers
on the spot. It takes time. And sometimes the answers are discovered
when the play is already on in a theatre. Or the worst part would be
not to find the answers throughout the project. Maybe you might find
those answers later in your life. Theatre is spiritual. You never finish
discovering moments or directing a play.16
This approach suggests that a director’s work is never done, and there is
always time to learn new lessons from and in your own work.

How to deal with criticism
Over a long rehearsal process you will probably have lost the distance to
reflect on the show, and you need that distance to be able to analyse your
work and grow. Asking for criticism is a way to create that distance and
to start thinking about new work.
Getting critical feedback on your work during the after-party of the
first night of your show is never nice and can often be irritating. It is not
the best moment to deal with criticism, and most people know this, so
we are only used to praising one another. On an opening night people
usually don’t tell you directly if and why they don’t like your show. They
may tell each other, but they do not give this feedback directly to you.
As a director you must understand that you need to reflect on what
you have done to be able to improve your work. This means you must
actively ask for critical feedback from people whom you trust. You
don’t have to ask every audience member what he or she thinks, but
select those people who you are sure will be honest in their positive and
negative criticism.
You don’t have to do this on your opening night. A day or two after
the show, you can contact people and ask for feedback. Make a list of
relevant questions. What struck them about the piece? What feelings did
they leave the theatre with? What was the most powerful moment of the
show, and what was the weakest? What did they think about the casting?
Ask them to be critical and not to cover you with praise. You don’t need
to make changes based on all of their suggestions, but it is useful to get
a new professional perspective on the work, and then to weigh up how
making changes will have an impact on the piece.
The director and the stage

A painter will direct the eyes of the viewer of his or her work towards a
specific person, object or space of the painting. Painters do this through
the composition of the image. A theatre director has to do the same –

when this is not done, the audience is lost. Even when the acting is good,
the audience doesn’t know where to look, they don’t see who is speaking.
In film and television we use a camera to create emphasis. With the
camera we are able to bring the eyes of the audience close to a face of a
character. In theatre we have a live audience and need another method
to direct the eyes of the audience. This is where theatre directing and
directing for film differs – you need another set of laws, skills and
methods. A theatre director has different ways to centre the attention
of his audience and let it move over the stage. How does he make that
happen? He uses body position, levels, areas and contrast – it looks
simple and it works.
Director Greg Homann comments that: “Theatre is so much a visual
medium, especially in South Africa, where the relationship with the
English language is very complex; the need to communicate visually is
strong.”17
Every student theatre director has to learn the characteristics of their
material and the set of laws belonging to the work on the stage. You need
to understand how and where you arrange the actors in the set and how
and when they move to a different place on the stage.
Composition
Composition is the structure, form or design of a group of actors on
stage. Every composition has an emphasis and will focus the attention
of the audience and arouse a certain emotion. For every moment
in a scene, a director has to find a suitable composition to be able to
communicate the particular emotion of that moment to the audience.
All those compositions of blocking one after another in a certain rhythm
and tempo create the flow of the show. Besides the acting of your cast,
composition is a director’s tool to express feeling and mood of a scene
through colour, line, mass and form. Composition doesn’t tell the story,
but it is the director’s technique to create clarity and beauty.
Through certain strong actions and positions, actors can take the
attention of the audience; others will give away attention through weak
17 Interview with Greg Homann. Twijnstra, R., 2013.

positions or actions. Giving and taking attention is a way to create emphasis
in a composition and to direct the eyes of the audience. We have to make
sure that the audience sees what we want it to see at a certain moment. Ways
to take attention on stage are the same ways we try to attract someone’s
attention in real life. These might be to walk towards someone, talk louder,
make an active body movement, open your body position, or to climb
onto a chair or a table. The most common ways to give away attention are
to walk away from someone, be silent, turn your back to someone, look at
someone else, or to sit on a chair or on the ground.
Body position
According to the position the actor has towards the audience, the
character’s value is stronger or weaker. That doesn’t mean it is good
or right, but the value is the amount of attention the actor gets when
everything else is removed, when there is no set, no light, no costume,
not being high or low, close or far from the audience, not even the body
and facial expression of the actor.
All these other factors modify the value of the body position. They
can build up a weak body position or soften a strong one. Basically there
are five body positions.
1. Full frontal position is very strong.
2. One-quarter-turned-away position (over left or over right) is still
strong but less so than full front.
3. The profile, or half-turned position (over left or over right) is less
strong.
4. The three-quarter-turned-away position (over left or over right) is
weak; it is the only really weak position.
5. The full-back position is as strong as the profile, but other things
being equal, not as strong as the one-quarter turn.
Two people on stage having an argument, who are placed close together,
give a totally different feeling from when you place them far apart. When
you place one with their back to the audience and the other in an open
position, the emphasis and the general feeling is different than when we

see them both in an open position facing the audience. Positioning your
actors will make the audience feel a certain way about them.
Different body positions of the actor towards the audience. By Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
Stage areas
When we look from above down onto the stage, we divide the space into
six areas: three downstage (close to the audience) and three upstage (at
the back of the stage floor). In the centre area, we will have one downstage
area, and one upstage area. Stage left and stage right are always described
as being seen from the actor on stage facing the audience.

Different areas, their strengths and the lateral side lines. By Roel Twijnstra, 2014.
As a director, you need to see and realise that centre stage is the strongest
position and that downstage is a stronger area, because it is closer to
the audience than the upstage position. Also we’ll see that the right side
positions are stronger that the left side positions.
All other modifying factors are left out when we rank the strength of
the areas as follows:
1. Down centre
2. Down right
3. Down left
4. Up centre
5. Up right
6. Up left

When you place an actor in these areas, you will see that up right and
up left are so weak that you probably won’t use them for important
moments and scenes, unless you modify their value with a higher level
or other factors such as lighting.
What is the reason behind these different values? The difference
between up and downstage is a simple one – someone close to us attracts
more attention than someone far away. When someone from ten metres
away slowly walks towards us, we feel that the attention we give this
person becomes stronger and stronger. We are more alert when someone
comes closer; it has to do with our survival reflex.
The reason that right areas are stronger than left ones has to do with
our eyes and how we are used to reading. In the West, we read from left
to right and also by looking at images our eyes go from left to right. This
theory is also tested in some Asian cultures, where people read from right
to left. You can see the same phenomenon in the traditional blocking of
theatre in these cultures, where the left areas (seen from the actor’s point
of view facing the audience) are considered stronger than the right areas
of the stage.
Levels
By levels, we mean the height of an actor above the stage floor. From
weak to strong, we can rank these as:
1. Lying down on the floor
2. Sitting on the floor
3. Sitting in a chair
4. Standing
5. Standing on a block or rostrum
6. Standing on a table or on steps
The basic rule is: the higher the position, the stronger the position of the
actor.
The king is seated high; his servant kneels down on the floor.
When you have something important to tell, you jump on a table.
The revolutionary making his speech climbs on top of a car. But when
everyone is standing and one is lying on the ground, that one will attract

all the attention. In this case, the law of contrast is stronger than the
ranking of positions mentioned above.
The position a character has tells something about that character.
Some people always sit on the best chair; other people are uncertain
entering a space with a lot of people, and end up standing at the side.
A theatre director creating a composition for a scene tries to make clear
what the characters in a certain scene are up to, what their relationship
is, where the emphasis of the scene is, and where the audience’s attention
should be.
Making a composition, using body positions, areas and levels is a first
step in communicating with an audience without using any text or body
language and expression of the actor.
Law of contrast
When all actors are standing on stage in an open (strong) body position,
facing the audience, and one is with his back to the audience, that one
gets more emphasis that the others although his body position is a weak
one. The law of contrast is stronger than the ranking of the value of body
position. When all the actors are put in one area, let’s say downstage
right, and one is placed far from them in upstage left, that one actor will
get all the attention, even though the area in which he is placed usually
has a weaker value. The exception always attracts our attention.
Emphasis
Using body position, levels, areas and contrast, there are a lot of methods
to obtain emphasis and there are different types of emphasis. The direct
emphasis brings the focus of the image to one person, but often we have
to focus on more than one, to what we call dual emphasis. In some scenes
we want to shift the attention among several people.
• Dual emphasis is when the characters are arranged in a way that the
attention goes to two characters of equal importance in a scene. It
is used when the essence of a scene in the script is carried by both
people. The simplest form is when two people each take a one-quarter
body position or profile position facing each other centre stage. You

will see the actor on the stage right side is a little stronger, because he
is in a stronger area. You can balance this composition by giving the
stage left actor a full-front position, which is stronger than the profile
position. Probably you will now see that the left actor is stronger.
When you let him sit on a chair, which is a lower and weaker
level, you balance him again with the right actor. Every time one of
the actors takes a stronger position you have to balance that. You can
do that by using a stronger level (standing on the chair) or by using a
stronger area (move to central stage or come closer to the audience).
Every character will have its own way of creating emphasis.
When you want to create dual emphasis on two main characters
and there are more actors on stage, they can support one of the two
main characters: standing or sitting behind him or her, that will make
his or her value stronger. A leader always has supporters behind them;
the king always has guards and servants around and behind him. To
balance such a strong character and create dual emphasis, you can
place the strong one in a weaker area, not so close to the audience,
and have the other character in a full- and open-body position closer
to the audience.
• Secondary emphasis may look like dual emphasis, but is different. It is
an image where two characters have the focus and are important, but
the main focus goes to one and the second in importance gets focus
as well but with a weaker value. Sometimes it is a character that does
not really have lines, but his or her reactions are of importance for
what follows. Or the secondary emphasis goes to the character about
whom the scene is played.
• Diversified emphasis is the most complex form of composition. It
is a scene in which several characters are important. It can be an
ensemble scene, in which the main characters are placed on stage in
a way that the attention from the audience goes from one character to
another, and then to a third and so on. All are alternately important
and should immediately be able to take the focus of the composition
with a slight change of body position or level and without too much
movement from one part of the stage to another.

Director Greg Homann comments on this:
Space, bodies in space, and the relationship between the actors and
the environment are a primary tool for a director and strengthening
your visual sensibility by understanding composition and movement
makes for a much richer experience for the audience. Movement creates
meaning. That’s why good blocking can tell the story of the play, even
if the language being spoken is not understandable to the audience.18
Picturisation
Composition and creating emphasis is the technique, and with
pictuarisation we inject meaning. We add the storytelling quality to the
composition. It is the next step in blocking. It is not about where on stage
you put the actors, what their body position is and what levels you use. It
is also not the use of the text and the acting which comes later. It is about
the story and the relationships between the characters.
In picturisation we create storytelling pictures. Let us make an example:
when you have one table, two chairs, a sofa and a cast of two people, you
can picture the scene without adding text, movement or acting. Make a
confession, a gossiping scene, a conspiracy or a scolding. They will all
look different... you’ll place the table and the chairs in different areas and
the actors in different positions.
There are 50 or more ways to sit on a chair, so be creative and don’t
always use the same way. But more important is that of those 50 ways,
only one is the most suitable and fits best into your way of composing
and gives the meaning you want the scene to have. Nobody just sits on
a chair; someone sits in a specific way in a specific situation to obtain
something specific.
Let’s create another picture with a door, and a cast of three people;
there is no talking, no acting, just create an image of a husband and wife
saying goodbye to their son who is going to school and after that, to their
son who is going to war. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to make these
pictures, without telling, just with showing. You will recognise them and

can give them a title; the actors didn’t speak, they don’t have to explain
everything that you already know and understand.
Inexperienced actors, while improvising, often use a lot of words to
explain where they are, who they are and what they are doing. Most of that
can be left out because a director can put his actors into a composition
and picture that tells all of that without words. This is the art of directing.
Greg Homann comments that his own work is based on such pictures,
where each moment on stage should be considered as an opportunity to
create a dynamic or compositionally interesting spatial arrangement:
Imagine that a photographer could take a photo of the performance at

any point in the play and ask yourself if what they might capture will
be visually appealing. The challenge in this is to think about how levels
are being used, how the actors’ bodies in space are positioned, how they
are positioned in relation to each other, and how the actors are engaging
with the set, furniture and props they are working with. In short, would
that photograph of that particular moment tell the story of the action at
that exact moment?19
Homann recommends an activity of creating tableaus in the rehearsal

period, where the actors create these pictures with their bodies, and then
the audience, who is observing this tableau, is asked to analyse what
they are reading as the story of this picture. He sees this as a way to make
meaning in the work:
It is amazing how much information we are able to get by really

considering the eye-line of the actor, the way each person is sitting,
standing or lying on the floor, and the difference between half a metre
to the left or by moving one person one metre away from another.20
19 Interview with Greg Homann. Durden, E., 2013


Seven steps in creating picturisation
To create meaningful pictures for your work, you can use the seven steps
below (adapted from Dean and Carra).21
1. Analyse the scene for purpose, for the objectives for the characters and
give the scene a title, for instance: ‘A scene of revenge’, ‘Confession
of love’, ‘Unjust accusation’, ‘Feelings of guilt’, ‘Angry confrontation’,
‘Everyone suspects one another’, ‘Scene of extreme physical violence’
and ‘A mother talks to her dead son’.
2. Try to describe the mood of the scene, for instance: nervousness,
unrest, awareness, great formality, informal, intimacy, romantic,
depression, etc. When the title of your scene is ‘Everyone suspects
one another’, the mood could be nervousness or unrest.
3. Try to express the mood described above in terms of composition,
such as line, mass and form. Is it compact, diffused, large or small,
regular or irregular, flat or deep? In your scene with the title ‘Everyone
suspects one another’, you might use irregular body positions,
diversified emphasis (focus is not on one person) and isolation in
space, using different areas and levels.
4. Think about the set, exits, entrances, light, colours and costumes.
Create the dramatic space (set) in which the scene takes place.
Identify the social background of the characters, the time of the day
and season. Are the characters of your scene ‘Everyone suspects one
another’ gangsters meeting at night in a murky hide out? Or politicians
at a social function?
5. Place your characters roughly in the dramatic space. Picturise your
scene now as an image.
6. Next, focus on the individual actors, coach them and use their
instinctive reactions. How will they use their emotions to create body
language and express their individual attitudes? When you put two
rivals that are about to kill each other close together, their emotions
and reflexes will be different from when you place them far apart.
7. Finally on top of all of that, the actors use their dialogue and they act.
21 Dean, A. & Carra, L. (1941) Fundamentals of Play Directing. Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, New York.

In these seven steps, we worked from the general to the specific. The
actors will feel supported for their acting by their place in the picture.
They will understand the relationships they have with the other
characters on stage at that moment. The director can now give the actors
space to use their talent. Through this process of providing composition,
emphasis and picturisation, you are able to support and coach the actors
and give them all they need to make the scene come alive, to create the
magic of living theatre on stage.
Dramatic space, the set a play-world

Dramatic space is more than a set. It is a play-world, a specific architecture
and landscape, with specific levels, exits and entrances, a floor pattern,
light and design. The actors are exploring and using this play-world,
the play-world adds meaning to the scenes of the play, and the actors
are in constant dialogue with this world. It is not a dead background for
the actors; it must be seen as an extra character or actor to whom the
characters must relate.
When you as a director are envisioning or designing your play-world,
realise you are creating a new universe. Anne Bogard who created the
Viewpoint method says:
Rather than take for granted that the reality of the play will be the same
as our everyday reality, work with an attitude that anything in this
play-world can be invented from scratch. The play-world is the set of
laws belonging to your piece and no other. Every culture has its own
rules, spoken or not, as does every household, every relationship, every
landscape.22
Neil Coppen considers this creation of a new world a vital element of his
work, akin to the ‘Total Theatre’ of Peter Schaffer who describes theatre
as an all-encompassing and visceral medium:
22 Bogard, A. & Landau, T. (2005) The Viewpoints Book. Theatre Communications

Group New York.

Visually I work with textures. I love the word ‘materiality’. The world
we exist in and move through is full of textures, sounds and sensations
that I try to explore/reference/evoke in the more static confines of the
traditional theatre space. Often organic materials employed in the design
such as sand, water, shadow, etc. allow me to explore this. Similarly
textures are always considered in the lighting, performance, design and
sound design. It’s about creating a multi-dimensional universe.
Theatre is live. It’s a living, breathing, experiential and immediate
entity. We must use this immediacy to our advantage, immerse
audiences in our characters’ worlds and universes so that when they
stumble into the night post-show, they quite literally feel they have
journeyed somewhere, transcended their bodies for an hour or two. We
must work very hard not to bore audiences, which is a daunting task
when you consider how technology and social media have impacted on
all our attention spans.23
Part of this play-world is created by the director and the designers, as

physical objects on stage, and part of it is created by the actors themselves
in their heads. Stanislavski suggested that concentration was one of the
most important tools for the actor to be able to act. To help the actor he
created the notion of ‘the circles of concentration’. The first circle is the
environment very close to the actor, the costume they are wearing, the
chair they are sitting on, personal props in reach. The second circle of
concentration is the environment around the actor that they can see, the
room they are in, the window, the walls. The third circle of concentration
is what’s beyond and mostly not visible on stage: the city, the country, the
woods, the civil war that is going on.
Every actor starts concentrating in the first circle and from there takes
the second and the third. In that way, the actor will become part of the
environment and feel secure and act from that physical environment.
Viola Spolin24 uses the three circles of Stanislavski and calls them

24 Spolin, V. (1977) Improvisations for the Theatre. Northwestern University Press,
Illinois.

three kinds of ‘wheres’. She distinguishes between the direct where (first
circle), the visible where (second circle) and that which is beyond (third
circle). Improvising actors can use impulses from the three different
wheres. For instance, two brothers talking about holiday plans might be
asked to focus on their mother who is dying in another part of the city
that is not visible on stage (that which is beyond, i.e. third circle).
As on stage, also in daily life we constantly have connection with
‘what is beyond’. This can be anything, someone you left behind in a
country far away, ambitions for the future or dreams. Spolin states that
for every actor’s every moment on stage, you should be aware of the
three circles of concentration, the three different wheres. That also means
every dramatic space or set must have those three circles.
Thinking about a set, you should think about those three levels. A
room in a house in the jungle will look different to a room in a town
house during the war, or a room from a shack in Sophiatown in the
1960s. A good set design pulls the third circle, ‘That what’s beyond’ into
the second and first circle and makes it visible, not only for the audience
but also for the actor to be able to have a point of concentration.
Every dramatic space has points of projection. Those are elements
that mean something and can be used for a certain action. They are
points in the set on which the actor can project his acting. A window
is a good example. You can walk towards it, look outside, open it and
climb through it, or close the curtains. A door or a bed can be used as
projection points. They make the acting dynamic and give meaning to
the blocking. The art of set design is to place the projection points in
space in a way that they support the story, the theme, or the conflict of
the scene so that they create dynamic movement.

Option 1 has placed the projection points (door, bed and window) close to each other.
Option 2 shows them further apart, creating a dynamic space. By Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
If the two characters are close to the door, the man really wants to get
out and the woman blocks his way out with her body or by locking the
door. When they are sitting on the bed, the woman gets more what she
wants, which is for him to stay. The two projection points (door and bed)
in the set will help the actors move according to their inner conflict. You
can even add a third point, a window in the middle, from which you can
look outside, a point between leaving and staying.
The dramatic space consists of the three wheres that Spolin talks
about, as well as the set which influences the acting style and the
audience’s response to the play. For the rest a dramatic space is made of:

• Solid mass: Furniture, rostrums, natural blocks, walls, floors, ceilings,
windows and doors. A set with different levels helps the director to
create more variation in their compositions.
• Texture: Is it made by wood, paper or metal? Is the floor covered with
little stones or a painted design? The texture determines the kind of
movement the actors have.
• Light: The lighting is part of the dramatic space. Where does it come
from? Windows, doors? Are the theatre spots visible or not? How does
the light create shadows? Shadows and darkness are as important
as light on the stage. Neil Coppen comments: “Using shadows on
stage (be it through puppetry, creating negatives or duplicating the
silhouette of the live performer, etc.) is wonderful because it suggests
things without overstating or illustrating them.”25
• Sound: This is created by the dramatic space, such as the iron bars of
a jail, small stones on the ground, and the creak of a door.
Considering these four elements, you will now be able to finalise (in
our example) the set of the man and the woman in their conflict. You
could, for instance, create the room in a basement and make that visible
by the window placed in the middle high in the wall, where only the
feet of passersby are visible. You could also place the door on the left
side and add a few steps to go down into this basement. This way, you
create more levels which make it easier to create variety in composition
and emphasis. The basement is a safe but dark, oppressive and stuffy
environment giving a specific meaning to the scene.
The different projection points can be used by the actors. She can
exclude the outside world by locking the door, closing the window
and the curtains and putting some candles around the bed. When he
finally leaves, he opens the window and interacts with the anonymous
characters walking outside. He will open the door with their help, a lot of
light comes in; she hides under a blanket on the bed. In this way, layers of
meaning are created through the actor’s interaction with the set, without
the need for any dialogue.

A possible set with projection points in a dynamic space, based on the theme of the story.
By Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
Placing of the audience

Where to put your audience is usually not a question, as the chairs in a
formal theatre are often in a fixed position and so is the stage. But it is
important to remember that the position of the audience is a choice that
affects the way in which the audience receives the play.
The classical proscenium position is common in theatre buildings,
and creates distance between the audience and the stage, and backdrops
and exits and entrances are possible. Many venues allow a circus or other
position, like a catwalk with the audience on two sides. This increases
the distance between the audience and the stage, the audience doesn’t
only see the show but also sees one another. Circus theatre doesn’t have
a lot of options for entrances and exits, and backdrops or large set pieces
that obscure or block vision are not used. The question to ask is: what
suits your show best? It is clear that the position of the audience gives the
show a particular significance.
The most-used position is the proscenium one with the show in front
of the audience. However, if you use this, you automatically create a

sense of distance between you and your audience. There is an imagined
‘fourth wall’ to the action, which they as the audience are being allowed
to see through. Is this the effect that you want to create? Perhaps you
would like to change the audience seating arrangements so that they are
brought closer to the life of the play.
Neil Coppen comments on the effect of the fourth wall on the
audience:
I’m not such a fan of the idea of the fourth wall, the rather Victorian
idea that we the audiences are simply voyeurs, passively eavesdropping
on stories. I prefer to demolish this wall entirely and make the audience
participants, to reel them in and let the story surround them.
Theatre should and can stimulate all the senses. Cinema can’t quite
do this in that the story is pre-recorded and sealed (for all time) behind
a screen.26
Re-envisioning where the audience is placed can have a great impact on

how the piece works with the audience. Sometimes a venue is created in
a way where the audience is sitting in an arena, a half circle, around the
stage, and the action of the show has moved a little into the audience.
This arrangement breaks down barriers between the actors and the
audience. It can make your theatre seem more alive, immediate and
arresting for the audience. Backdrops are possible in this set-up, as are
exits and entrances.
In the classical circus position, the audience is in a circle around the
play. A lot of street theatre works like that as well, where the audience
gathers around the action in a circle. This is often known as ‘theatre in
the round’. When you play in a circus position, the audience will always
see the audience on the other side, you can’t use a back drop, there are
no exits and entrances, your blocking should be made different, and you
must use the circle and play around it. That might add meaning to your
show in a way you like. Bheki Mkhwane and Ellis Pearson have used this
format in many of their works, and the audience sitting around in a circle
is included in their stories like villagers at a village meeting.

Different options for the positioning of the audience. By Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
There are many more positions and answers to the question about where
to put the audience. Jerzy Grotowski27 thought that for every show there
should be a different position for the audience, because every show is
different. Just as every show has a different set, costumes, cast and text,
so should every show have its own audience position. In the staging of
his Dr Faustus, the audience was seated on both sites of a long table and
the actors played on top and around it. In another show, Kordian, the set
was an insane asylum with beds and chairs, and the audience was seated
in the set, on the beds and the chairs.
27 Grotowski, J. (1968) Towards a Poor Theatre. Odin Teatrets Forlag, Denmark.

Positions according a set of Grotowsky. Actors (black) audience (white). From Grotowski, J.
(1968) Toward a poor theatre (p 51). Odin Teatrets Forlag, Denmark.
Brett Bailey, who makes many of his works outside of the conventional
theatre space makes his audience part of the set, sometimes sitting in a
waiting room of a train station (Terminal, 2011) or activating them by
walking through the action. He notes:
The audience–performer relationship is one of the primary elements

in the conceptualisation of a work. I don’t like the audience to be
in a passive situation, as they generally are in a theatre – sitting in
comfortable seats in the dark. That is great for movies, but generally,
as far as theatre goes, it doesn’t work for me. I generally take audiences
out of their ‘comfort zones’ to locations in the wilderness or in ‘found
spaces’ – old churches, warehouses, abandoned buildings… I like the
audience to walk; to remain silent; to smell fire and damp; to stumble
in the dark; to be involved in something in which they are active. I also
like small, intimate situations, with small audiences. This makes the

whole experience much more rich and special, and the engagement
more complete.28
For his work Exhibit B, Brett explains that 25 spectators for each show
have to wait in a stuffy, cramped room in silence until their number
is called. One by one they enter the performance, which is a series of
installations in which performers stare back at them. Brett comments on
this deliberate separation of the performer and the audience:
The spectators don’t know where to look. They want to look, but they
are uncomfortable at being watched. The emotions that arise are very
profound, very intimate. The real drama occurs between each individual
spectator and the performer who is confronting him or her with their
gaze. It’s very intense for all parties involved.29
Movement, rhythm and tempo

Movement
Movement is created when you go from image to image. But movement is
not only a necessary evil. The way you move from image to image can be
done in different ways, fast or slow, so it has a tempo that can differ from
moment to moment, besides the fact that it also has a rhythm.
The set of laws we used for composition come from the visual arts.
When we are talking about movement, we use a set of laws coming from
dance. How do you find movement, tempo and rhythm in a written text?
Gerhard Ebert gives an exercise called ‘Zug um zug’ that makes clear how
to connect movement and a written dialogue.30
On the floor, in a circle with a diameter of six metres, you mark nine
points by putting white A4 pages on the ground; it is a circle of eight and
with one page in the centre.
28 Interview with Brett Bailey. Durden, E., 2013.

29 Interview with Brett Bailey. Durden, E., 2013.
30 Ebert, G. (1985) Handbuch der schauspieler-ausbildung. Henschelverlag, Leinen.

“Zug um zug” From Schauspielen (1985) Ebert, G. Hanover, Henselverlag.
Starting with a dialogue for two actors, the two choose a position on one
of the white papers. While reading the lines, they are allowed to move
from one paper to another (see the arrows).
The reactions of the two actors follow the principle of:
1. Perceive
2. Estimate/guess
3. React
The one who speaks first makes the first move to another piece of paper,
and after that the other actor can move. Not moving is also a choice.
The movement that comes out of the pattern makes it clear what the
relationship between the two is. Are they circling around each other? Is
one constantly trying to escape? You will see that movement can make
the acting vivid and animated, and it can tell the audience about the

content of the relationship between the characters, the emotions and the
purpose of the scene.
The audience should not feel that movement is created in a technical
way. They should not think that a director has told the actors to move to
a certain spot; they must simply follow the characters and their actions.
An actor must find legitimacy of movement through the character and
not simply move because a director gave an instruction to move. Ask the
actor: “Why did you move?” When the response is: “You told me to”, you
need to get the actor to find a reason through the character, which is part
of the job of the actor.
Rhythm
Rhythm is one of the most difficult parts of directing because it is difficult
to describe. It must be understood in an intuitive way. Rhythm is linked
to two basic biological processes, heartbeat and respiration. These are
rhythmic processes having to do with vitality and life.
Our fundamental feeling for rhythm might have to do with structured
sequence instead of total chaos. For the audience it is easy to relate to
rhythm to take over (dance) or to enjoy it in music. Rhythm is important
for a theatre director to create atmosphere, ambience and mood. Rhythm
ties together and blends all parts of the play. Every character has its own
rhythm, every scene has a distinct rhythm, and every show as a whole
has one.
An intimate erotic scene has a different rhythm from a political debate.
Adding the rhythm of a show is usually done at the end of the directing
process, to add the right colours, to orchestrate the different scenes at
the right pace, to add moments of silence and standstill, to speed up, or
slow down moments. Now the director is more like a music conductor.
Director Pusetso Thibedi notes how theatre rhythm is influenced by
music:
The rhythm, for me, is the flow and approach of the piece, the actual
journey that the audience is taken on. When an audience watches a
piece they are fully engaged with the rhythm of the story. Even a piece

without any sound has a specific rhythm to it. The entire journey, be it
emotional or physical, is determined by a set rhythm that the company
of artists have created to tell the story.
The rhythm in the script is dictated by the relationship between
characters (dialogue, moments, silences, speaking over each other,
listening or not listening), the stakes of each scene (what are we
building towards? Is it climatic or anticlimactic?). I discover the rhythm
for myself as a director and try to see if it’s comfortable/uncomfortable,
interesting or boring for an audience. I then encourage the actors/
performers to discover their own rhythms with the script. If I have a
live musician or composed music, the music needs to make rhythmic
sense with the story. Then we all jam and try to make it work.31
The definition of the rhythm of a scene or a show is simple but also

subjective. You will find that the scenes you made already have an
indication of a rhythm in the same way they have certain emotional
tones and colours. Rhythm also comes from the written text. Amy Jephta
uses repetition and strong rhythm in her work. Talking about her mentor
Sandra Temmingh she says:
She works with a specific heightened language and taught me not to

fear it and work with the possibilities of the stage, not turning it into
a kitchen sink. To tell the story with space and repetition, with poetry
and elevated language.32
Talking colours and visual arts, you’ll find that a certain show has
pastel tones and light shades, another has strong bright colours or is
a black-and-white charcoal drawing. Rhythm can also be described as,
for instance ‘monotone ticks of a clock’, ‘the lightning and thunder of a
storm’, or ‘the waves of the surf against the rocky coast’. The rhythm of
the show has to do with the type of show you want to make. A comedy
has a different rhythm from a tragedy or a farce or a melodrama.

32 Interview with Amy Jephta. Twijnstra, R., 2013.

When you direct, you need to add rhythmic assignments to your
coaching. For instance make sure where a scene starts, how it develops,
where the story leads you and where it ends – describe all that for the
actors in terms of rhythm. Know how many heartbeats the dialogue has,
and when it changes to another tone or theme.
You need to know how rhythm glues different scenes together. The
scene changes and transitional moments are also part of the rhythm, you
can’t stop the flow. The pauses and silences that the actors take should
never be longer than the rhythm of the scene breaks. The actor who is in
two connecting scenes is responsible for keeping the rhythm; he or she
can continue the rhythm while a new character entering the scene can
change the rhythm. Actors must become aware that rhythm is a collective
process in which everyone can have their own colour. Just like different
musicians in a band who have to stick with the basic pace and rhythm,
adding their own sound.
Tempo
With tempo we build a scene, we need to know where to accelerate the
tempo and build to a climax. Starting from the basic rhythm of a scene,
you slowly accelerate the tempo until you reach the climax, without
breaking the basic rhythm. You can do this through the volume of the
voices increasing, a clearer articulation which makes the words more
intense. Write shorter lines; use staccato, no more pauses; let the actors
already start their line in the last part of the line of the actor before him;
be more alert in the acting. The movement of the actors increases. Sounds
and effects grow with the intensity of the acting. “In working on tempo
the focus is not on what the action is but on how fast or slow the action
is preformed: awareness of speed.”33
The rhythmic pattern due to variations in tempo becomes an important
frame and context of your show. A successful show is a journey that
pulls an audience like a magnet. There are moments where your path
becomes abrupt and steep; there are moments of rest in a valley; there
33 Bogart, A. & Landau, T. (2005) The Viewpoints Book. Theatre Communications

Group, New York.

are moments to breathe; and moments of intense effort and stress. The
rhythm and tempo are not constantly the same during the journey – it is
a sequence of variations that makes for an overall rich experience.

PART 3
Workshopping
a Script
This part of the book focuses on the development

of new work together with a team of actors. It
explores the notion of workshopped theatre in
the South African context, and provides a simple
model for workshopping a new play.
Dramatic texts, whether published or not, are not the only source
for creating theatre. We have a treasure chest of beautifully written texts
dealing with strong stories and well-constructed plots from the ancient
Greeks, to Shakespeare, from comedies to theatre of cruelty, political
theatre, you name it and it will be there. For every theatre director,
reading plays and reading about plays is most important, not only to
find one that you might want to stage, but also to learn how plots are
constructed and how characters are created through conflict.
There can be different reasons not to choose one of these pre-existing
scripts, but rather to create a new play in collaboration with the actors.
We call this workshop theatre. Workshop theatre often begins with a group
of actors coming together around a theme that they are passionate about.
These themes can vary from the political to the social or personal issues
and topics. There are many ways and methods to workshop a play. It can
be a collective or more directorial process. In this book, we focus on the
directorial method of workshop theatre, where the process is driven by
the director.
In South Africa, the term workshop theatre is often used in connection
with the political plays made in the past. Some people use the more
neutral term devised theatre, but we prefer to use workshop theatre because
it conjures up images of working together to create something.
South Africa has a strong tradition of workshop theatre. Some of the
well-known South African classics like Woza Albert and many of the early
plays of the Serpent Players, in which Athol Fugard collaborated with
John Kani and Winston Ntshona, were created as workshop theatre in
the 1980s.
The successful musical Sophiatown was created in collaboration with
the actors in a workshop process in 1985, the group included Angus
Gibson, Ruth Jacobson, Liz Johansson, William Kentridge, Siphiwe
Khumalo, Ramolao Makhene, Doreen Mazibuko, Arthur Molepo, Gladys
Mothale, Malcolm Purkey, Sarah Roberts, Tessa Sargo, Minky Schlesinger
and Pippa Stein. Many of these artists and theatre makers are still active
in the theatre industry today.
The reason for this strong workshopping tradition might be that
at that time, during the height of apartheid repression, there were few

existing texts that dealt with political issues, due to censorship. Few
playwrights were able to address the political and social issues that these
theatre creators wanted to talk about and share with their audiences.
Pieter-Dirk Uys’s plays were consistently banned from 1975 onwards,
and so he simply stopped writing them down. The strong oral tradition
of storytelling also contributed to those creations. All these processes of
workshopping were different, some started with a clear idea about the
story and plot, others like those directed by Barney Simon began “with a
director, a group of actors and a blank sheet of paper.”1
In many instances, the workshopping process was a coming together
of different skills and ideas to create something new and surprising.
Between 1993 and 2008, the KwaZulu-Natal-based actors Bheki
Mkhwane and Ellis Pearson created a unique style of physical theatre,
which theatre lecturer Veronica Baxter notes from their very different
respective backgrounds, training and experiences: “Mkhwane brought
the perspective of township theatre and Zulu traditional storytelling,
while Pearson contributed his training with Jacques Lecoq and local
university drama education.”2
Over a period of 15 years of close collaboration, they developed a
method of workshopping that has some universal phases of all workshop
theatre. Theirs could be described in the following steps.
• The process begins with settling on a theme, such as internecine
violent taxi war (as in Skadonk), or the racial division of the poverty
gap and colonialism (as in The Hungry) or corrupt officialdom (as in
The Hidden).
• Out of this theme, they would construct a strong basic idea, with
dramatic potential, meaning a story with a conflict written down in
one or two sentences with stock characters. For instance, Boy Called
Rubbish tells the story of a young boy who lives with an abusive
stepmother. Rubbish decides to run away and the play follows his
1 Simon, B. (1997) Born in the RSA: Four Workshopped Plays.Witwatersrand

University Press, Johannesburg.
2 Baxter,V. & Aitchison, J. (2010) “Embodying ‘lightness’ in the New South
Africa – The Theatre of Ellis Pearson and Bheki Mkhwane”, South African
Theatre Journal. Vol. 24.
Workshopping a Script 177

exploits as he attempts to find a means of staying alive. Besides a
basic idea, Bheki Mkhwane explains he always seeks ‘a soul image’.
In Sitting around the Fire it was the image of the group of homeless
people sitting around the same fire every night. In most of the work
with Ellis Pearson it was the village with the stock characters. A ‘soul
image’ is a strong theatrical image that is dominant in the work. You
can step away to find sidetracks, but you always come back to this
original image.
• They would then collect stories and observations that they could use
to enhance the basic idea. We’ll call this research source work.
• Physical material would then be collected around the basic idea,
including images, props and a possible set.
• Then they would start working in the rehearsal studio, creating
the piece. They would explore all the possibilities of the basic idea,
improvise, create situations, scenes and characters; constantly going
back to the source and the theme, adding songs and movements,
improvising around their own experiences and those of others. At this
stage of the work, they would not think about whether they would
eventually use this material in their show or not. They would simply
allow themselves to play as children do. They often called their style
‘Theatre of the Imagination’ in which anything could happen (and
usually did). The work relied heavily on using stock characters like
the chief, taxi driver, a priest, criminals, elders, herdsmen and girls
of marriageable age, intersected with the occasional stranger whose
economic power and cultural differences disturbed the status quo.
We’ll call this later process of building the scenes scene work.
• After an intense period of developing material, and based on what
they improvised, they would sit down around a table and write a plot
and dialogue of around 20 minutes. The piece has now a beginning,
a middle and an ending. We’ll call this table work.
• With this 20-minute piece, they would play around and discuss:
What is missing? What already feels good? What can be thrown out?
These three crucial questions lead them to create new material (scene
work) and if necessary new characters, adding situations or scenes and
throwing away what was not necessary. The questions that lead the

work should include: What furthers the story? What do we want to
tell with this show? Where should it end? Whose story are we telling?
Then you need to take out what is not necessary. Sometimes you have
to throw away a beautiful scene or moment because it doesn’t fit in
the ongoing story and what you want to express. This is known in the
process as ‘killing your darlings’ (the things you love most), as you
need to realise that they don’t fit into the piece.
• After this period they would again sit around the table, and write and
construct the first written draft of the full-length show (further table
work).
• They would then rehearse it and present it to a trusted person who
was, until that point, not involved in the work and could look with
fresh eyes at what they had created. Based on the feedback, they
would change scenes and storylines and rewrite a second draft of the
piece. That second draft would be presented to a test audience, and
again changes would be made before the show was finally considered
to be ready and have its opening performance.3
Given an overview of the working process described above, we can

identify five important phases of workshopping:
1. The starting point
2. Source work
3. Formulating a basic idea about the plot
4. Scene work
5. Table work
Phases 2, 4 and 5 are repeated a number of times during the rest of the
process.
As a director, you need to guide and facilitate the workshop process.
For this you need additional skills. You need to know how to create a
dramatic structure, starting from the theme that you and your actors are
passionate about. Dramatic structure is described in the previous chapter
about the director and the script, but now you have to create a script with
3 Interview with Bheki Mkhwane. Twijnstra, R., 2013.
Workshopping a Script 179

the actors on the floor instead of understanding and analysing an existing
script. You will need to know how to give the actors assignments for
scene work, how to further the story that develops, how to collaborate
with the actors in the writing, how to create and nurture the ensemble,
how to set common goals in rehearsal, and how to create group trust and
commitment.
We will focus on the process of directorial workshop theatre,
including tools, techniques and recipes and exploring some of the skills
listed above.

Monageng (Vice) Motshabi workshopping with Lashona Arts, 2013. Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
CHAPTER 7
The Starting
Point
I
n the beginning, there can be anything. You and your actors are
surrounded by impulses – news flashes, interviews on radio, images
in a magazine or in a gallery, observations on life around you, films,
games, novels, poems and stories from your grandmother. Everyone
carries a treasure box inside them, full of experiences, good or bad, likes
and dislikes, stories, histories and images of your loved ones and those
you hate. You have your dreams and your ambitions. Most of all you have
your imagination that can play like a child with what you are and what
is around you.
There are a few important qualifications for a starting point of a
workshopping process.
It must be something that intrigues you

You might have heard a hundred stories, but maybe one of them keeps
coming back to your mind, although you might not know why. You might
have read a thousand books, but one of them still puzzles you, you keep
referring to it, the story or a specific character intrigues you. You might
have seen the news every day for the past year, but one specific news
item haunts you, it got under your skin. Sometimes you don’t realise
what intrigues you when you start thinking about workshopping a play.
You might have chosen a theme but are still looking for a story or an
angle that intrigues you. Always use what intrigues you. Ask your actors
to write down the issues that are most urgent for them to talk about.
Exchange them and make small five-minute scenes of the most pressing
issues.
It must have dramatic potential

A fascination for garden flowers has no dramatic potential; cooking Thai
food also has none. Maybe you can use these elements for a character,
but it cannot be a starting point for a dramatic work. Maybe a cooking

competition with an unusual twist has dramatic potential or the love
affair between a gardener and his boss’s wife? A starting point with
dramatic potential includes emotions and a conflict. Without emotions
and conflict there will be no story and no characters. So the starting point
must be active.
It must generate imagination and action made

visible in images
The cooking competition and the gardener mentioned above already
create visual images. We know these characters, we know their actions.
The starting point should generate images as the main material for both
design and acting. It must be easy to think of possible actions, props and
costumes, elements of a set and stock characters.
There can be a specific question that determines the starting point
of the process. Roel Twijnstra once had a request from an opera school
to workshop a play in which all 25 students would participate and sing
at least two songs. The request also stipulated that the opera choir of 50
singers should be included. He chose not to do it as he couldn’t find an
interesting angle after finding out that the students were not interested in
making a theatre show at all.
Once a high school asked him to make a show about bullying,
which could be staged in the classroom. He did that one, using three
characters, a girl who was bullied too much and killed one of the bullies,
her mother and a rehabilitation officer from the prison where the girl was
incarcerated. He was able to create a story with action from the starting
point of the bullying theme.
Maybe a group of actors want to make a show based on the stories of
the Brazilian writer Gabriel Garcia Marques. Other actors want to make
a show based on loneliness and isolation. When the starting point is a
question that comes to you, you must still then find an entrance, a theme
and an intriguing basic idea. This idea must be able to be made visible.
Bheki Mkhwane comments:
The Starting Point 183

First you must have a certain vision of seeing something in your
head. Workshopping involves bodies in a room, but whoever is
running that workshop must have a vision in their head. Sitting
around the Fire came from the picture in my head of four people
sitting around a fire on the side of the road. You see this picture
and then you start to build it, so that the theatre moments take
shape, with the actors pushing the envelope and extending the
vision.1

Jerry Pooe creating scenes for The Famished Road, 2013. Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
CHAPTER 8
Source Work
The research
T
he research around your starting point can elevate your involvement
and inspire your imagination. It is a way of lighting the fire, and
everyone should share. Source work can be done by searching on
the internet around your starting point. Find DVDs that have a connection
with the theme and source. Read books. Dig around and find interviews,
images or novels and plays. When your starting point has connections
with a hospital, graveyard, jail or a mortuary, go there with your actors,
try and experience the environment for yourself, ask questions of those
who you have never spoken to before.
Take time for source work, and invite an expert to come to the
rehearsal and talk about the subject. The South African director Barney
Simon notes that he used to “send his cast out into the streets of
Johannesburg and Soweto, to law courts, the railway stations, the cafés,
the parks (once, even, to the abattoir), to listen and interview and return
to report what they had seen and heard.”1
Source work should be a shared process. The cast should sit together
to watch related films, videos and DVDs. They should be encouraged to
exchange personal stories. Ask performers to cut out pictures and create
an inspiration board in the rehearsal studio. This sharing is part of the
process of sparking creative ideas about how to build the show.
Theatrical aspects
After this general source work, focus on theatrical aspects. Don’t
decide on anything, but allow yourself and the group to fantasise and
brainstorm without limitations. What genre could be connected with
the theme and the starting point, a musical, vaudeville show or tragedy?
What ideas do you have for characters and acting style? Besides rounded
characters, look also for stock characters that you can find in a farce or
1 S imon, B. (1997) Born in the RSA. Witwatersrand University Press,

Johannesburg.

in the tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte. Consider whose story you
are telling. Do you follow one character or is it a mosaic from different
stories and character? Did you find any text and situations? What about
storytelling, performance art, movement and dance, music and songs?
What could be the set, the props and costumes? This is a time to consider
all of the dramatic elements that make the play stage-able.
Source Work 187

Twist Novel-Script Project, 2013. Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
CHAPTER 9
Formulating
a Basic Idea
about the Plot
B
efore you enter the next step of the process, make a selection of
the source work that you want to use and what you want to throw
away. You do this by referring to the starting point and using three
questions to help you to make the selection:
1. What feels vital and good?
2. What do you still miss? (if anything, you will need to continue with
source work)
3. What can you throw away?
After this selection, you are left with source material that you really want
to use in the show or want to explore later in improvisations. Before
you start with scene work, you need to formulate a basic idea about
the possible plot, reviewing all of the material that you have collected.
The question that you must ask yourself and the cast is: What dramatic
situations are visible in the collected source work?
Sometimes a soul image is enough to start the scene work, and the
single image allows the plot to unveil itself later during the scene work.
But even when you are working in that way, sooner or later you have to
find the story and the plot.
Every story is based on a dramatic situation. There might be more
than one in the source work. Simple dramatic situations are connected
with our emotions and conflicts. Sawyer and Weingarten, in their book
Plots Unlimited (1994), outline 21 possible dramatic situations for a plot.1
It might be helpful to see which ones are in your source material, because
these basic situations are connected with basic stories.
The plots defined by Sawyer and Weingarten include the following:

1. Starting romances
2. Romantic adventures
3. Marriage proposals
4. Rejection
5. Marriage
6. Family life
1 Sawyer, T. & Weingarten, A. D. (1994) Plots unlimited. Ashleywilde, Malibu.
Formulating a Basic Idea about the Plot 189

7. Misfortune and accidents
8. Injustice
9. Helpfulness
10. Liberation
11. Idealism
12. Obligations
13. Needs
14. Coincidence
15. Personal short comings
16. Vanity
17. Disappointment
18. Crime and immorality
19. Revenge
20. Secrets
21. Revelations
These basic situations have dramatic potential as they usually contain

characters that are in conflict. A dramatic situation is just that: a situation
with characters in conflict. From here the plot of the story unfolds.
Basic idea and basic stories

Every show is based on a script that is based on a simple idea about a
story with dramatic potential. Terry McCabe2 describes some of them.
Most of them you know, because basic ideas are used by all writers in all
times. In your workshopping process you must find them in your source
work and use them:
• Boy meets girl, boy loses girl and boy gets girl.
• An obscure person who possesses hidden qualities that lift him or her
to greatness (Cinderella, Oliver Twist, Superman, Jesus Christ, Mandela,
The Ugly Duckling).
2 McCabe, T. (2001) Mis-directing the Play. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago.

• A person who sets out on a journey or a quest and has interesting
adventures along the way (Odysseus, The Lord of the Rings, James Bond).
• A successful and powerful person that, because of unexpected
problems, falls down and loses everything he owns (Hamlet, Medea,
Oedipus).
• Two people of different social conventions or cultural backgrounds
fall in love, to find out that their closest friends and family don’t agree
and make their love impossible until death parts them (Romeo and
Juliet, Westside Story).
• A dramatic and often unresolved hidden past is destroying the present
and future ambitions of a successful, mostly powerful person. This is
the story of the explosive past, that has to come out before someone
can continue or not with his or her life (Nongogo).
These basic stories are told in hundreds of different versions, some

more detailed and complex than others. Some say there are only a small
amount of stories, those stories constantly reincarnate in other times,
cultures and shapes. These basic stories might also be part of our basic
human behaviour, our human condition. They deal with the big dramatic
themes that we have in life: love, death, success, power, survival, dreams,
ambitions or traumatic pasts.
These basic human themes present themselves in basic story lines.
They have a strong structure and are embedded in our consciousness and
unconsciousness. Writers use them, reshape them and transform them.
A theatre director must recognise and use their power. An audience will
understand, recognise and feel connected with them.
The Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806) said: “There are only
36 dramatical situations or plots, the rest is variation.” However, he never
outlined which 36 plots he believed are the basic ones. Much later, in the
20th century, the French writer Georges Polti wrote them down.3 Some
of these you’ll find in classical tragedies of the ancient Greek, others in
fairytales or traditional African stories, you can identify them in films,
television sitcoms, comics, games, history and daily news.
3 Polti, G. (1916) The Thirty-six Dramatic Situations. The Writer, Boston.

Polti’s dramatic situations were as follows:
1. A desperate appeal, a request or a plea
2. Salvation
3. Revenge
4. Revenge between relatives
5. Prosecution
6. Adversity, disaster and misfortune
7. Cruelty and accidents
8. Revolt, uprising and rebellion
9. A daring enterprise
10. Abduction
11. A puzzle or riddle
12. A demand or claim
13. Enmity and conflict between relatives
14. Love competition between relatives
15. Committing adultery ending in murder
16. Insanity
17. A fatal mistake
18. Unconscious trespassing of sexual taboos
19. Accidental killing of a friend or family member
20. Sacrificing yourself for an ideal
21. Sacrificing yourself for a beloved or family member
22. Sacrificing everything for a passion
23. The necessity to sacrifice beloved ones
24. Rivalry between a superior and a subordinate
25. Adultery
26. Sexual crimes
27. Tarnish about a mistake done in the past, painful discoveries
28. Obstacles in love
29. Falling in love with the enemy
30. Ambition
31. Conflict with a god
32. Undeserved jealousy
33. Injustice
34. Remorse and spite

35. Reunion with someone lost
36. Loss of a beloved
Polti provides, with every dramatic situation, a line of dialogue, the

necessary possible characters and an analysis of the conflict. Two
examples follow:
Situation 10 – An abduction
• Dialogue: “Let me go, bastard! Don’t touch me! I want to get out of
here! I hate you!”
• Characters: An abduction has at least four characters: the kidnapper,
the hostage, the guard or watchman, and the saver.
• Conflict: It means that against your will you have to stay somewhere
in a world you don’t know and you can’t get out on your own. Only
others can help you out.
Situation 18 – Unconscious trespassing of sexual taboos

• Dialogue: “But darling, then... then you are my sister!”
• Characters: This trespass has at least three characters and one taboo:
the lover, the beloved, the one who uncovers or unveils, and the
taboo (sex between siblings).
• Conflict: “Don’t marry in your family” is a conflict between the law
or tradition and lust; often a secret plays an important role. Oedipus
doesn’t know that he is married to his mother. Maybe the one who
unveils the situation tells the secret first to the lover and not to the
beloved, and a drama is born.
At the basic story stage of your workshopping process, you should use
these dramatic situations to formulate your basic idea in your own way,
adding characters and thinking about what happens before and after the
dramatic situation. Later when you are writing (doing the table work),
we will discuss how to construct a plot out of a story.
Skadonk, created by Bheki Mkhwane and Ellis Pearson in 2001, tells
the story of Big Ben, a proud owner of a red taxi, who always brings his

only son with him to work. He and the community take care of the son
because the mother died in childbirth. Taxi violence erupts and becomes
worse. Big Ben asks the ancestors if there is a sacrifice to be made that
will stop the violence and he is told that he must sacrifice his son.
He sets off up a mountain with his son on his back, to make his sacrifice
on top. His faith is tested on the way up. As he is about to plunge his
knife into his child, the ancestors shout for him to stop. They praise
him for his courage and willingness to sacrifice that which is most
precious to him for the sake of peace, and allow him to substitute a
goat. He carries his child down the mountain, back to the village, where
peace and harmony are restored.4
Mkhwane and Pearson here use Polti’s dramatic situation number 23:
‘The necessity to sacrifice a beloved one’, and use the biblical story of
Abraham and Isaac, but place it within the setting of a taxi rank. By
doing so, they acknowledge the archetypal power of such stories. Many
narrative theorists, including Tzvetan Todorov, Vladimir Propp and
Joseph Campbell, have articulated the idea of repeated stories.
There are many texts that will be useful for understanding how to
build narrative. We want to point to Robert McKee’s Story (1997) which,
although about film, is interesting;5 Rib Davis’s book, Writing Dialogue for
Scripts, is very useful on dialogue;6 David Mamet’s dramatic work is often
cited as being the key to understanding dialogue; and Harold Pinter’s
plays give insight into understanding subtext.
4 Baxter, V. & Aitchison, J. (2010) “Embodying ‘lightness’ in the New South

Africa – the theatre of Ellis Pearson and Bheki Mkhwane 1993 – 2008”. South
African Theatre Journal, Vol. 24, 2010.
5 McKee, R. (1997) Story: Substance, structure, style and the principals of
sceenwriting. Harper Collins Publishers, New York.
6 Davis, R. (2003) Writing Dialogue for Scripts. A & C Black Publishers Ltd.

CHAPTER 10
Scene Work
Scene work with actors from Eager Artists,

2013. Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
Y
ou and your actors at this point have lots of ideas and fantasies
about the new show that you are about to make. Now is the time to
create theatre out of it and test which of your ideas are convincing
and are vital components for the piece. You have the basic ingredients
and the recipe, now you have to start cooking, tasting and discussing.
This period is considered the most creative part of the process. You need
to consider how to organise scene work. It will be convenient to stick to a
procedure in four steps: Firstly, give your actors an assignment; secondly,
let them create; thirdly, let them present to you and the others; and lastly,
discuss what has been made.
Assignment, creation, presentation and

discussion
Divide the group into smaller groups and give them the same assignment
to create a scene of a certain length. Don’t give too much time to create,
so that you avoid long discussions, limit the time and encourage them to
start working on the floor as soon as possible.
While the groups are creating, you can walk from group to group,
coach and inspire them when the group is stuck. Don’t hesitate to add
ideas yourself and to give advice if a group doesn’t understand the
assignment. You are a member of the creative process as well, but should
avoid directing at this moment. The creative experience of the actors
should have its own spontaneous flow.
After creating, the different groups will present their work to the
others.
The work should then be discussed briefly. What did we see? What
worked and what didn’t? This feedback from an audience point of view
is most important to make the actors understand that it is not about what
they feel or think, but about delivering a message or creating a feeling in
the heads and hearts of the audience. In this way the role of the audience
becomes a structural part of the scene work. Everything done on stage
is done for the audience. These discussions are facilitated not so that

you judge the actors, but to share the experience with the actors. The
questions about whether an audience understood, was entertained and
intrigued must become part of the scene work.
Make sure that you don’t forget what is created and discussed. You
could make notes, drawings, take pictures or use video to capture and
record what arises during this creative process.
Improvisations on basic ideas about story and

characters
Scene work should explore the dramatic situation, the characters and the
actions, in order to develop the story or different storylines.
When your dramatic situation is an abduction, you should think of
moments before and after it as well. The abduction itself is short and
maybe not even be worth showing. But scenes before and after it are.
Think of possible variations and situations that might happen around
the dramatic situation. How does the hostage try to escape? What is the
relationship with the guard or watchmen? Focus on the relationship
between the kidnapper and the guard; what are the problems they might
have? Where does the saver come in? Does the guard know the intentions
of the saver? You might include flashbacks or short monologues in which
they talk about past experiences, memories or dreams. Or show the
characters ten years later.
When your scene work has to do with acting out personal stories
and experiences of the actors, ask them to find characters, actions and
situations around the story or situation. When you give an assignment to
create, add theatrical means, give the actors some props or set elements
to play with: a door, a big trunk, two suitcases, ten buckets of water,
stones and sand, or empty oil drums. Avoid chairs and tables, as these
may bring you into a realistic and non-theatrical trap, and may limit your
creativity. Add costume elements to stimulate character: an old winter
army coat, an umbrella, a walking stick, a skull of an animal, high heels
or big boots.
Scene Work 197

Improvisations on developing genre and
acting style
During source work, you also collected ideas about the genre and acting
style. Make time to focus on these and explore your ideas. Take one of
the scenes you developed before and give different groups the assignment
to create that specific scene in different acting styles. For instance, you
might use physical theatre, storytelling, clowning, masks, realism or
puppetry. Also try epic ways of acting, meaning non-realistic and non-
psychological. Or try playing the scene in different genres, transforming
the scene into a musical and creating songs around the action; making it
into a melodrama, stand-up comedy or street theatre.
You can directly talk to the audience, as an actor or as a character.
Make a clichéd character or a cartoon, explore how he or she moves,
talks and relates to others. Use animal behaviour for your characters.
An exciting assignment can be to create the scene somewhere outside
the rehearsal room. You could play the scene out in a public park, in the
toilets, in an empty parking lot or an abandoned house.
Some of these acting styles and genres will require extra training and
skills. In this first playful exploration of scene work, don’t spend too
much time on that, but when you choose a dominant acting style at a
later moment, let’s say physical theatre or clowning, then you will have
to integrate special training sessions with the actors to learn the specific
skills of that style.
Improvisations using extravagance and

grotesque means
Theatre is bigger than life. Create a play-world in which anything can
and will happen. Use stage make-up, absurd costumes, big bellies, big
buttocks and wigs. Use boxes, blocks and rostrums instead of tables
and chairs. Use masks and window dummies; pick props like ropes and
empty oil drums; use candles, torches and Christmas-tree lights, drums,
whistles, a horn, a rattle or a kettledrum.

Circus can be an important point of reference. You can use the means
mentioned above in a circus setting and make an improvisation in which
one actor introduces all these bizarre characters to the audience and lets
them come on stage in a parade, one by one presenting their favourite act,
dance or song, and ending with a group picture. It is a way of creating a
celebration in a bombastic extravagant theatrical style, we know it is all
artificial and any reference to realism and naturalism is removed.
Using means like these, you can also create your own ritual using
dance and music to sacrifice something or someone. Rituals always have a
strong theatrical visual expression. Create with the actors your own ritual
to celebrate birth, initiation, marriage or death. Create your own birth
rites, imitation and puberty rites, weddings, anniversaries, retirements
and death ceremonies. Create your own gods and goddesses, masks,
songs, and props for the dramatic situation you are working from. This
is all part of creating a play-world which is different from the real world.
In Europe during the Middle Ages (between the 6th and 9th century
AD), allegorical theatre was popular as performance. These were big
visual spectacles in the descriptions that still exist; these plays look like
the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch about hell and heaven. The characters
are not real but are portrayed as allegoric ideas: Evil, Purity, Sin and Power.
One of the most well-known plays is Everyman, in which God sends
‘Everyman’ on his last journey, and says he might take some companions
with him. However, ‘Family’, ‘Friends’ and ‘Possessions’ don’t want to go
when they are told that death is the destiny of the journey. Only ‘Strength’,
‘Virtue’, ‘Wisdom’ and ‘Beauty’ want to go with him. Finally arriving at
his grave only ‘Virtue’ stays by his side. Using characters like this in a
workshopping process around a theme that comes from social issues,
for instance the theme of domestic violence, could bring unexpected
material to the surface and mix realistic characters with allegorical ones
as described above. The process allows you different perspectives and
reactions to a specific topic.
Working like this doesn’t mean your whole show should be bizarre and
extravagant. You might use elements of it in your final show, or you might
not. It is a way of thinking differently and working out of the box, where
you might find images, characters or scenes that you can integrate later.
Scene Work 199

Improvisations of solos
Besides group assignments, you should also make time for individual
work. Ask actors to present a solo of a maximum of five minutes, based
on personal experiences. When giving the assignment, encourage the
use of character, action and space. For instance when the starting point
of the work has to do with domestic violence and the solo has to do
with a personal experience, then you might ask them to explore other
characters that were part of the experience or were around. Portray the
mother or the abusive stepfather telling their side of the story. This allows
them another perspective to the situation. When you are asking actors to
draw from personal stories or experiences, be sure that you prepare them
for this psychologically and talk about the need for confidentiality within
the group, and be able to refer them for further support if it is needed.
You can also add props or the use of space in your assignment. Use
at least ten chairs, or a suitcase full of small props that are memories of
the past. You can also ask the actor to choose a specific site to present
the solo. You might end up in a high-school class or in his living room.
Besides the angle of space, action, props and characters you can also
ask the actor to use performance art as a way of presenting the solo.
This is often a crossover between theatre, music and visual art in which
language and story play a subordinate role or are absent. The actor
expresses the emotions behind a specific experience or idea using his
body and visual elements, sometimes adding music, poetry and action.
Mostly the presentations are short happenings.
Using oral history

This method starts with conducting interviews or collecting existing
interviews made around a specific theme, group of people or history.
After a selection is made, the actors go to the rehearsal studio and try to
portray the interviewed person as truthfully as possible, using their exact
lines, way of speaking and behaving. It is a way of creating a character
very close to the original. Next the texts and characters are combined

with each other. Sometimes fictional material is added. At the end the
scenes are directed in a created set and presented to the audience.
This use of oral history has become a popular form of contemporary
theatre known as verbatim theatre. Gina Shmukler’s 2012 play The Line,
based on xenophobia and violence, is based on the directly recorded
words of interviewees who experienced the violence, and it is crafted
into a theatrical work of art. Verbatim theatre involves the actors
performing with the intonations, physical language and mannerisms
of the real person. Of course you can make a creative step and change
and fictionalise this work, but then it is no longer verbatim theatre, but
simply theatre created from oral history.
Scene Work 201

Notes from Neil Coppen, 2014, Animal Farm. Photograph by Neil Coppen.
CHAPTER 11
Table Work
O
n the table is the scene work: bits and pieces of the story,
characters, actions, different ideas about genre and acting style,
images, ideas about the set, props and costumes. Table work can
be done by you as a director. This is a moment for you to make choices,
select the material and arrange it in a way that feels good for you. It is
where you start to take more creative control over the process.
The director Malcolm Purkey writes in his introduction for Sophiatown:
After six months of work, the tapes and files of recorded material
became burdensomely large. I was sent off for six weeks to shape the
material into a working script. After another six weeks of intensive daily
rehearsal and rewriting, we were ready to open. We premiered at the
Market Theatre Upstairs on 19 February 1986.1
Your assignment can be to write a working script of 20 minutes from

the material at hand. This first draft is a sequence of images, actions and
dialogue with a beginning, middle and ending. Before you can do that,
you must choose a plot structure, where to begin and where to end. Your
plot might start at the end of the story or half way. A plot is how you
structure the story.
From story to plot

Your plot is a sequence of main events that unfolds in a particular pattern.
Your starting point for the plot is how you are going to tell this story,
outlining where your point of attack is. You also need to consider who
the main character in your plot is.
A plot seldom uses the same sequence of events as the story that
outlines events in a chronological order. Oedipus is the story of the man
who married his mother and killed his father, without him knowing.
When he finds out, he blinds himself by pulling out his eyes. In the plot
that is made from the story, we don’t see the marriage with the mother;
1 Purkey, M. (1986) Sophiatown. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg.
Table Work 203

we don’t see how he killed his father. Our main character also doesn’t
know the situation, and we follow the script through his eyes.
The plot is still a chronological sequence of events: step by step Oedipus
finds out about the past. Realising that actions have consequences, his
wife/mother commits suicide and he takes his eyes out. What happened
in the past is only talked about and is not shown on stage. It is a famous
example of an exploding past (see further discussion on this under the
earlier section on dramaturgical concepts).
The point of attack, where the writer gets into the story, is almost at
the end, many years after all the dramatic events have unfolded. Finally
Oedipus understands what he has done, those actions from the past
are not shown, but they are told by other characters who know. The
sequence of the actions and the construction of the different scenes make
up a plot that is somewhere related and connected with a basic story.
A plot is the soul of the script, a plot develops the characters, and the
characters develop the plot. You’ll find some discussion and advice about
plot in the earlier section, which focuses on the director and the script,
and in the reflection on Tshepang in the section on storytelling.
First draft of a working script

By forcing yourself to make a working script of 20 minutes, you create
clarity in what you want to show and what you want to leave behind.
After formulating your plot, you can now write down the images and the
sequence of the scenes. You can write down dialogue as it was spoken
during the improvisations, but it is more likely that you will shape this
dialogue, concentrate it by deleting what is not essential. You can rewrite
monologues and add lyrics if you feel the need. The result will be a
working script that is clear in its vision and what it wants to say. To write
good dialogue you should consult other books.
After rehearsing the first draft of the working script with the actors,
ask yourselves the same three questions that you asked when starting to
formulate your story again: What feels good? What do you miss? What
can be deleted? The answers will bring you back for the second time

to scene work, to create what is missing. Add characters, actions and
images. Create new situations and material. Table work should again
follow this period to write and rewrite the full-length script.
Table Work 205

UKZN students (Pietermaritzburg) workshopping, 2014. Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
CHAPTER 12
A Simple Model
for Workshopping
Starting point
• Sit with your actors in a circle. Start with the question: What do you
want to change in this country, for you, for your family, friends or
community? Write down everything your actors come up with on a
piece of paper or a flipchart.
• From this long list, ask everybody to vote for the five topics that they
think are the most important ones. Count the votes and then make a
short list of the top five.
• Divide the group into pairs, and ask each pair to share a personal
story that is connected with one of the five subjects on the short list.
Ask the teams to select the stronger of the two stories, then come
back in the circle and share these personal stories. Write them down
in keywords on the piece of paper or flipchart.
Source work
• Put different newspapers of the day on the ground and ask every actor
to take one. Ask them to find an article that is connected with one
of the personal stories that was just shared in the group. Share those
with one another in the circle and write them on the piece of paper
or flipchart.
Developing the basic idea for the plot

• Try to combine the characters from the personal stories and the
newspapers. You can add characters or combine characters from
different stories. Use your imagination and that of your actors. A basic
idea about a possible plot will emerge.
• Ask actors to choose a character that intrigues them, or to whom
they relate to most; and let them write down their name, age, and
relationship. Where does the character live; what street or region?
A Simple Model for Workshopping 207

What does the character want at this moment? What is the character’s
secret, something that no one else knows about? What is his or her
biggest fear? Where is the character at this moment? What is he or she
doing? What is a thought that this character has right now? Keep the
notes about these characters, as these can be built on later.
Scene work
• Ask actors in groups to prepare improvisations around the characters
that they chose and the situations from the basic idea. Get them to
present these to one another.
• Add different assignments for other genres and styles of acting. Let
the storyline grow by improvising scenes that have happened in the
past, or which might happen in the future.
Table work
• Take all of the ideas and material home and write a first short draft of
the text (this should not be longer than 20 minutes).
This model combines personal stories and social/political issues; it uses

background material from newspapers and, most importantly, it uses the
imagination of you and the actors. It can create in a few hours a basic idea
about a possible plot and characters that is multi-layered and not one-
dimensional or predictable. We have witnessed Neil Coppen using this
method with group leaders of community theatre groups in KwaZulu-
Natal from the Twist Theatre Development Projects network,1 and it was
highly effective as a starting point for new work for these theatre groups.
1 Twist Projects is a network organisation in KZN focusing on the development

of community theatre groups. www.twistprojects.org.za.

The way of working described in this part is one way, but there are
many others. Many of these workshopping techniques are similar to those
developed by Barney Simon and Athol Fugard. There is some interesting
material in the book on Simon’s work called World in an Orange.2
2 Fox, J. (2006) World in an Orange. Jacana Media, Johannesburg.
A Simple Model for Workshopping 209

PART 4
The Director
as an Arts
Entrepreneur
This part of the book focuses on what is needed

for an aspiring director to become an arts entre
preneur and how to make a living from his/her
work.
South Africa has many performing arts departments at universities
as well as private performing art schools and colleges. Those institutions
educate young emerging performers, directors and dramaturges. Every
year hundreds finish their studies, often with very good results. Are they
ready for the arts industry and is the industry ready for them?
There is no coherent relationship between the number of graduates
from the performing arts departments and the market of jobs in the
industry. All arts departments know that there will be only a few who
will make it in the industry. Only some of their graduating students have
the same realistic view.
We have met countless graduates who, when asked what they are
doing a few months after graduating, reply “waiting for a job”. It is vital
that they realise that there are very few ‘jobs’ as they are traditionally
imagined. There are few institutions or arts organisations in this country
that are able to pay salaries. Those that do most often budget only for
salaries for administrative or managerial staff, as they play the roles that
are required to keep the organisation ticking over. The creative teams,
performers, designers, writers and directors can all be contracted in as
needed.
Some of the emerging local directors, as well as the contemporary
directors mentioned in earlier chapters, don’t follow the path from
university to the industry. Some of them come from community theatre
groups or other disciplines like film or television. This means that the
industry does not have enough space to take in the number of graduates
and emerging talents. It means the competition is stiff, especially in the
big cities such as Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and Pretoria.
The interviews with ten contemporary theatre directors show clearly
that, even for them, making a living in the arts is not easy. Most of them
have won awards and their work is regarded as some of the best in South
Africa, but that is no guarantee for a sustainable career in the arts. Most
of them have to supplement their directing lives with other jobs, perhaps
teaching, performing, administration or other work that is not related to
the arts.
This means that as a theatre director, you can only survive when you
are an entrepreneur. You need to be able to take initiative, to network

with artistic directors of different theatres, to make proposals for
festivals and to pitch for projects. Director Gregg Homann says: “Theatre
directing in SA is director driven, not by the writer or producer. As an
arts entrepreneur I almost always find the project, the project rarely finds
me.”
All successful theatre directors in South Africa have had to develop
great business skills. And most of them were only able to create because
they had these entrepreneurial skills. From the early days of Gibson
Kente, who travelled with his successful township theatre and musicals,
the idea of the travelling show has been one that has allowed directors
to earn an income from their art. Mbongeni Ngema has built on this
and created an international brand with his musicals. Brett Bailey is a
director who is frequently invited to stage his works at theatre festivals
around the world. Zinzi Princess Mhlongo, Pusetso Thibedi, Lara Foot,
Neil Coppen, Prince Lamla and Amy Jephta all combine artistic genius
with the best entrepreneurial skills. Most of them don’t do this to become
rich, but simply want to forge a sustainable way to create the work that
they want to do. An entrepreneur is someone who wants to earn a living
and to create income through investments, and work.
Theatre direction involves being an arts entrepreneur, and running
yourself as a business. For a theatre director, being an entrepreneur is
part of the job as much as it is for a farmer, dentist or real estate agent.
The word ‘entrepreneur’ comes from the French verb entrepretende, which
means ‘to undertake’. An undertaking, more than just a project, becomes
about you taking full responsibility for what it is that you do. We should
then see entrepreneurship as undertaking the responsibility for a project
or multiple projects. This means not relying on donors and traditional
producers, but doing things yourself. We don’t suggest that you do the
whole thing alone, but that you know what is required to bring your idea
to life, and that you take the responsibility to find partners who can help
you to bring your project to the stage.
Amy Jephta comments on this need to take responsibility for yourself
as an artist:
The Director as an Arts Entrepreneur 213

Be persistent, be self-sufficient, and don’t wait. Taking control of the
entrepreneurial spirit of the industry means you can take control early
on of your own career, and make the kind of work you want to make.
Waiting for someone else to give you money or space will mean you’ll
never do anything, make anything. By the time you meet opportunity,
and put yourself in the right place at the right time, you’ll have learned
enough lessons by yourself to really embrace that moment.1
Paul Bonin-Rodriguez calls an arts entrepreneur an ‘artist-producer’,

focusing on the productivity of the artist, and arguing that artists are
“capable of balancing both their expressive ambitions with their material
concerns in strategic ways”.2 Through this shift in focus, he breaks down
the myth of the starving artist who is unwilling to engage with the world
of commerce. Ismail Mahomed is another person who warns against this
stereotype of artists approaching funders with their ‘begging bowls’.3
Artists can start to think about their careers in the same way that any
other professional does. With this attitude, earning money from your art
becomes more than desperately trying to keep the wolf from the door
with piecemeal jobs, but rather becomes about valuing your own work
and generating a decent income for it. However, this is often easier said
than done.

2 Bonin-Rodriguez, P. (2012) “What’s in a Name? Typifying Artist
Entrepreneurship In Community Based Training”. Artivate: A Journal of
Entrepreneurship in the Arts. Vol. 1, Issue 1.
3 Mahomed, I. (2009) Arts Entrepreneurship Can Smash the Begging Bowl.
National Arts Festival.

Twist Novel-Script Project, 2012. Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
CHAPTER 13
What Does it Take
to Become an
Arts Entrepreneur?
T
here are a range of skills that you will need to develop this
entrepreneurial side to your work. Knowledge about funding,
business administration, marketing and an understanding of local
politics are as essential as the artistic skills. You also need to remember
that although we are talking about making arts your business, there are
differences between the arts and other conventional products for sale.
You need to be careful not to lose the ‘art’ of your work, and to find ways
to keep hold of your passion while in the pursuit of profit.
Entrepreneurs look for opportunities

You will need to take the initiative to start your own projects, and this
involves looking at where openings and opportunities are in the industry.
Understanding these gaps and chances is essential for a successful
entrepreneur. And when you have found a gap, don’t rest at just one.
Finding one avenue for your work is great, but you will need more doors
to open for the future if you want a sustainable career. Essential for an
entrepreneur is that there is more than one client or ordering party. You
need to know your market and know who it is that traditionally buys or
sponsors arts, who consumes it, and where there might be new markets
and consumers (audiences) that you can interest in your work.
Part of expanding your market involves marketing and publicity, and
this self-promotion is a vital part of getting yourself out there and known
in the industry. The four traditional marketing principles of product, price,
place and promotion apply to the arts as well. What is it that you have as
your product, and what makes it different from everybody else’s work?
What are you going to charge for your work, and how are you going to
make it affordable for a high volume of consumers or audience members?
Where are you placing yourself – both in the marketplace, and physically,
in which theatre or province? And finally, what are the best methods of
promoting your work or your skills?

Entrepreneurs get themselves noticed
Publicity for yourself or your work is vital. It is no good being a fantastic
director if nobody knows about you. Make sure that you network as
much as possible within the industry so that you start to make yourself
known to those on the inside. This involves joining networks and
organisations, and attending conferences, workshops and other events
where industry professionals can be found. Put yourself on mailing lists
and find out what is happening in the industry and where you can get
involved. Sitting at home with a vision is not going to get you anywhere.
The traditional media is another way to promote yourself. If you
are doing a production, no matter how small, and whether it is in your
street, community hall or local school, find somebody from the media
who is willing to document it. Perhaps this is one of the free community
newspapers, or a local ‘what’s on’ website, a community radio station, or
a national newspaper or radio or television station. Don’t be afraid to let
people know what you are up to. It takes a certain amount of bravery
to put yourself out there, and you must also understand that if you put
yourself into the public eye, you are also opening yourself up to public
criticism, so make sure that your work is as good as it can possibly be,
and be prepared to stand up and defend it. As far as we are concerned,
any publicity is good publicity, as it allows more people to hear about
what you do.
Keep your own documents and records of your work as well, so
that you build up a portfolio. This might include your own videos of
your work, photographs, testimonials, audience comments from shows,
newspaper articles or other records.
Social media sites are a great way to share this portfolio and to get
yourself known. All of the Facebook, Twitter, Mxit, LinkedIn and other
social networking platforms can be a great way to tell people about your
work and your plans. Put your videos on YouTube so that people can
get a taste for your work. Make sure that your use of these platforms is
also publicised, so that people know how to find information about your
work. You need to learn how to make Google and other search engines
work for you.
What Does it Take to Become an Arts Entrepreneur? 217

While all of this might sound egotistical, you have to face the fact
that if you are trying to forge your way in the industry, you are just one
of many who are trying to do so, and you need to set yourself apart
and make yourself known. Many artists get annoyed when it appears
that people who consistently get work in the arts are well connected,
and are favoured by the principle that ‘it’s not what you know, but who
you know’. Speaking as producers, directors and company managers, we
know that it is easier to call on an actor, director or script-writer whose
work we have previously seen, or who we have used before or enjoyed
talking to at an event or workshop than it is to use an unknown person.
So get yourself out there and get known.
Princess Zinzi Mhlongo comments on this need to market yourself
and sell your vision to others:
Our industry is very unpredictable, which is why I’ve always tried

to learn more about the entrepreneurial side of things. It’s definitely
not easy, because you still find people who don’t see arts as a career.
More than anything as an artist you first need to rely on yourself. Your
dreams, your talents are all within you. How you share it with the world
will determine your success. I’ve always believed that no one can sell
your dream better than you can. This is important because you will
always find yourself trying to sell your vision to someone else.1
Entrepreneurs take calculated risks

Traditionally, entrepreneurs are those who do something different and
bring about a change in the industry. If there are already many people
that are doing the same thing that you are doing, then competition
will be stiff and opportunities will be few. So you need to think about
branching out, and doing or offering something that has not yet been
seen or experienced. This involves you taking risks. However, these
risks should be calculated, you need to have thought about what you are
proposing and whether there is a market for this.
1 Interview with Princess Zinzi Mhlongo. Durden, E., 2013.

You need to have a good sense of what is already on offer in the
market place, and work out what skills you have that can set you apart.
What is new, creative or different about you? You must have a strong
idea about what you are good at. What is your own voice as a director,
and who could be waiting for that voice? What can you do to make your
voice heard? How far are you prepared to go to bring your project to the
stage? Know this, and know your limits. You should recognise that all
risk has consequences, and you should weigh these up before taking the
plunge.
The South African actress Jemma Khan took a risk with her 2012
work The Epicene Butcher and Other Stories for Consenting Adults, which
introduced a completely foreign style of theatre to South African
audiences, bringing the Japanese art of Kamishibai to local stages and
giving traditional Japanese stories a South African twist. She won a
handful of awards for her work locally, and has also toured extensively
internationally with this original and potentially risky work.
Entrepreneurs make investments

The old adage ‘it takes money to make money’ can be applied to arts
entrepreneurship. You will have to spend something to be able to earn
something. But this does not always need to be money. We certainly do
not advocate that you get into debt to create a show, and strongly believe
that you should not do the cooking before the meat is in the pot.
Instead of money, you may instead end up investing large amounts
of time and energy to get close to what you want. The investments that
you will have to make are likely to do with time spent doing research
and networking as you start looking for funding or other commercial
income through partnerships, and you spend time on developing your
ideas and considering ways to bring them to fruition. You are responsible
for creating the conditions in which your work can survive, and this
includes building a context where support for your projects is possible,
so you need to invest in this context.
What Does it Take to Become an Arts Entrepreneur? 219

Paul Bonin-Rodriguez2 talks about strategy when he refers to the
artist-producer, and part of your investment involves planning for how
you are going to pave the way for your own success. Perhaps this means
doing work for free, volunteering or doing internships. These strategies
should not just be seen as a stepping stone to success, but also as a
way for you to actively engage with the arts community in a non-selfish
way throughout your career, where you become what is referred to as an
‘artist-citizen’, involved with your community and not just your art. This
is particularly important in South Africa, where there is not a strong arts-
consuming audience. Doing this work now builds your own profile, and
also builds an arts audience for the future.
2 Bonin-Rodriguez, P. (2012) “What’s In a Name? Typifying Artist

Entrepreneurship In Community Based Training”. Artivate: A Journal of
Entrepreneurship in the Arts. Vol. 1, Issue 1.

Twist Novel-Script Project, Chiron Kwame and Annemarie Slotboom, 2010. Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
CHAPTER 14
Other Useful Skills

for You as an
Arts Entrepreneur
Proposal writing
T
o write a proposal for a specific funder, municipality or theatre
is a skill. There are many books and courses that deal with this
(see the bibliography for some suggestions). But writing it is not
enough, and meeting face to face with the decision-makers is essential
to understand whether it is worth your time to write that proposal. You
may not qualify for their particular area of interests, which might focus
on certain provinces, audiences or topics at any given time. Try to get as
much information about what it is they want to support, before you ask
for this support.
You should always establish live contact after you have submitted a
proposal, so that your proposal becomes personalised. Phone the funder
or producer to check if they received your proposal, let them inform you
about the decision-making procedures and keep them updated about
other work that you do. Invite them for your opening nights or other
events, even if it is likely they won’t come.
Management
We have talked in earlier chapters about managing an artistic team
and managing actors for a production that you are directing. There
are, however, many other processes and parties that you will need to
learn to manage as an arts entrepreneur. These include managing your
organisational structures (if you are part of an organisation or registered
group or company), managing programming and projects, managing
people, managing marketing, managing partners and networks, managing
finances and managing records. There are a number of other good books
that cover these topics, so we will not go into them in detail here, but you
should be prepared to gather these skills and experiences so that you are
able to cope with the work of an entrepreneur.

Managing your organisational structures
First you need to register your organisation (with CIPRO if it is a business,
with the Department of Social Development if you are registering an
NPO, and with SARS if it is a tax entity). There are a number of legal
requirements for both the registration process and for doing this annually,
including submitting forms, narrative reports and financial reports, and
it is important that you know what these are and that you are compliant.
You can find this information from local business support groups, or
through various local arts management guides and on the Internet.
Other organisational issues that need to be attended to include
outlining your vision, mission and objectives, outlining a scope of
activities, looking at management and governance policies and pro
cedures, and developing goals, strategies and plans for the group.
Managing projects
Project management involves five key processes, which are:
1. Initiating the project, gathering all the relevant information and
determining precisely what the project is about.
2. Planning the actions to be taken to bring the project to life (these
actions will include budgeting, marketing, casting and all of the
associated processes that are part of the project).
3. Executing the project and converting planning into action.
4. Monitoring the project, which involves checking and measuring
activities against your original planning.
5. Wrapping up, finalising the project and creating reports.1
As a director, you need to be responsible for managing all of these

processes for your work.
1 Project Management Toolkit for Arts and Culture. Arterial Network, Cape Town,
2011.
Other Useful Skills for You as an Arts Entrepreneur 223

Collaboration
Being a director can often be a solitary job, and it is easy to feel that you
are independent, especially if you are not connected to a performing
company or theatre house. However, collaborating with others cannot
only keep you inspired and challenged, but can also allow you to open
doors for one another. Collaboration should be strategic, and you need
to choose your fellow collaborators wisely. Some artists prefer to work
alone, so as not to have to make artistic compromises. This is something
that you will need to work out for yourself, as the need arises. However,
you should be cognisant of the fact that the theatre industry thrives on
networking and collaborations. You should consider how you can help
to promote access for other aspirant directors, and how you can help one
another to pave the way for a future generation of artists.

CHAPTER 15
Getting Started on an
Entrepreneurial Project
Twist Novel-Script Project, 2011.

I
f you are considering a new project, there are ways to get yourself
started. Most business skills training courses will call for a business
plan as your starting point. Elaine Rumboll teaches a course in arts
entrepreneurship in Cape Town, and suggests that artists consider a
creative entrepreneurial plan, as opposed to a business plan1. A business
plan is often a linear and clinical document that outlines how to realise an
idea. A creative entrepreneurial plan might be more fluid and personal,
and should be driven by your passion rather than by the idea of profit.
When you have a new idea in mind, it is useful to think about it
in four stages, as proposed by Graham Wallas, in his book The Art of
Thought2:
Stage 1 – Preparation
This is where you do your homework, gather information and define
what it is you want to do.
Stage 2 – Incubation
This is where you give the idea a rest, taking time away from it and
allowing it to brew in your subconscious mind.
Stage 3 – Illumination
This is where the lights come on, and hopefully you find a solution or a
way to make your project come alive.
1 usiness Acumen for Artists: From Artist to Entrepreneur. ACT | UJ Arts & Culture
B
Conference ‘Creative Currencies: accessing opportunities in an expanding
marketplace’, August 2013.
2 Wallas, G. (1926) The Art of Thought. Harcourt Brace, New York.

Stage 4 – Verification
This is where you get a chance to test out your ideas, theory and solutions,
to see whether your project is viable and might work. It is a good idea to
talk to other people in the industry at this stage, to see how they respond
to the idea.
Sometimes people who have no relation to the arts can also provide
great insight, and it is recognised that people far from the problem can
have a different perspective that could offer new solutions.
From there, we simply suggest that you go for it.
In conclusion
The skills and concepts spoken about in this part of the book are seldom
part of performing arts training in university. But there are courses
available to train you in the skills you need. There are also countless
manuals and books that can help you to master the art of getting your
project off the ground and organising yourself into a legitimate theatre
enterprise. You could contact arts organisations and entrepreneurs in the
industry that are successful and get advice from them. The best way to
build a career in the industry is to network, to build on the successes that
have come before you, and to learn from the challenges and failures of
both your own work and the work of others. The path of a performing
artist in South Africa is seldom an easy one.
If you want to make your way in the industry, it is a good idea to
keep reading about entrepreneurship and business skills as much as
it is important to read about theatre and directing skills. Artivate is
an international journal with a focus on arts entrepreneurship, and it
includes articles on education in arts entrepreneurship, as well as case
studies. It provides interesting reading for people who are hoping to
build their own arts careers. The bibliography at the back of this book
contains other books that you might find useful.
Perhaps the most vital skill for you to have is that of perseverance.
Getting Started on an Entrepreneurial Project 227

Very few performing artists make it the first time round. It will take time
and patience, and evidence of your skill and good work to be able to
build up your career. We wish you good luck.
228 On drama and conflict

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baxter, V. & Aitchison, J. (2010) “Embodying ‘lightness’ in the New South Africa
– the theatre of Ellis Pearson and Bheki Mkhwane 1993–2008”. South African
Theatre Journal, Vol. 24.
Becket, S. (1961) Happy days. Grove Press, New York.
Benedetti, R. (1985) The Director at Work. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey.
Boal, A. (1992) Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Routledge, New York.
Bogart, A. & Landau, T. (2005) The Viewpoints Book. Theatre Communication
Group, New York.
Bonin-Rodriguez, P. (2012) “What’s in a Name? Typifying Artist Entrepreneurship
In Community Based Training”. Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the
Arts. Vol. 1, Issue 1.
Burnett Bonczek, R. & Storck, D. (2013) Ensemble Theatre Making, A Practical
Guide. Routledge, New York.
Davis, R. (2003) Writing Dialogue for Scripts. A & C Black Publishers Ltd, London,
Dean, A. & Carra, L. (1941) Fundamentals of Play Directing. Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, New York.
Dietrich, J.E. & Duckwall, R.W. (1983) Play Directing. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey.
Ebert, G. (1985) Handbuch der Schauspieler-ausbildung. Henschelverlag, Leinen.
Elam, K. (2002) The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. Routledge, London.
Esslin, M. (1987) The Field of Drama. Methuen, London and New York.
Foot Newton, L. (2013) Solomon and Marion. Oberon Books, London.
Fox, J. (2006) World in an Orange. Jacana Media, Johannesburg.
Fugard, A. (1959) Nongogo. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Graver, D. (1999) Drama for a New South Africa: Seven Plays. Indiana University
Press, Bloomington.
Grootboom, M.P. (2009) Foreplay. Oberon Books, London.
Grotowski, J. (1968) Towards a Poor Theatre. Odin Teatrets Forlag, Denmark.
Homann, G. (2009) At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa. Wits
Hummelen, W.M.H. (1989) Van Moment tot Moment. Coutinho, Muiderberg,
1989.
Krieger, M. (1959) “Tragedy and the Tragic Vision”. The Kenyon Review. Vol. 20
no 2.
Mahomed, I. (2009) Arts Entrepreneurship Can Smash the Begging Bowl. National
Arts Festival [online]. Available from: http://www.nationalartsfestival.co.za/
show/arts-entrepreneurship-can-smash-the-begging-bowl/.
McCabe, T. (2001). Mis-directing the Play. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago.
McKee, R. (1997) Story: Substance, structure, style and the principals of screenwriting.
Harper Collins Publishers, New York.
Meskin, T. (2013) Directing and the Actor. Course Handbook, Department of
Drama, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.
Peithman, S. & Offen, N. (eds.) (1999) Stage Directions Guide to Directing.
Heinemann Portsmouth.
Polti, G. (1916) The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations. The Writer, Boston.
Purkey, M. (1986) Sophiatown. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg.
Sawyer, T. & Weingarten, A.D. (1994) Plots Unlimited. Ashleywilde, Malibu.
Schechner, R. (1985) Between Theatre and Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania
Press, Philadelphia.
Schoenmakers, H. (1984) Passies in Pluche. Theaterwetenschap, Utrecht.
Schnitzler, A. (1903) La Ronde (Das reigen). Vienna.
Simon, B. (1997) Born in the RSA: Four Workshopped Plays. Witwatersrand
Solberg, R. (2011) Bra Gib: Father of South Africa’s Township Theatre. University of
KwaZulu-Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg.
Spolin, V. (1963) Improvisation for the Theatre. Northwestern University Press,
Illinois.
Tlelima, T. (2009) Review: Foreplay, In Arts Review [Online] accessed from http://
www.artsreview.co.za/stage/2009/09/30/review-foreplay/.
Twijnstra, R. (1987) Dramatiseren. Uitgeverij IT&FB, Amsterdam.
Twijnstra, R. (1991) Betekenis van Drama. Uitgeverij IT&FB, Amsterdam.
Twijnstra, R. (2000) Een Chinees op Goeree. International Theatre & Film Books,
Amsterdam.
Wallas, G. (1926) The Art of Thought. Harcourt Brace, New York.
Zakhava, B.E. (1983) “Principles of directing”. In Acting: A Handbook of the
Stanislavski Method. Edited by Toby Cole. Crown, New York.

Useful resources and manuals for arts
management and entrepreneurship
Arterial Network Project Management Toolkit for Arts and Culture (2011)
Available at: www.arterialnetwork.org
Audience building and the future Creative Europe Programme.
Available at: www.eenc.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/audience-
building-final-report.pdf
The Performing Arts – A Manual for Managers.

Available at: www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/culture/Completed/STAGE/
DGIV_CULT_STAGE(2002)16_EN.pdf
Original interviews
Interview with Neil Coppen. Twijnstra, R. (April 2013) In person.
Interview with Greg Homann. Twijnstra, R. (September 2013) In person.
Interview with Prince Lamla. Twijnstra, R. (September 2013) In person.
Interview with Zinzi Princess Mhlongo. Twijnstra, R. (September 2013) In
person.
Interview with Pusetso Thibedi. Twijnstra, R. (September 2013) In person.
Interview with Paul Grootboom. Twijnstra, R. (September 2013) In person.
Interview with Neil Coppen. Twijnstra, R. (September 2013) In person.
Interview with Lara Foot. Twijnstra, R. (October 2013) In person.
Interview with Amy Jephta. Twijnstra, R. (October2013) In person.
Interview with Brett Bailey. Twijnstra, R. (October2013) In person.
Interview with Zinzi Princess Mhlongo. Durden, E. (November 2013). By email.
Interview with Brett Bailey. Durden, E. (November 2013). By email.
Interview with Bheki Mkhwane. Durden, E. (November 2013). In person.
Interview with Pusetso Thibedi. Durden, E. (November 2013). By email.
Interview with Greg Homann. Durden, E. (November 2013). By email.
Interview with Neil Coppen. Durden, E. (November 2013). By email.
Interview with Prince Lamla. Durden, E. (November 2013). By email.
Interview with Amy Jephta. Durden, E. (November 2013). By email.
Interview with Paul Grootboom. Durden, E. (November 2013) By email.
Bibliography 231
LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS
AND ILLUSTRATIONS
Photographs
1. Cover photograph: The Famished Road, directed by Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
2. Empty chairs, 2013. Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
3. Prince Lamla. Photograph by Suzy Bernstein.
4. Zinzi Princess Mhlongo. Photograph by Norman Maake.
5. Neil Coppen directing Animal Farm, 2014. Photograph by Val Adamson.
6. Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom directing Relativity, 2005. Photograph by
Ruphin Coudyzer.
7. Greg Homann. Photograph by Timmy Henny.
8. Pusetso Thibedi rehearsing, 2014. Photograph by Mamta Ramjee.
9. Lara Foot. Photograph by Mark Wessels.
10. Amy Jephta. Photograph by Reneva Newman.
11. Brett Bailey preparing Adama Cissoko for Exhibit B in Avignon, 2013.
Photograph by Pascal Gely.
12. Bheki Mkhwane workshopping drama students at UKZN Durban, 2014.
13. Abnormal Loads directed by Neil Coppen, 2012. Photograph by Val
Adamson.
14. Foreplay directed by Paul Grootboom, 2009. Photograph by Waldemar
Photo Studio.
15. David Dennis and Fezile Mpela in Delirium, directed by Greg Homann.
2012. Photograph by Ruphin Coudyzer.
16. Set for Orfeus directed by Brett Bailey, 2007. Photograph by Brett Bailey.
17. Pusetso Thibedi directing Capturing Sanity, 2012. Photograph by Beatrice
Lyl.
18. Monageng (Vice) Motshabi workshopping with Lashona Arts, 2013.
19. Jerry Pooe creating scenes for The Famished Road, 2013. Photograph by
Roel Twijnstra.
20. Twist Novel-Script Project, 2013. Photograph by Roel Twijnstra.
21. Scene work with actors from Eager Artists, 2013. Photograph by Roel
Twijnstra.
22. Notes from Neil Coppen, 2014. Photograph by Neil Coppen.
23. UKZN students (Pietermaritzburg) workshopping, 2014. Photograph by
Roel Twijnstra.
25. Twist Novel-Script Project, Chiron Kwame and Annemarie Slotboom, 2010.
27. Back cover photograph: Roel Twijnstra and Emma Durden. Photograph by
Val Adamson.
Illustrations
28. “The bird and the jackal”. Roel Twijnstra, 2014.
29. “A development with an unexpected twist”. Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
30. “Conflict with tragic development”. Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
31. “Conflict with a happy ending”. Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
32. “Action moments prepare the action units”. Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
33. “Structure of an exploding past”. Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
34. “Neil Coppen’s notes on costumes for Animal Farm”. Neil Coppen, 2014
35. “Different body positions of the actor towards the audience”. Roel
Twijnstra, 2013.
36. “Different areas, their strengths and the lateral side lines”. Roel Twijnstra,
2014.
37. “Option 1 has placed the projection points (door, bed and window) close
to each other. Option 2 shows them further apart, creating a more dynamic
space”. Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
38. “A possible set with projection points in a dynamic space, based on the
theme of the story”. Roel Twijnstra, 2013.
39. “Different options for the positioning of the audience”. Roel Twijnstra,
2013.
40. “Positions according a set of Grotowsky. Actors (black) audience (white)”.
From Grotowski, J. (1968) Toward a Poor Theatre (p 51). Denmark: Odin
Teatrets Forlag.
41. “Zug um zug”. From Henselverlag, E.G. (1985) Schauspielen. Hanover.
List of Photographs and Illustrations 233

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Theatre Directing in South Africa – Skills and Inspirations is a user-friendly introduction to the

Theatre Directing in South Africa

SKILLS AND INSPIRATIONS

INCLUDING INTERVIEWS WITH:

Design and layout by Jacana Media

The publication of this book is made possible through generous grants

Maddi Davis, Christiaan du Plessis, Nicole Masuku, Georgina Mabbett,

Most special thanks to my friend Emma Durden for collaboration,

Working in the theatre industry is made both possible and pleasurable

PART ONE – A HISTORY OF INSPIRATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

PART TWO – THE BASICS OF DRAMA AND DIRECTING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

PART THREE – WORKSHOPPING A SCRIPT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

viii Theatre Directing in South Africa

PART FOUR – THE DIRECTOR AS AN ARTS ENTREPRENEUR . . . . . . 211

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232

A NOTE FROM ROEL TWIJNSTRA

A NOTE FROM EMMA DURDEN

– Emma Durden (PhD)

xii Theatre Directing in South Africa

South Africa and the Netherlands have developed a strong partnership.

This part of the book introduces ten contempor­

2 Theatre Directing in South Africa

4 Theatre Directing in South Africa

Empty chairs, 2013.

This rainbow nation is pissing me off. It looks beautiful on the

6 Theatre Directing in South Africa

As the first born, Lamla inherited a lot of responsibilities and had to

Ten Contemporary Directors 7

Grotowski’s soul belongs in Africa, he was born in the wrong place,

Prince Lamla was intrigued by strong physical theatre. “I got an

8 Theatre Directing in South Africa

When I start working on a play, I go in another world with the actors.

That is where my own history started. The elder generation of theatre

Ten Contemporary Directors 9

Zinzi Princess Mhlongo, 2013. Photograph by Norman Maake.

Always work with a team of strong individuals

10 Theatre Directing in South Africa

She studied Drama on the Tshwane University of Technology. Janine

Ten Contemporary Directors 11

Sometimes I have it, sometimes I lose it. When I lose it I always go

12 Theatre Directing in South Africa

Ten Contemporary Directors 13

Neil Coppen directing Animal Farm, 2014. Photograph by Val Adamson.

We have to attract and excite new audiences into our theatres,

14 Theatre Directing in South Africa

Ten Contemporary Directors 15

16 Theatre Directing in South Africa

I wanted to free-up the theatre, avoid pandering to the idea of South

Ten Contemporary Directors 17

Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom directing Relativity. 2005.

I know young emerging directors watch my work.

18 Theatre Directing in South Africa

My grandparents had a strict idea about my future and wanted

2 “Mpumelelo Paul ‘Cosmo’ Grootboom”. Rafadi, K., South African History

Ten Contemporary Directors 19

My other inspirations are the German film director Leni Riefenstahl.

Grootboom adapted many novels and plays, directed and co-directed,

20 Theatre Directing in South Africa

Ten Contemporary Directors 21

Theatre in South Africa is director driven. It’s

22 Theatre Directing in South Africa

Ten Contemporary Directors 23

Malcolm was the first professional director I worked with as an actor.

This part of the book introduces ten contempor

2 “Mpumelelo Paul ‘Cosmo’ Grootboom”. Rafadi, K., South African History

3 Interview with Sir Peter Hall. (2006) www.rolexmentorprotege.com.

10 Veronica Baxter and James Aitchison (2010) “Embodying ‘lightness’ in the