Speelgoed van glas, Nico Scheepers’ award-winning reworking and translation of Tennessee Williams’ English masterpiece The Glass Menagerie, gets an interesting new look at The Baxter in August, performed in English and in Afrikaans.
Directed, translated and designed by Nico Scheepers, the star-studded cast includes Anna-Mart van der Merwe, Carla Smith, Ben Albertyn and Mark Elderkin.
The Glass Menagerie plays from from 31 July to 7 August 2025, This will be followed by the much-discussed standalone Afrikaans version, from 8 to 16 August.
The characters unravel the intricate web of love and loss, spun by a matriarch to keep her family together at all costs – a web from which they all long to escape. The Glass Menagerie is an intense, heart-wrenching tale of separation, and a gripping exploration of fragility, longing and the fallibility of family.
Speelgoed van glas debuted at the Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees last year and was awarded in the following Woordfees categories: Best Play, Best Director (Nico Scheepers), Best Supporting Actress (Carla Smith), Best Supporting Actor (Mark Elderkin).
South African adaptation
Director Nico Scheepers is excited to bring a production that he is so proud of to one of the leading theatres in South Africa. He tells us a little more about the new English retranslation and the Afrikaans version.
“I think the interesting thing is that I couldn’t just use the original American English text, because I had completely adapted the Afrikaans production to the nineties in South Africa, with an Afrikaans family that has an English guest visit,” explains Nico.
“Therefore, I had to translate the Afrikaans text back into English using my adaptation with all the references and language as the foundation. I thought the most successful way to do it in English was to still treat them as an Afrikaans family. The actors speak with Afrikaans accents and there are still Afrikaans words in the production, so that it is still authentically South African. They are a South African family, who speak a kind of “Anglikaans” thereby making the English they use serve almost as subtitles for English audience members. It was the only way that I could see the adaptation working. And even though everyone speaks English, Jim (Mark Elderkin) who arrives in the second half still feels like an English person visiting an Afrikaans family.”
For the Afrikaans interpretation, the ensemble remains faithful to the production that has enjoyed great success at the various arts festivals, says Nico.
What: The Glass Menagerie / Speelgoed van glas
Where and when: Baxter from 31 July to 16 August 2025
Tickets: Webtickets
WS
