Crimp's simmering social commentary hits Rhodes Box Theatre
Director: Liz Mills (Former head of directing at UCT, now at AFDA, Cape Town).
Assistant to the Director: Megan Wright
Stage Managaer: Anna Karuchas
Assistant Stage Manager: Aphile Sololo
Sound Technician: Michael Cullen
Performers: Sandi Dlangalala, Kamogelo Molobye, Ananda Paver, Kelsey Stewart, Hana Kelly, Cullan Maclear, Philip Sulter, Megan Wright, Ryan Napier.
Lighting design: Tersia Du Plessis
Set: Willie Coombs
Designer: Ilka Louw
Costumes: Kelly Rother
In March the Rhodes University Drama Department brought to campus 'The Treatment' written by British playwright, Martin Crimp, and directed by Cape Town based director, Liz Mills.
The play explored the exploits and drama surrounding the fast paced, cut throat industry of the New York film society where the spicy "three quarter full" characters laid bare the intrigue and two-faced mask of the New York film scene: questioning the meanings of truth, life and art.
Highly stylized and simmering with slick social commentary, Liz Mills' spin on the Crimp text bore new fruit in our department this March as 'never before scene' style enticed the audience and inspired the predominantly senior cast of actors (the majority being current honours students).
Each year the Rhodes Drama Department invites a guest director to challenge its students with a fresh first term student porduction. Mills made her mark and the work wowed and impressed.
Performers: Hana Kelly (third year) and Sandi Dlanglala (honours).
Cullan MaClear (second year).
‘Crimpland’ at Rhodes
"For well over a decade I have been absorbed, fascinated and challenged by the work of two quite extraordinary contemporary playwrights; Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin Crimp. These two unique voices in theatre have through their writing crafted language anew and manipulated both character construct and play structure in quite original ways. They are politically and socially-politically responsive in their writing and use the fiction of theatre to disturb audience perception of the daily reality of urban living. When I first read Martin Crimp’s Attempts on her Life I felt that I had been extended the ultimate challenge as a director. I had absolutely no idea how to direct the play: a series of ‘vignettes’ with no dialogue allocation, no character allocation and no traditionally recognizable play structures. The main character of the play is Anne, a character written as an absence! The only clue to dealing with the work which has strong resonances with film is that it is written for the theatre. The fact that a successful production emerged confirmed for me that good playwriting can evoke good directing.
When Juanita Praeg, the Head of Rhodes Drama Department, approached me to direct their students in the opening production for 2014, Crimp was uppermost in mind. His 1993 piece The Treatment seemed an ideal choice for a student cast. Although a decade old, the play remains a brutal exposé of consumerism; of success measured by popularity; of the lure of celebrity culture; of art as consumer product; and of a blurring of reality with the realities constructed by the media. And so ‘Crimpland’ – a term coined by critic Aleks Sierz in referring to Crimp’s signature writing features; his clinical observation of human interaction, his understanding of the dramatic in the banal and so on – came to Grahamstown!
My extremely enthusiastic, hardworking and invested cast immediately understood both the seductiveness of the text as well as its shocking brutality! The style of performance was a challenge for them because of its departure from the familiar realist Stanislavsky-based performance. These characters needed to read as real but also function as commentators; they had to draw an audience into a world and then remind them to interrogate it.
Rhodes Drama Department is in the most privileged position of having two professional designers on the staff and both were assigned to design for the production. Illka Louw designed a beautifully evocative set that functioned as urban landscape and costumes that located the characters in red carpet upward mobility. Tersia du Plessis’ lighting design captured the banality of crude coloured neon light city as well as the space of metaphor evoked with shadows and shafts of light. It was into this space that Kelsey Stewart, Hana Kelly, Philip Sulter, Ryan Napier, Cullan Maclear, Ananda Paver, Sandi Dlangalala, Kamogelo Molobye and Megan Grace Wright stepped under the watchful eye of Stage Manager Anna Kharuchas and her very capable crew Thando Maurice, Michael Cullen and Aphile Sololo. Collectively they delivered a slick, punchy, sophisticated piece of Crimpland SA-style! Thank you Rhodes Drama for an exciting production time!"
Liz Mills
Last Modified: Fri, 09 May 2014 16:06:00 SAST