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Campbell Meas is done waiting
Done waiting: Campbell Meas, winner of this year's National Playwright Competition at the National Arts Festival. Photo: Boipelo Khunou
Campbell Meas was standing outside her mom's salon with a towel around her head and water dripping down her face when she learnt she had won this year's National Playwright Competition at the National Arts Festival.
'I looked like a crazy person outside a shopping mall crying in a towel,' says Meas as she recounts the moment she told her parents.
Meas wears many hats — actor, writer, director, acting teacher — and she's recently added playwright to her resume after debuting her first play at this year's National Arts Festival which is on in Makhanda until 6 July. While winning came as a surprise, it was never her goal.
'The point wasn't to get accepted or win or anything like that. I didn't enter this with the hopes of winning.
'And, not to downplay any of that, my focus was I've already won because I got to write a play and I got to choose myself. So, everything after this has been an absolute bonus, including winning.
'The point was just to put myself out there, and to get used to continually putting myself out there, because I think there comes a point in every creative's life and journey where we stop choosing ourselves and we kind of just wait for opportunities to come to us or we wait for people to hire us.
'And so if that's not happening, we're just sitting around and waiting. And then, for some reason, we forget this work was for us and an outlet for us first. And I think that's very true as an actor and a director.'
As this year's National Playwright Competition winner, Meas had her play Vakavigwa staged at the festival. She started writing the script in 2016 with Christine van Hees and Mathabo Tlali, who also performed in it. She partnered with a writing mentor, Refiloe Lapere, who helped hone the play's focus on central themes. It addresses community, immigration and capitalism, while exploring the complexities of identity.
''Vakavigwa' is Shona for 'they were buried' or 'burials'. And that's essentially what the play kind of deals with. It deals with the death of Tinashe Musivera, a Zimbabwean student on South African land. It's not just any South African land. It's a community's ancestral land that is being sold to a construction [firm].
'And so her death kind of puts a stop to the community holding on to their land, but it also puts a stop to this capitalist rebuilding of the site. I try to look at how those three things come together.
'You know, community, ancestral history, being an immigrant or foreigner or a migrant and your claim to land and identity and accessibility. But also this idea of capitalism and corporateness and forward construction in South Africa and the necessity of that as well for communities.'
Meas was inspired in part by her maternal Zimbabwean heritage.
'My mom is from Zimbabwe and has really raised us to not forget that and to seek that community out wherever we can. And so, in this starting again of Campbell, I was going, 'Well, what other parts of Campbell have I forgotten about?
'Oh yeah, being Zimbabwean. And it became important for me to also tell that story. Not because I was trying to be the voice of anyone, or any community, but because I started noticing a very interesting rhetoric in the way South Africans would speak about other communities.
'When, I say other communities, I mean other nationalities, sexual identities, and religions. It's just we have a very interesting way as South Africans of having a very core identity and then anyone outside of that, we really struggle to integrate with. And so Tinashe kind of became this.'
One could say Meas' success was inevitable — she inherited the 'acting and writing gene' from her father Zane Meas, a veteran South African actor known for his role as Neville Meintjies in 7de Laan.
'I've been lucky enough to grow up in the arts industry because of my dad. My dad is an actor and so I've watched his career blossom and have hills and valleys, and because of that, I've been exposed to lots of different spaces in the arts and that's kind of where my love for the arts, theatre and storytelling began.'
But growing up around the industry didn't mean her path would be paved in gold. After graduating, Meas struggled to find her footing.
'I managed to study at Wits for four years, which was a lovely experience. I made so many good friends there. And a lot of the working relationships I have now started at Wits.
'And then afterwards you kind of just continue the hustle. And I use the word 'hustle' not in a happy way.
'I left Wits thinking I knew the industry because of my dad and then thinking I knew the industry because of four years of studying theatre.
'But then I got into the industry and it was a hustle. It was a hard thing to get into, to make connections, to find consistent work, build relationships and to build yourself and to build your skill set.'
They were buried: Scenes from Campbell Meas's play, Vakavigwa (above left and right), which looks at the themes of community, immigration, capitalism and the complexity of identity. Photos: Mark Wessels/National Arts Festival
She majored in performance and directing so writing wasn't something Meas initially saw for herself — but it became the outlet that allowed her to rediscover joy.
'By the age of 30, I was really burnt out. I was so tired. I was falling out of love with this thing. It felt like I was giving away parts of myself to make other people's visions come true. It felt like I was giving away parts of myself just to make money.
'It didn't make sense for me anymore to be a creative in the South African creative industrial complex.
'I took a step back from teaching, from directing, from acting, even from writing. Writing was never something I saw for myself. When I took a step back, I started journalling. It was like, 'I'm sad. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I'm a failure.'
'And so writing became a way of meeting myself. And then, weirdly enough, all of the opportunities that I started seeing coming up in the arts space were about writing.
'Again, because I didn't feel 100% confident in it, because it wasn't the main thing that I was doing, I was going, 'Cool, this is a great way to fail. And this is a great way to fail on my own terms, because I know I'm not this thing.''
Meas approached Vakavigwa with 'live cinema' — a term she admits doesn't quite capture what she and her team were doing.
'Essentially, live cinema is a style of theatre pioneered by a female director called Katie Mitchell from the UK. So, you are recording, you are filming a live theatrical performance, and then projecting it back on screens for an audience to watch.
'After watching Small Islands in like 2020-2021, I managed to buy the play and I was reading the play and I saw in the stage directions and in the writing and even with Katie Mitchell's work the way that she writes her live cinema scripts is you've got to also write for the crew and for the team. So, you can't just be a storyteller like a novelist. A novelist is just telling one story.
'If you are a playwright, you are writing for the actors, you're writing for the set designer, you're writing for the director, you're writing for the producers, you're writing for so many people. Not that that should override what you are trying to do but it's just something to keep in mind that you are creating the blueprint or the map for multiple planes of your story to exist. If you don't write it, you are leaving it up to someone else to create.'
Putting the play together came with numerous challenges, including technical issues with the live feed. Meas had to remind herself what truly matters.
'You've just got to choose over and over again to say, 'It's not about the outcome. It's about who I'm becoming in this process. And who I'm becoming is someone who is going to keep trying, who is going to keep being curious, who is going to keep saying 'yes'.''
Having wrapped up the show, Meas shared a valuable lesson.
'Assemble a team that you trust because this was a very big project and I cried at the beginning of this process because I thought I had to carry it alone. I thought that everyone was looking to me for answers and I thought I had to be everything for everyone.
'And so the biggest lesson was to assemble a team you can trust because then you can give things away. You don't have to carry six performances from six actors. You can give those away to them.'
