playwrights-from-south-africa

"Without any conscious intent, I have found that sometimes, when trying to bring a character to life, an instinct in me would force me to withdraw from the world of the set"

"I’ve always wanted to remain something of a stranger on set and to the other actors, since this has enabled me to choose how to interact and joust with the movie set – actors and crew – as an entity that I am part of, but, at the same time, apart from."

"Google can teach you many different things, but certain acting tricks can only be learnt through experience."

"I’ve always known that I am an outsider, and I believe every actor has to arrive at that magical island where it’s okay to be different and set up shop on the beach"

"I’m often described as “the crazy actor who camps in the bush”, but becoming an outsider has been a deliberate decision on my part"

"Generally speaking, a movie set is a wonderful place for an actor to be"

"“I have a lot of friends who are writers and they want to tell amazing black stories, but they can’t because they are not allowed to. There is a variety of stories to tell but there is no platform and that’s frustrating"

"We met her and she allowed us to speak to women about their lives and challenges. I decided to create a drama because I don’t think that there is a human being who wakes up and decide to be a prostitute"

"But I am happy that black people are telling black stories though they are controlled in how they should tell them."

"What I like about the story is that this is the honest portrayal of sex workers and their lives"

"When you're into theatre and you are lucky enough to gigs in theatre, we tend to think that TV actors are coconuts. So I didn't want to do TV because I thought I was gonna be one of those 'cheesy' actors ... However, as time went by, I grew and became a man with responsibilities and the luxury to choose? Well, that was demolished and I had to audition for TV,"

"In terms of his life as a character, it's been hard. In terms of me as an actor, it's been a great journey to have to play such a complex character and to have to challenge myself to gelling to the emotion, to the life and to the imaginary lifestyle that he has. It's been a learning curve for me and I am still trying to understand where I can go further in terms of my career."

"I think there's no difference in acting for TV and for theatre, that was just me ... As long as you are telling the truth and you are true to the script and to the character. You can get away with anything as long as you tell the truth."

"I won't lie, when you are into theatre ... first, people like to assume that a professional actor is only the one that's on TV, but that's a lie, because there are professional actors making a living in theatre. For me, personally, when I graduated with my diploma, I didn't want to do TV (jobs)."

"When people like or love you for your work, they can even see you behind a mask!"

"You don’t have to create something new. Just be in a conversation and then something new will arise."

"There will be points where the work will not be magnificent and there will be moments when it comes back to itself again."

"I think university catches you at a very specific time in your life where you, yourself, are trying to figure out yourself."

"They still pay me the same as, let’s say, 10 years ago,” she said. “I’m worth much more than that and so are my peers... I will take hands with anyone supporting my stance, something needs to be done."

"In high school, drama was not part of the syllabus, so I organised drama classes after school and did a play with a few other students which was recommended to be performed for the South African Black Students Association’s first national congress."

"In my head Charmaine does no longer exist and I made peace with that ... A lot of people still call me Charmaine, especially in the shops"

"Even though I had friends as a child, I often chose to be on my own because my games were not conventional children’s games."

"If I am to be known by a colour, then I want to be known as a brown South African. I tried for so long to be black, politically, but that proved to be a misnomer."

"At primary school I re-wrote the Nativity, inventing a story about a blind girl who dreamt about witnessing the birth of Jesus and when she woke up, on Christmas morning – she could see! My teachers were so impressed, they allowed me to direct it as well."

"Although my role in Legacy was not big, I still enjoyed working with them."

"I was the one who initiated school plays and drama projects."

"I’m not in a position where I can sit back and go on with life as normal without working ... I take on any and all of the jobs offered to me."

"As a mixed-race African and adoptee I feel, paradoxically, oppressed and completely free....My adult life has been largely devoted to healing this rift. The freedom of my paradoxical position, is in fact that I don't have the constraints of a traditional role and I have access to the world."

""I started writing poetry when I was a child, my first published poem was when I was 11. I was brought up in a home that loved poetry and literature, especially the English language. But it was only when I was older that I realised that writing is so much more than words playing on a page."

"I felt like the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain. Writing continued to be important to me but I was convinced that it was simply a therapeutic process, of no value to anyone else."

"Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up."

"Writing contains the writer, their concerns, their social context and their history. My own history became a block to my creativity as I started to explore my identity as a black woman adopted by a white family in apartheid South Africa."

"I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side."

"After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification."

"Innovation and change: it was one of her key phrases, a mantra she liked to repeat. But it was empty. Ruth Ngema would go to great lengths to avoid any innovation or change, because who knew what might follow on?""

"So for a while I had two lives: one that was empty and adrift, in the hospital by day and another that was illicit and intense, by the side of the road at night. The one had nothing to do with the other."

"He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly."

"All the images and impressions and countries and continents he'd vised had been erased. What you don't remember never happened."

"The first time I saw him I thought, he won't last."

"And maybe that is the true reason for this journey, by shedding all the ballast of the familiar life they are each trying to recapture a sensation of weightlessness they remember but perhaps never lived, in memory more than anywhere else traveling is like free-fall, or flight."

"[Ockie] imagines himself one of his Voortrekker ancestors, rolling slowly into the interior in an ox-wagon. Yes, there are those who dream in predictable ways. Ockie the brave pioneer, floating over the plain. A brown-and-yellow countryside passes outside, dry except for where a river cuts through it, under a huge Highveld sky."

"They park in the driveway under the awning, with its beautiful green and purple and orange stripes. Beyond it, a diorama of white South Africa, the tin-roofed suburban bungalow made of reddish face brick, surrounded by a moat of bleached garden. Jungle gym looking lonely on a big brown lawn. Concrete birdbath, a Wendy house and a swing made from half a truck tyre."

"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were."

"The moment the metal box speaks her name, she knows it’s happened. She’s been in a tense, headachy mood all day, almost like she had a warning in a dream but can’t remember what it is. Some sign or image, just under the surface. Trouble down below. Fire underground."

"Oh Mr Bulane, what a sight to greet the plains of Tabanyane!"

"Bulane was dressed in faded old khakis, somewhat soiled and torn and sprinkled with mud, and although this was the height of summer on the highveld and the sun would soon be scorchingly hot, he was swathed in a thick army coat that looked frayed and moth-eaten, like something which might have been bequeathed to an importunate servant by a jokey employer."

"Why believe the word of the girl against mine,... Except for the whiteness of her skin, a color that has caused more trouble and unhappiness in the world than the color of any other skin, what particular claim to virtue can this girl be supposed to have?"

"Good gracious, man! Are you trying to tell the court that your people had never heard of orgies before the white man came to this continent?"

"No, I'll die of a vaster, deeper, more cruel conspiracy by the ruler of my country who have made a certain knowledge between persons of different races not only impossible to achieve but positively dangerous even to attempt to acquire. They have made contact between the races a cause for profoundest alarm among white citizens."

"We were lovers in everything but in name."