“Katurian is a writer of gruesome short stories, more often than not featuring the horrific deaths of young children. In the totalitarian state in which he lives, someone is enacting his stories – two children are dead, one more is missing. Katurian is the prime suspect, along with his brain-damaged brother but….did they do it?
This most dark of comedies is a seriously disturbing tale that scrutinises the very nature and purpose of art and storytelling.”
Clara Vaughan is a drama graduate of Rhodes University and practises as a performer, director, facilitator and writer in a variety of contexts. In 2005, she wrote a play for the UBOM! Theatre Company, and in the same year she scripted K.E.Mang, which was performed at the Sibikwa Theatre and the Durban Playhouse. She has directed and assistant-directed numerous student and professional productions, including Julius Caesar and House of Zombies. Last year she facilitated a course in directing for the Gauteng Organisation of Community Arts and Culture Centres with a group of promising young theatre-makers and was commissioned to write a manual titled A Guide for New Theatre Directors. She has just facilitated a creative Applied Theatre collaboration between Sibikwa and the Central School of Speech and Drama, London, as well as a pilot project working with female prisoners at Jo’burg Central Prison. She is currently lecturing in Applied Theatre at Wits University.
Martin McDonagh was born in Camberwell, London (UK) on 26 March 1970 to Irish parents. The son of a construction worker and cleaning lady, he dropped out of school at 16, shunned college because it was “bogus” and spent the following 10 years on the dole watching TV and eating potato chips. During this decade of leisure, McDonagh watched his brother, John, try to become a writer, and decided that it might be a good idea to become one too. Most of his early writing consisted of radio plays and screenplays, until he wrote a series of theatre plays in 1994/1995 that would bring success.
He wrote The Pillowman in 2003; it won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2004, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 2005. Martin McDonagh is the first dramatist since Shakespeare to have four works professionally produced on the London stage in one single season.
McDonagh wrote and directed his first full-length feature film, In Bruges (2008), for which he received the BAFTA Award for Original Screenplay and a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award nomination.
Free parking is available in Senate House; the entrance is on Jorissen Street, Braamfontein
PRODUCTION: The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh; directed by Clara Vaughan
VENUE: Wits Downstairs Theatre, East Campus, Braamfontein
SEASON: 17:07:2012 – 28:07:2012 @ 19:30
RUNNING TIME: Ninety minutes excluding interval; Age restriction: 16 LV
BOOKING: www.strictlytickets.com Full price = R 66:00; discount price = R 45:00 (students, pensioners and Wits staff). Tickets are available at the door: full price = R 70:00; discount price = R 38:50 (students, pensioners and Wits staff).
WitsTix (pay R 10:00) – 17 & 26 July @ 19:30
