Latest news with #RoyalShakespeareCompany
Daily Record
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Outlander's Sam Heughan announces exciting new role
Outlander star Sam Heughan has announced his new film project Outlander heartthrob Sam Heughan has shared details about his latest venture following the conclusion of filming for the Starz series' final season, reports the Express. Alongside his upcoming stage appearance in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Macbeth production later this year, where he'll star opposite Lia Williams, the 45 year old Jamie Fraser actor is providing narration for a factual documentary titled Clinging By A Claw. Heughan lends his distinctive voice to the film, which highlights the desperate situation facing Scotland's wildcats - a species teetering on the edge of extinction - and the conservation efforts underway to rescue them. The actor posted the documentary's promotional material to his Instagram Stories. The production showcases stunning cinematography of the Scottish Highlands, where these threatened animals make their home. Previously sharing his enthusiasm on Instagram, he wrote: "Excited to take you on the iconic wildcat's journey back to the Scottish Highlands. "Honoured to narrate this heartwarming feature-length documentary 'Clinging by a Claw', which is being brought you THIS AUTUMN by @SaveOurWildcats and @ScotlandTBP." His Outlander colleague Caitríona Balfe responded with a string of applauding hand emojis to show her support. The documentary's preview features Heughan's voiceover cautioning: "The wild cat is on the brink of extinction in Scotland. This enigmatic animal is clinging on by a claw. "But now, could there be fresh hope for wild cats?" The teaser features a host of wildlife experts, including BBC Springwatch's Iolo Williams, discussing the dire situation facing Scottish wildcats and their potential resurgence in the Cairngorms National Park. It also showcases a team dedicated to constructing habitats aimed at enticing wildcats back to the area for breeding purposes. Outlander: Blood of My Blood fans can get MGM+ free for a week This article contains affiliate links, we will receive a commission on any sales we generate from it. Learn more £5.99 £0 MGM+ Get MGM+ here Product Description The trailer concludes with an inspiring message from Williams: "Can you imagine walking through here, and you've the possibility, it's a small possibility, but you've got the possibility of bumping into a wildcat? That sends a frisson of electricity down my spine." Produced by Saving Wildcats in collaboration with Scotland: The Big Picture and backed by the European Nature Trust, Clinging By A Claw is set to be screened at various cinemas throughout Scotland. This includes a special showing at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, featuring a Q&A session led by renowned presenter and wildlife aficionado Chris Packham. Clinging By A Claw marks a departure from the intense dramatic roles that Sam Heughan is typically associated with, such as his performances in Outlander, The Couple Next Door, SAS: Red Notice, and Bloodshot. In addition to his acting career, Heughan has entrepreneurial ventures like his Sassenach Spirits drinks line and the fitness initiative My Peak Challenge, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Heughan is set to star in the upcoming survival film Everest, sharing the screen with Ewan McGregor, Mark Strong, and Juno Temple.
The Guardian
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘What if everyone didn't die?' The queer, Pulitzer-winning, happy-ending Hamlet
When he was still in his 20s and studying for a master's degree in acting, James Ijames was advised to take a swerve away from all things Shakespearean. His tutors thought his southern accent, the product of an upbringing in North Carolina, was not conducive to declaiming Elizabethan verse. Believing them, he did just one professional Shakespeare production in 10 full years of treading the boards. Now Ijames is righting that old wrong, although he does not see it quite that way. Fat Ham, his latest drama, is based on Hamlet and features a queer protagonist called Juicy, who is commanded by the ghost of his murdered father to avenge his death. Significantly, Juicy hails from a Black American family in North Carolina. 'The thing I kept hearing over and over,' he says, 'was that my regionalism – the slowness of my southern accent – would make it difficult for me to do Shakespeare. I did avoid it for those reasons. That's a little bit of what's in this. I wanted to take this thing I was told I couldn't access and see if I could make it work for me.' It worked all right. Fat Ham was feted on Broadway, winning a Pulitzer prize and amassing five Tony award nominations. Next month, the play is coming to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon for its European premiere. Ijames, a playwright with more than 15 dramas under his belt, conceived the idea eight years ago, as he gravitated back to Shakespeare. An easy-going presence with a calm, donnish air, Ijames now makes a robust case for his right to Shakespeare. 'I was raised in a Black Southern Baptist church that reads the St James Bible every Sunday,' he says, speaking via Zoom. 'So I grew up reading Elizabethan English. Yet I was told the way I spoke would prevent me from being able to do that, when I had seen people speak this language with ease and eloquence my whole life. It just rocked my world, at a later age, to realise it belonged to me. So it was a real revelation working on this play.' Ijames has not only embraced Shakespeare but played fast and loose with this most definitive of his tragedies. There are new names, rearranged storylines, with most of the big soliloquies written out. 'I can't compete with those,' he explains. 'I can't be in the room with 'To be or not to be'. That existential crisis won't look that way in my characters.' It's a bold move, not least because of an unconventional programme in the Oregon Shakespeare festival not so long ago, with plays including references to slavery and non-binary actors cast in various roles. Nataki Garrett, the festival's artistic director, received death threats. 'I remember that happening,' says Ijames, 'and thinking, 'This is insane.'' Yet, he points out, Shakespeare hardly wrote from scratch: he took huge liberties with his source material, recycling older stories, borrowing from history. The 'almost scriptural quality' some attach to his texts is not something Shakespeare would have endorsed, Ijames believes. 'He was trying to evoke the audience's imagination because he knew that's where the play actually exists.' Acting, for Ijames, was a circuitous way into writing. In 2001, he says, 'they weren't really taking young people into playwriting programmes. So I went to grad school for acting. But I wrote the entirety of my career, in dressing rooms, wherever, until I'd built up enough work.' Learning about writing through acting sounds rather Shakespearean, I suggest. 'Yes,' says Ijames. 'I don't pretend to be as earth-shattering a writer as he was, but his curiosities are very similar to mine.' Evidently so: Fat Ham is warmer and more comic than Hamlet – but at its core, it is a story about fathers, sons and the cycle of violence triggered by the drive for vengeance. Except that Fat Ham's antihero struggles against the violent masculinity his father represents. 'It's perennial for me as a writer to ask, 'What does masculinity mean?' 'What does the performance of masculinity do?'' One reason he is so defined by this theme, he explains, is because he shares a name with his father. 'I'm a 'junior' – so there's a kind of ownership, an expectation of legacy, that I've lived with my whole life. As an artist, I'm preoccupied with disrupting: this notion of how a man is supposed to act at any given moment.' He wants to explore what lies beneath the ideal of masculinity that young people are fed – an ideal that requires them to stifle many components of their emotional being. 'It takes time,' says Ijames, 'to bring that stuff back to life.' Alongside Juicy in Fat Ham, there is Larry (based on Laertes) who feels a closeted queer passion for Juicy. Shame and homophobia shape their trajectories. 'Many times,' says Ijames, 'homophobia is about not wanting to face parts of yourself. I'm not one of those folks who say you're homophobic because you're actually gay – but I do think you are homophobic because you think that if you get too close to a man's body, then your body might betray you.' Ijames grew up in a large family, in the small town of Bessemer City. His father worked in truck manufacturing ('He's retired military – that type') while his mother taught elementary school ('She wanted us to be surrounded by art'). What was it like growing up queer in this household, in this corner of the south? 'I wasn't in a family that was like, 'Oh, you're gay, get out of here, you're the worst.' They said, 'Just don't get in trouble.'' And the masculinity in his family contained a 'softness', something he puts down to it being mostly comprised of women. 'They were such engines of the family that it changed us. I remember thinking I should be elegant because one of my uncles was very elegant.' What about the greater forces around him, such as the Baptist church? He tells an instructive story about a late family member called Thomas Calvin, who was a theologian. As Ijames's uncle, he believed a Christian had a simple duty: to make the world a better place. 'And that is my framework for Christianity.' Although Ijames has witnessed – and experienced – intense homophobia in churches, he still takes moral direction from the 'social justice aspect of the teachings of Jesus'. Given the changes that have swept America under Donald Trump, it is hard to escape 'strongman' notions of masculinity. Has it ever felt more toxic, more in crisis? 'Well,' says Ijames, 'that's a thing a play can't fix.' He adds, in his even way, that masculinity is hardly one single thing. 'It's a constellation of stuff. I don't feel safer with these strongmen, so what is the strength we're talking about? I don't feel more protected. I don't feel like we're somehow more powerful. I just feel like anxious people – and I'm an anxious person – are being anxious with each other.'All those alternative versions of manhood are there in Fat Ham, rubbing alongside darker elements. But there is playfulness and exuberance, too. Its characters do not seem as villainous as Shakespeare's and the ending might even be described as happy. Is Ijames deliberately creating a state that is good out of Shakespeare's rotten one? 'I was very much doing that. I was curious about what happens if we spend time figuring out what paradise looks like. What if everyone didn't die at the end? What if everyone had a place to live, enough to eat. These are questions about civilisation.' There is violence in Fat Ham and it seems implicitly bound to race and US history, but Ijames does not get into cycles of inherited violence within some Black communities. Instead, he goes down another route. 'I don't write that because I don't know how to be inside that. Joy is a thing I know in excess. It's one of the tricks of being an actor: you understand what offers pleasure to the audience because you have to do it with your whole body. I think marginalised people in general, and Black Americans in particular, are miraculous. I think we should party once in a while.' Fat Ham is at the Swan theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon, from 15 August until 13 September
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘What if everyone didn't die?' The queer, Pulitzer-winning, happy-ending Hamlet
When he was still in his 20s and studying for a master's degree in acting, James Ijames was advised to take a swerve away from all things Shakespearean. His tutors thought his southern accent, the product of an upbringing in North Carolina, was not conducive to declaiming Elizabethan verse. Believing them, he did just one professional Shakespeare production in 10 full years of treading the boards. Now Ijames is righting that old wrong, although he does not see it quite that way. Fat Ham, his latest drama, is based on Hamlet and features a queer protagonist called Juicy, who is commanded by the ghost of his murdered father to avenge his death. Significantly, Juicy hails from a Black American family in North Carolina. 'The thing I kept hearing over and over,' he says, 'was that my regionalism – the slowness of my southern accent – would make it difficult for me to do Shakespeare. I did avoid it for those reasons. That's a little bit of what's in this. I wanted to take this thing I was told I couldn't access and see if I could make it work for me.' It worked all right. Fat Ham was feted on Broadway, winning a Pulitzer prize and amassing five Tony award nominations. Next month, the play is coming to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon for its European premiere. Ijames, a playwright with more than 15 dramas under his belt, conceived the idea eight years ago, as he gravitated back to Shakespeare. An easy-going presence with a calm, donnish air, Ijames now makes a robust case for his right to Shakespeare. 'I was raised in a Black Southern Baptist church that reads the St James Bible every Sunday,' he says, speaking via Zoom. 'So I grew up reading Elizabethan English. Yet I was told the way I spoke would prevent me from being able to do that, when I had seen people speak this language with ease and eloquence my whole life. It just rocked my world, at a later age, to realise it belonged to me. So it was a real revelation working on this play.' Ijames has not only embraced Shakespeare but played fast and loose with this most definitive of his tragedies. There are new names, rearranged storylines, with most of the big soliloquies written out. 'I can't compete with those,' he explains. 'I can't be in the room with 'To be or not to be'. That existential crisis won't look that way in my characters.' It's a bold move, not least because of an unconventional programme in the Oregon Shakespeare festival not so long ago, with plays including references to slavery and non-binary actors cast in various roles. Nataki Garrett, the festival's artistic director, received death threats. 'I remember that happening,' says Ijames, 'and thinking, 'This is insane.'' Yet, he points out, Shakespeare hardly wrote from scratch: he took huge liberties with his source material, recycling older stories, borrowing from history. The 'almost scriptural quality' some attach to his texts is not something Shakespeare would have endorsed, Ijames believes. 'He was trying to evoke the audience's imagination because he knew that's where the play actually exists.' Acting, for Ijames, was a circuitous way into writing. In 2001, he says, 'they weren't really taking young people into playwriting programmes. So I went to grad school for acting. But I wrote the entirety of my career, in dressing rooms, wherever, until I'd built up enough work.' Learning about writing through acting sounds rather Shakespearean, I suggest. 'Yes,' says Ijames. 'I don't pretend to be as earth-shattering a writer as he was, but his curiosities are very similar to mine.' Evidently so: Fat Ham is warmer and more comic than Hamlet – but at its core, it is a story about fathers, sons and the cycle of violence triggered by the drive for vengeance. Except that Fat Ham's antihero struggles against the violent masculinity his father represents. 'It's perennial for me as a writer to ask, 'What does masculinity mean?' 'What does the performance of masculinity do?'' One reason he is so defined by this theme, he explains, is because he shares a name with his father. 'I'm a 'junior' – so there's a kind of ownership, an expectation of legacy, that I've lived with my whole life. As an artist, I'm preoccupied with disrupting: this notion of how a man is supposed to act at any given moment.' He wants to explore what lies beneath the ideal of masculinity that young people are fed – an ideal that requires them to stifle many components of their emotional being. 'It takes time,' says Ijames, 'to bring that stuff back to life.' Alongside Juicy in Fat Ham, there is Larry (based on Laertes) who feels a closeted queer passion for Juicy. Shame and homophobia shape their trajectories. 'Many times,' says Ijames, 'homophobia is about not wanting to face parts of yourself. I'm not one of those folks who say you're homophobic because you're actually gay – but I do think you are homophobic because you think that if you get too close to a man's body, then your body might betray you.' Ijames grew up in a large family, in the small town of Bessemer City. His father worked in truck manufacturing ('He's retired military – that type') while his mother taught elementary school ('She wanted us to be surrounded by art'). What was it like growing up queer in this household, in this corner of the south? 'I wasn't in a family that was like, 'Oh, you're gay, get out of here, you're the worst.' They said, 'Just don't get in trouble.'' And the masculinity in his family contained a 'softness', something he puts down to it being mostly comprised of women. 'They were such engines of the family that it changed us. I remember thinking I should be elegant because one of my uncles was very elegant.' What about the greater forces around him, such as the Baptist church? He tells an instructive story about a late family member called Thomas Calvin, who was a theologian. As Ijames's uncle, he believed a Christian had a simple duty: to make the world a better place. 'And that is my framework for Christianity.' Although Ijames has witnessed – and experienced – intense homophobia in churches, he still takes moral direction from the 'social justice aspect of the teachings of Jesus'. Given the changes that have swept America under Donald Trump, it is hard to escape 'strongman' notions of masculinity. Has it ever felt more toxic, more in crisis? 'Well,' says Ijames, 'that's a thing a play can't fix.' He adds, in his even way, that masculinity is hardly one single thing. 'It's a constellation of stuff. I don't feel safer with these strongmen, so what is the strength we're talking about? I don't feel more protected. I don't feel like we're somehow more powerful. I just feel like anxious people – and I'm an anxious person – are being anxious with each other.'All those alternative versions of manhood are there in Fat Ham, rubbing alongside darker elements. But there is playfulness and exuberance, too. Its characters do not seem as villainous as Shakespeare's and the ending might even be described as happy. Is Ijames deliberately creating a state that is good out of Shakespeare's rotten one? 'I was very much doing that. I was curious about what happens if we spend time figuring out what paradise looks like. What if everyone didn't die at the end? What if everyone had a place to live, enough to eat. These are questions about civilisation.' There is violence in Fat Ham and it seems implicitly bound to race and US history, but Ijames does not get into cycles of inherited violence within some Black communities. Instead, he goes down another route. 'I don't write that because I don't know how to be inside that. Joy is a thing I know in excess. It's one of the tricks of being an actor: you understand what offers pleasure to the audience because you have to do it with your whole body. I think marginalised people in general, and Black Americans in particular, are miraculous. I think we should party once in a while.' Fat Ham is at the Swan theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon, from 15 August until 13 September
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Breakfast With Mugabe: biting political drama finally arrives in South Africa
I am standing outside the hallowed walls of the Market theatre, Newtown, Johannesburg. This is the place where Athol Fugard – surely the greatest of South African playwrights and one of my all-time theatre heroes – staged plays including Hello and Goodbye and The Island. The latter was co-written with fellow theatre greats, actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Now it's the turn of a little-known English writer and his play Breakfast With Mugabe. This is, as they say, one of the days of my life. In 2001 my script felt like urgent work. Elections loomed in Zimbabwe, and Robert Mugabe was reportedly unleashing terrible violence in his bid to cling to power. To many in the UK 'President Bob' had long been a monster. But what, I wondered, created the monster? The play finds Mugabe holed-up in State House, pursued by the bitter spirit of a long-dead comrade. Denied help by traditional healers, the former liberation leader reluctantly turns to a white psychiatrist. Cue the unravelling of history. Interest in Breakfast With Mugabe was immediate, and persistent. The late (and much missed) Antony Sher directed a Royal Shakespeare Company production that travelled from Stratford in 2005 via Soho theatre to the West End in 2006. An audio version flourished on BBC Radio 3 and the World Service; a second UK production followed, while in the US a production by Two Planks & A Passion (directed by David Shookhoff) clocked up 100 performances on New York's 42nd Street. Another production was staged in Berkeley. Since then, Mugabe has died and Zimbabwe bumps along in comparative peace. So a new production – especially in South Africa – came as a surprise. According to Greg Homann, the idea blossomed slowly. In 2022, Greg – whose theatre work spans the US, UK and South Africa – was associate artist at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham. Then his 'dream job' became a reality. Returning to South Africa as artistic director of the Market theatre, one of the first artists he encountered was a young director fast building a reputation as an innovative theatre-maker. Calvin Ratladi had, sometime in 2016, chanced on a copy of Breakfast With Mugabe. The play stuck with him; would the Market produce it? Sadly, that plan stalled. Then, earlier this year, Ratladi was named Standard Bank's young artist of the year for theatre. This award is quite a gong (its first winner was Richard E Grant). It brings with it support for a creative project – and an opportunity was glimpsed. If Ratladi still held a torch for his Mugabe project, the Market theatre would host. Remarkably, he was as keen as ever. A theatre polymath and renowned disability activist, for him this four-handed, pressure-cooker play of psychology and spirituality presented exciting new challenges. If this partly answers the 'why here, why now?' question, why do Ratladi and Homann think the play resonates in the new South Africa? For Homann, the play typifies the Market's longstanding commitment to 'an entwining of politics and theatre' – a tradition vital to the theatre's co-founders Barney Simon and Mannie Manim, and to one of the many playwrights they championed, Athol Fugard, who sadly died in March. Recent shows at the Market have examined the life and legacy of other significant South African figures, among them Winnie Mandela and Robert Sobukwe. As Ratladi points out, Breakfast With Mugabe extends this tradition; a play about a hero of the liberation movement – this time from outside South Africa, and one whose legacy is hotly contested. This is especially true among Zimbabweans, an estimated one to three million of whom now live in South Africa. Hearings into the Gukurahundi in Matabeleland in the mid 1980s have only just begun in earnest. In that massacre, Mugabe ordered his army's North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade to suppress his party's opponents. An estimated 20,000 Zimbabweans were murdered. At the production's first night in Johannesburg, it was clear the play retains its bite. Themba Ndaba and Craig Jackson lock the president and his shrink in a terrible struggle for supremacy; Gontse Ntshegang shines as the manipulative Grace Mugabe, drawing howls of laughter for her indiscretions as 'the First Shopper', while Zimbabwean-born Farai Chigudu exudes menace – and barely controlled violence – as the bodyguard/secret policeman, Gabriel. With the first three performances sold out, audiences (as audiences will in South Africa) whooped, gasped and sighed at every zinger or put-down – verbal or physical – delivered by the cast. I've been lucky. The play has almost always been well received by audiences as well as critics. In the US however, what I believed was a play about colonial culpability was celebrated as an essay on interracial conflict, pure and simple. Do Americans struggle to see their country implicated as a colonial power? In South Africa by contrast, it's the impact of colonial oppression that deafens. Post-liberation rewards – the justice so long awaited by black South Africans – never materialised for many. How the country's current government can ever deliver redress is a hot-button political issue for President Cyril Ramaphosa – and one critical to the future of South Africa's 63 million inhabitants. And what does Ratladi's unexpected, bracing new production offer the playwright? A lesson. Whatever we may think we've written, a play can – simply by shifting its context in time and space – make us think and feel something new. It is after all play – a living, unfolding, mutable thing. Like all true play, its punches do not always land where expected. Breakfast with Mugabe is at the Market theatre, Johannesburg, until 10 August
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Breakfast With Mugabe: biting political drama finally arrives in South Africa
I am standing outside the hallowed walls of the Market theatre, Newtown, Johannesburg. This is the place where Athol Fugard – surely the greatest of South African playwrights and one of my all-time theatre heroes – staged plays including Hello and Goodbye and The Island. The latter was co-written with fellow theatre greats, actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Now it's the turn of a little-known English writer and his play Breakfast With Mugabe. This is, as they say, one of the days of my life. In 2001 my script felt like urgent work. Elections loomed in Zimbabwe, and Robert Mugabe was reportedly unleashing terrible violence in his bid to cling to power. To many in the UK 'President Bob' had long been a monster. But what, I wondered, created the monster? The play finds Mugabe holed-up in State House, pursued by the bitter spirit of a long-dead comrade. Denied help by traditional healers, the former liberation leader reluctantly turns to a white psychiatrist. Cue the unravelling of history. Interest in Breakfast With Mugabe was immediate, and persistent. The late (and much missed) Antony Sher directed a Royal Shakespeare Company production that travelled from Stratford in 2005 via Soho theatre to the West End in 2006. An audio version flourished on BBC Radio 3 and the World Service; a second UK production followed, while in the US a production by Two Planks & A Passion (directed by David Shookhoff) clocked up 100 performances on New York's 42nd Street. Another production was staged in Berkeley. Since then, Mugabe has died and Zimbabwe bumps along in comparative peace. So a new production – especially in South Africa – came as a surprise. According to Greg Homann, the idea blossomed slowly. In 2022, Greg – whose theatre work spans the US, UK and South Africa – was associate artist at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham. Then his 'dream job' became a reality. Returning to South Africa as artistic director of the Market theatre, one of the first artists he encountered was a young director fast building a reputation as an innovative theatre-maker. Calvin Ratladi had, sometime in 2016, chanced on a copy of Breakfast With Mugabe. The play stuck with him; would the Market produce it? Sadly, that plan stalled. Then, earlier this year, Ratladi was named Standard Bank's young artist of the year for theatre. This award is quite a gong (its first winner was Richard E Grant). It brings with it support for a creative project – and an opportunity was glimpsed. If Ratladi still held a torch for his Mugabe project, the Market theatre would host. Remarkably, he was as keen as ever. A theatre polymath and renowned disability activist, for him this four-handed, pressure-cooker play of psychology and spirituality presented exciting new challenges. If this partly answers the 'why here, why now?' question, why do Ratladi and Homann think the play resonates in the new South Africa? For Homann, the play typifies the Market's longstanding commitment to 'an entwining of politics and theatre' – a tradition vital to the theatre's co-founders Barney Simon and Mannie Manim, and to one of the many playwrights they championed, Athol Fugard, who sadly died in March. Recent shows at the Market have examined the life and legacy of other significant South African figures, among them Winnie Mandela and Robert Sobukwe. As Ratladi points out, Breakfast With Mugabe extends this tradition; a play about a hero of the liberation movement – this time from outside South Africa, and one whose legacy is hotly contested. This is especially true among Zimbabweans, an estimated one to three million of whom now live in South Africa. Hearings into the Gukurahundi in Matabeleland in the mid 1980s have only just begun in earnest. In that massacre, Mugabe ordered his army's North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade to suppress his party's opponents. An estimated 20,000 Zimbabweans were murdered. At the production's first night in Johannesburg, it was clear the play retains its bite. Themba Ndaba and Craig Jackson lock the president and his shrink in a terrible struggle for supremacy; Gontse Ntshegang shines as the manipulative Grace Mugabe, drawing howls of laughter for her indiscretions as 'the First Shopper', while Zimbabwean-born Farai Chigudu exudes menace – and barely controlled violence – as the bodyguard/secret policeman, Gabriel. With the first three performances sold out, audiences (as audiences will in South Africa) whooped, gasped and sighed at every zinger or put-down – verbal or physical – delivered by the cast. I've been lucky. The play has almost always been well received by audiences as well as critics. In the US however, what I believed was a play about colonial culpability was celebrated as an essay on interracial conflict, pure and simple. Do Americans struggle to see their country implicated as a colonial power? In South Africa by contrast, it's the impact of colonial oppression that deafens. Post-liberation rewards – the justice so long awaited by black South Africans – never materialised for many. How the country's current government can ever deliver redress is a hot-button political issue for President Cyril Ramaphosa – and one critical to the future of South Africa's 63 million inhabitants. And what does Ratladi's unexpected, bracing new production offer the playwright? A lesson. Whatever we may think we've written, a play can – simply by shifting its context in time and space – make us think and feel something new. It is after all play – a living, unfolding, mutable thing. Like all true play, its punches do not always land where expected. Breakfast with Mugabe is at the Market theatre, Johannesburg, until 10 August
