Veteran and award-winning actor and playwright Paul Slabolepszy brings his latest play, Suddenly the Storm, to the Baxter this month.
This just in: The play just won three prestigious Naledi Awards on 5 June, scooping the coveted Best New South African Script for Paul Slabolepszy, Best Theatre Set Design (Greg King) and Best Lighting Design (Wesley France) awards.
Paul talks about the work, and what he has been up to:
WS: Can you please tell us the basic storyline of Suddenly the Storm?
PS: Suddenly the Storm is a thriller, shot through with dark humour and many twists and turns. Namhla Gumede, born on the 16th June, 1976, arrives at a plot on the Far East Rand belonging to Dwayne and Shanell Combrink seeking answers to questions that have been buried 40 long years.
WS: As someone who has written some very funny comedies, but also some very poignant dramas, where does this fit on the spectrum?
PS: Suddenly the Storm is a poignant story – heart-breakingly sad and at the same time gloriously uplifting. To me, it is the story of our country.
WS: What inspired you to write the play?
PS: Where do I start? This play has taken me five years to write. At the heart of it was the need to tell a story that would reveal the injustice and brutality of a racist system that caused untold misery in the lives of the majority of its citizens; for those that went into exile, longing for their homeland and then finally coming home – the question: When does ‘longing’ become ‘belonging’? After years in the wilderness, is it even possible to attain that state of being?
WS: As an acclaimed playwright of award-winning South African works, whose plays have been created during some very specific periods in this country’s history, would you say that current affairs played a role in this creation?
PS: Saturday Night at the Palace was the first of my plays that exposed certain things that were going on in South Africa back in 1982. Suddenly the Storm has without doubt been influenced by what is happening in our country in our recent past. Since the play opened at the Market Theatre in June, 2016 there have been so many audience members coming forward, saying ‘This is my story!’
WS: And you’re working with (director) Bobby Heaney, with whom you have collaborated before. How is to be back and doing a theatre production together, once again?
PS: Working with Bobby Heaney has been an absolute joy. From the moment I gave him the first completed draft the journey has been exciting, inspiring and richly rewarding. There is nowhere I would rather be than working on a new play and bringing it to the stage under Bobby’s guiding hand. Renate Stuurman and Charmaine Weir-Smith, my co-cast members in Suddenly the Storm, were blown away when Bobby and I told them during rehearsals that this was the very spot, behind the Barney Simon Theatre at the Market, where Bill Flynn, Fats Dibeko, Bobby and I rehearsed Palace in March/April, 1982. Thirty-four years later and theatre still lives in that hallowed space; and Bobby Heaney – ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends! – still directing a Paul Slab play!
WS: You are a prolific writer – if we are correct, you have written over 30 plays, not to mention screenplays and even books. But there has been a seven-year gap between your last play and this one. What have you been up to?
PS: I have doing what all other actor/writer’s do in South Africa, tackling ‘other stuff’ for a living: corporate gigs, product launches, industrial cabaret. I have been fortunate in that every now and again I get commissions to write television or screenplays and for the past seven years I have been head writer on a daily SAfm soapie, Radio Vuka. This has enabled me to write for theatre in my spare time.
WS: As a veteran of the South African theatre scene, how do you find things at the moment, in terms of original new works, and what is out there? Exciting, or same old same old?
PS: The South African theatre scene is hugely exciting at the moment. Stories for the stage are being told across the length and breadth of our country and truly wonderful theatre is being produced.
WS: That said – what was the last live show you saw, and how did you find it?
PS: As it so happens I saw Andre Odendaal in a play called Dop, directed by Sylvaine Strike – brilliant, spellbinding and world-class. See that play and know that South African theatre can stand proud anywhere on the planet!
WS: What do you like to do to relax?
PS: I practice Transcendental Meditation and learned to do it in Cape Town in 1971.
WS: Can you please tell us something about yourself that most people would not know?
PS: At age three-and-a-half I did one-man shows at the Modderfontein Dynamite Factory Nursery School for all the pupils and staff. I still have the termite-eaten report card to prove it! (Makes me wonder why I even bothered with maths and science and geography and all those other things in the following years).
What: Suddenly the Storm
Where and when: Baxter Flipside from 7 June to 8 July
Book: Computicket
WS
