Adam Small’s The Orange Earth, written in 1984, is a lyrical and dreamlike drama of memory and injustice, brought to life by an outstanding cast of South African actors in a new staging by acclaimed director Matthew Wild. The play debuts at 2013's Suidoosterfees. Wild answers some questions about the production.
Matthew, The Orange Earth will be premiering at the 2013 Suidoosterfees. How did the decision to do this piece and your involvement as director come about?
Niel le Roux, who runs the Suidoosterfees, asked me to look at The Orange Earth after he saw my production of The Comedy of Errors at Maynardville. The Suidoosterfees had decided to programme the piece as part of its ongoing traversal of Small's dramatic works.
There seems to be a lot of renewed interest in the work of Adam Small since he was awarded the Hertzog Prize. Do you believe this will have an impact on how audiences attend and receive the piece?
I think it's terrific that the Suidoosterfees has shown such seriousness and commitment by commissioning new productions of Small's plays over the past years. Regular festival attendees will have had an opportunity to experience all of his plays in relation to one another over the years – and of course the Hertzog Prize makes this thorough exploration of his theatre works of even more importance. The Orange Earth has not been widely seen in the decades since its premiere, so this is a rare opportunity for fans of his writing to see one of his unpublished texts brought to life in a very new, bold way.
Orange Earth was written in 1984. In what sense are the content and reflections of the piece still relevant today?
Earlier versions of the play date back to 1978, with the radio play text that we are working from dating from 1984. The play deals very directly with the issues of its day – and we have not sought to find contemporary relevance in it. The cast are costumed in clothes from around 1980, and we are considering the production as a creative exploration of a historically significant document. Small himself has called the play a “fictionalised autobiography”, and autobiographical detail is mixed with fiction in a dreamlike, poetic way, as Small plays out scenarios of what could happen to an alter ego version of himself if he became engaged in the armed struggle. So in our production we have inserted a fictional version of Small himself; the production concentrates on exploring the struggles of an author who uses words and ideas as a means of resistance, not bombs (as the play's lead character Johnny Adams does).
Was the text adapted or transformed in any way to make it more accessible to theatregoers in 2013?
It's quite a long text and we have made some cuts to bring it down to festival length. Some viewers may suspect that the meta-theatrical layers in our production required the addition of a few lines, but in fact every word spoken is part of the original radio transcript. The major part of our work has been finding a physical life for a script which was intended to be experienced only as audio.
What did the process of leading the actors into a frame of mind where apartheid was still kicking entail?
I've encouraged the actors to find their own “hooks” into the situations of the characters they are portraying, and we have kept quite a lot of analytical distance from the text. Small's identity as an intellectual shines through the script, and I don't think it requires deep psychological identification from the actors.
What do you hope audience members will take home with them after having experienced the production?
We have an outstanding cast in this production, and have tried to find a very modern, very fresh way to look at this 1980s text. I hope audiences will find it bracing, surprising and thought-provoking.
Click here for more information on The Orange Earth at the Suidoosterfees.
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