Three Plays

by Craig Higginson

  This collection first published in 2016 by Oberon Books Ltd

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  Collection copyright © Craig Higginson, 2016

  Dream of the Dog © Craig Higginson, 2010, The Girl in the Yellow Dress © Craig Higginson, 2010, The Imagined Land © Craig Higginson, 2016

  Craig Higginson is hereby identified as author of these plays in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights.

  All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before commencement of rehearsal to Curtis Brown, Haymarket House, 28-29 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4SP (info@curtisbrown.co.uk). No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained, and no alterations may be made in the title or the text of the play without the author’s prior written consent.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or binding or by any means (print, electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  PB ISBN: 9781783197248

  E ISBN: 9781783197354

  Cover image by Craig Higginson

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.

  eBook conversion by Lapiz Digital Services, India.

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  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Dream of the Dog

  The Girl in the Yellow Dress

  The Imagined Land

  Acknowledgements

  Craig Higginson would like to thank his agent Jessica Cooper and her assistant Kat Buckle at Curtis Brown, as well as everyone at Oberon Books, including James Hogan, George Spender, James Illman, Emma Hall, Tia Begum and Konstantinos Vasdekis. He would also like to thank the contributions of all the people involved in the development and production of these plays. Special thanks to my wife Leila Henriques and to Jeremy Herrin, Malcolm Purkey and Michael Titlestad.

  Foreword

  I first met Craig Higginson in 2006 when I spent some time working with young writers from the Market Theatre Laboratory, as part of a creative exchange with Live Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne. Craig was the Market’s Literary Manager and organised my sessions. The writers showed a desire to understand the state their country was in, and despite their ambitions to write the definitive play about the troubled journey from apartheid to constitutional democracy, their theatrical canvases were often too wide to achieve the desired impact. Craig booked himself in for a conversation about the play that eventually became Dream of the Dog, an ostensibly small play that in its nuanced precision tells a huge story.

  A collaborative friendship was born. Over a few years of return visits, I got to know South Africa, and Craig was a generous cultural and geographical guide to this beguiling and terrifying land. His insight into South Africa was offered with intellectual rigour and laced with sly and absurd humour. His tone was suffused with the sort of fatalism that seemed a sensible way to cope with the inequality and violence that comes with living in the thin air of Johannesburg.

  These virtues are the bedrock of this collection of plays; and this particular sample of work shows him at his miniaturist best. The canvas may not be broad, but the work goes deep. The pairing of delicate psychology and considered plot allow the plays to move beyond the realism of their settings into a bespoke theatrical landscape, a place where the contradictions and messiness of contemporary life hold themselves up for inspection. The questions within Dream of the Dog are specific to place, but The Imagined Land speaks more broadly of the space where national and personal amnesia meet, and how a personal need for definition asserts itself in the face of trauma. The Girl in a Yellow Dress takes Craig off South African soil, and targets his interrogations more specifically at language and Europe’s need to avoid the challenging reality of post colonial Africa. But all three plays talk congruently about how competing narratives need to find a way to coexist. What better theme for contemporary South Africa?

  Despite his bloodless ability to bear witness to reality, optimism is never too far away and Craig’s is a robust, hard-won South African variety. It is clearly reflected in these plays. His characters invariably turn towards the light. They have an inclination for the truth, even if reconciliation might still be beyond them.

  Jeremy Herrin

  Artistic Director Headlong

  London

  February 2016

  Introduction

  From 1996, when the first hearings began, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission exerted a considerable – even definitive – influence on South African literature and theatre. The Commission was based on principles of restorative justice: victims were accorded a context in which to face perpetrators and these agents of the state would be exonerated only in exchange for full disclosure. This ecclesial logic – confession, expiation and forgiveness – proved to be more symbolic than real. Only a minority of victims and perpetrators appeared before the Commission and the proceedings became mired in opposing definitions of truth and contested memories. Yet the hearings went a considerable way to rectifying and supplementing the apartheid public record. Covert military operations, assassinations, detentions without trial and disinformation had left constitutive silences in our history and at least some of these were given voice.

  It would be inaccurate to interpret Dream of the Dog (2007), The Girl in the Yellow Dress (2012) and The Imagined Land (2015) as programmatic engagements with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They are neither pedantically political nor do they endorse the instrumental version of testimony on which – given its remit – the Commission was forced to settle. Rather, the plays comprise a succession of enquiries into the complex relations between narrative and actuality, between memory and its erasure, and between authorized and occluded voices. Since they are not limited to a specific agenda (the impulse to present a singular truth, a semblance of healing and nation-building), the plays can address those questions that unsettled the Commission but which it prudently and strategically underplayed.

  Dream of the Dog was one of the most auspicious debuts in contemporary South African theatre – culminating in a West End transfer to the Trafalgar Studios of the Finborough Theatre production, which featured Janet Suzman. The play is currently a prescribed text in several universities in South Africa, the UK and North America. It concerns four enmeshed lives: Richard and Patricia Wiley, an aging couple in the process of leaving their desultory farm in the Natal Midlands to live in Durban; Beauty, their long-suffering domestic worker; and, Looksmart (whose isiZulu name is Phiwayinkosi Ndlovu), a post-apartheid entrepreneur who grew up on the farm. Richard is suffering the steady encroachment of Alzheimer’s disease. Characteristic of the illness, certain memories are vivid, while the chronology and details of others are becoming increasingly mangled. The repressed memory in which the climax of the play consists is the deadly attack by a dog on Grace, a young worker on the farm. Richard was paying her to have sex with him. Pregnant by him and intending to keep the chil
d, Richard loosed the vicious dog in the knowledge that it might kill Grace.

  Richard’s amnesia presents the tenuous and unreliable nature of memory. There is no simple retrieval of the past and no easy moral restitution. Patricia and Looksmart are also implicated in the torsion of remembering. The interaction between them reveals – after she initially fails to recognize Looksmart – that Patricia sentimentalizes the details of her role in raising him. Looksmart recalls the past in a different register. For him, all childhood memories are occluded by the day of Grace’s death. He believes that she died en route to the hospital because Patricia hesitated for fear of getting blood on the upholstery of her car. Beauty discloses another misapprehension under which Looksmart has laboured. Grace never loved him and had no intention of marrying him. The mildly vengeful conviction that has motivated his acquisition of the farm – with the intention of turning it into an affluent gated community – is based on slippage. Further, his intention to replicate the farmhouse in the design of the range of new homes is ambiguous. At one level it grasps the apartheid original and devalues it through its multiplication in simulacra. At another it stages the way in which, not only Looksmart, but all the characters are embedded in pasts they ineluctably replicate. There is no emotional or intellectual mechanism that allows them to fix the past in its place and, by so doing, institute a truly original future.

  While Dream of the Dog was a remarkable debut, The Girl in the Yellow Dress, which has had a number of local and international runs and is also a prescribed university text, is perhaps Higginson’s most celebrated play to date. Inspired by Ovid’s Echo and Narcissus, it superficially eschews South African preoccupations. It renders a series of finely crafted dialogues between Celia, a trust-funded young English woman living in Paris who teaches English as a foreign language, and a French student, Pierre. Each session reveals more about the history of the characters, wittily combining the roles of teacher and student and the intricacies of English grammar to reflect on the ways in which we construct ourselves and one another in the languages we know and those we are endeavoring to learn.

  It soon becomes evident that Pierre understands the cultural currency of the social dispositions embedded in the English language. Since seeing her putting up signs at the Sorbonne, Celia has become Pierre’s aspirational ideal; he imagines that, by teaching him the English language (and manners), she can usher him into the fullness of a European identity. He also hopes for an intimate association with his particular alterity through becoming her lover. In order to win her over, he tells her about his history of harm. He was, he claims, brought to France as a child by Médecins Sans Frontières after a violent attack by Hutu interahamwe on his East Congolese village. It transpires, though, that this is not Pierre’s but his mother’s story. He tells it because he imagines it to be the narrative Celia wants to hear from him; a tale of trauma on ‘the dark continent’. In fact, Pierre grew up in France; he is a second-generation immigrant who continues to feel yoked to his family’s past and confined to the various roles he is expected to play as an African student at a French university.

  Celia’s entrapment is a consequence of an incestuous desire for her brother. This transgressive longing – which was possibly actualized in an affair – leaves her trapped in self-loathing and consequent loneliness. In an explosive consummation, each reaches out of their particular confinement. After this sexual intimacy, Pierre and Celia retreat into entrapment by their pasts. Yet The Girl in the Yellow Dress does not propose worlds adamantly sealed off from one another. The play concludes with a portrayal of a hesitant mutuality – once again expressed in the form of a grammar lesson. Despite lapsing into fixed subject positions, Celia and Pierre glimpse the prospect of an alternative; a reality in which individuals are not fixed by their historical, emotional and racial embedding.

  The recognition of this prospect relates to South Africa in which whites and blacks have generally been proximate strangers. The restrictions which history has imposed on intersubjectivity have been inordinate and determinative. Higginson’s vision tests this political and existential reality – at a Parisian remove – without unmitigated pessimism.

  The Imagined Land returns to Johannesburg; to a situation in which a young black Zimbabwean academic, Edward, is writing the biography of an aging (originally Rhodesian/Zimbabwean) writer, Bronwyn, at the same time as he interacts with her daughter, Emily, rekindling an intimate relationship. Reminding us of Richard in Dream of the Dog, Bronwyn – in this instance as a consequence of brain surgery – is losing her memory. The narrative of her life is unraveling at the same time as her biographer seeks to mine it for keys, particularly the origin of Bronwyn’s strained relationship with Emily. Edward conjectures – in his view, deduces – that Bronwyn left her child unprotected from the advances of a black consciousness poet; that, in short, she chose her literary career and her need for political validation over Emily’s safety and well-being. As a politicized aesthete, Edward believes, Bronwyn was prepared to sacrifice anything to address her obsession with white complicity and guilt. Parallel to Edward’s self-serving archaeology, Emily reconstructs subtler realities about her family’s Zimbabwean past: intimacies and betrayals from which their lives were fashioned. Existence, it transpires, cannot be reduced to singular determining moments, rather it is a filigree; a composite, intricate pattern of linked representations. ‘Research’, in the sense that appeals to Emily, is a process of (repeatedly) looking again for patterns and possibilities; anything else is simply expedient ideology.

  The play concludes with Edward having been appointed as a lecturer in the English department at a preeminent Johannesburg university, while Emily, who applied for the same job, plans to leave South Africa to take up a position at a university in Perth, Australia. But Edward’s reduction of Bronwyn’s life, his expedient scripting of her art and politics, is not conclusive. In a final conversation, Emily tries to expose Edward’s motives for imposing his own narrative onto Bronwyn’s life. In a political act, Edward initially withholds an explanation, yet when he learns about the miscarriage of his and Emily’s child, a new space for mourning and exchange is opened. The play implies that Emily will hear his story only after the play has concluded. Here Higginson is suggesting that the ‘traumatic’ black narrative – which is so often represented in plays intended for predominantly white audiences, both inside and outside of South Africa – will be made available for Emily while still remaining generally unavailable.

  We can conclude somewhat hesitantly that the three plays in this volume comprise an arc. While Dream of the Dog presents an almost impossible quest for the past, The Girl in the Yellow Dress opens the way to a constructive mutuality, although it withholds any definitive actualization. The Imagined Land is unapologetic about representing contemporary South Africa as propelled by a rudimentary politics of redress which overlooks the subtleties of the intersection of the personal and the political. We progress, in other words, from allegory to realism. Yet it is the plays’ common concern with the possibilities and limits of representation – particularly with the emergence and strengthening of black South Africans’ voices – that gives them unity. Collectively they refract what has been at stake in this country’s transition, and they do so with a subtlety and insight that will ensure their longevity.

  Michael Titlestad

  University of the Witwatersrand

  DREAM OF THE DOG

  Production History

  Dream of the Dog first appeared as a radio play on SAFM in South Africa in 2006, directed by Craig Higginson. It was rewritten as a stage play and premiered at the National Arts Festival (NAF) on 2 July 2007, produced by the NAF and the Market Theatre, before transferring to the Market Theatre. In 2008, it was revised and played at the Hilton Arts Festival. On 27 April 2010, a further revised version opened at the Finborough Theatre, London, produced by Meeting Point Productions. Shortly afterwards, that production transferred to the Trafalgar Studios.

  In 2015, Craig Hig
ginson published a novel called The Dream House (Picador Africa), which was inspired by this play. It appeared in French in 2016 as Maison de rêve (Mercure de France).

  The current published text should be considered the final and definitive version of the play.

  For the Market Theatre production:

  Cast

  PATRICIA

  Vanessa Cooke

  RICHARD

  Peter Terry

  BEAUTY

  Given Lunga

  LOOKSMART

  Mncedisi Shabangu

  Production Team

  Director

  Malcolm Purkey

  Assistant Director

  James Albrecht

  Designer

  Sasha Ehlers

  Lighting

  Nomvula Molepo

  Producer

  Regina Sebright

  For the Finborough Theatre production:

  Cast

  PATRICIA

  Janet Suzman

  RICHARD

  Bernard Kay

  BEAUTY

  Gracy Goldman

  LOOKSMART

  Ariyon Bakare

  Production Team

  Director

  Katie McAleese

  Designer

  Alex Marker

  Lighting

  Michael Nabarro

  Sound

  Andrew Pontzen

  Costumes

  Penn O’Gara

  Producer

  Libby Brodie

  Characters

  PATRICIA

  RICHARD

  BEAUTY

  LOOKSMART

  The action takes place in real time, several years after the new millennium, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Dialogue in Zulu is in italics, followed by a translation in brackets.