This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

21st July 2007

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Lara Foot Newton has a bone to pick with J.M. Coetzee. Although she acknowledges that “Coetzee influences all of us and is remarkable”, her experience of reading his 2005 novel Slow Man was “awful”: “It goes beyond Disgrace in the sense that it’s so outwardly dark. Disgrace has a theatricality to it, a drive in the story-telling, whereas Slow Man has perhaps less pain but is really frustrating to read.” Foot Newton’s latest play, Reach – which premiered at the TheaterFormen Festival in Hanover, opened in South Africa at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, and is currently running at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town before moving to the Market in Johannesburg – is in part a rejoinder to the “absolutely desperate state that Coetzee writes about.”

In Reach, an ageing white woman who has become isolated by her bitter experiences of loss (her son was killed in a violent crime, her daughter has emigrated and she is divorced from her husband) sits reading Slow Man and contemplating suicide. When a young black man sneaks into her living room, she thinks he wants to rob or kill her, but he has in fact come – reluctantly – to deliver a message. During the course of the play, we see them build a strangely interdependent relationship as the emerging warmth and intimacy between them threatens to prevent the communication of his potentially discomforting message.

Director Clare Stopford compares the action of Reach to the process of developing a photograph: it starts as a negative, a dark picture, but grows into a scene with redeeming light and colour. Indeed, Foot Newton’s aim in writing the play (which she composed under the “blanket of depression” spread across Cape Town amidst incidents such as the murder of Brett Goldin, the unrest surrounding the security guard strike and the widespread electricity shortages) was to “sift through” elements of despair to find “a symbol of life which exists in unlikely relationships. All my plays, and particularly Reach, exhibit some form of hope – within a relationship, if not within the social context.”

I remind Foot Newton that in her programme notes on Athol Fugard’s Victory, which she recently directed to mixed critical response, she hinted at the possibility that Fugard’s play need not simply be one of “attrition” in which optimism about the South African situation is “dead and meaningless”, and that it can be read as “a warning” or “a call to be active, to protest, to reflect inwards”. The impetus driving Foot Newton’s first play as a solo writer, Tshepang, was similarly ambiguous. Tshepang means ‘hope’ and it is the name given to the baby girl who made headlines in 2001 after she was raped and sodomised by her mother’s boyfriend. Foot Newton’s treatment of this subject matter is largely sympathetic: in opposition to the media’s sensationalised direction of blame at an ‘evil’ rapist, she was conscious of “making society the protagonist, seeing the landscape, the whole village, the whole country, as the rapist ... one has to question where the rapist comes from, although that’s not excusing him by any stretch of the imagination”.

Yet the invocation of the word ‘hope’ in her title is not as cynical or world-weary as Fugard’s obviously ironic ‘victory’. Interestingly, Tony Hamburger’s introduction to Tshepang (published by Wits University Press in 2005) argues that “what links Foot Newton to Fugard is the hope that through plays dealing with social evils and personal pain a beginning can be made in understanding, in attempting to find meanings or possibilities in situations where there appear to be none”. In Victory, however, Foot Newton admits that – apart from moments of “slight redemption” – Fugard has “eradicated hope, taken away that glimmer”. She considers this “brave of him”, but it is not a position she can adopt: “hope is necessary because it gives you the ability to survive within a dark context”.

The tension between Foot Newton’s work as a director and as a writer is ongoing. In recent years she has avoided directing her own plays in order to “make room” for herself as a writer: “I’m more confident directing than I am writing, so I tend to smother the writer and let the director take responsibility. In the case of Reach, I decided to give myself space as a writer. It’s a challenge. How specific are you in the text? How does your vision translate, ultimately, into the stage? How many of your ideas are going to be trampled, and how many will grow?” Of course, as the Baxter's Resident Director, it’s her job to give notes and opinions to other directors, but it is Stopford who will guide and control the production – a process Foot Newton finds “fascinating and very exciting” to observe.

As Dramaturg at the Baxter, she works in very different spaces and on very different projects. Last year, for instance, in the 700-seater main auditorium she put on Peter Shafer’s Amadeus, a grand show with lush costumes and bold sets; on the other hand, the Baxter’s smaller studio venue lends itself to a more minimalist approach in an intimate atmosphere. Much of Foot Newton’s work has been in the ‘poor man’s theatre’ line, but she is wary of “limiting” herself: “You risk becoming smaller and smaller in your vision and eventually end up your own arse! There are different facets of directing and writing. As a director, if you’re challenged by the bigger plays, you are also going to be challenged as a writer. What interested me about Amadeus in the main theatre were things like the depth of the stage, the different visual base. And of course the text, although I can’t imagine myself writing an Amadeus – I work in very little strokes. Often I find that if there’s a lull in my own creativity in terms of making new work, then it’s good to turn to contemporary classics, where you push yourself into another area, and grow.”

Foot Newton has also directed Shafer’s Equus, Miller’s The Crucible, Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Pinter’s Betrayal and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame. The influence of Beckett’s two-handers, in particular, can be seen in the love-hate relationship of the characters in her second play, Hear and Now. Directed by Gerhard Marx, with whom she had previously collaborated on various projects (including Tshepang and subsequently And There In The Dust, the film version of the play) and starring her husband Lionel Newton with Denise Newman, Hear and Now depicts a relationship between two people desperately in need of company but who, at times, can’t stand to be in the same room. Instead of the post-apocalyptic wilderness or ‘the road that leads nowhere’ in Beckett’s work, however, Foot Newton’s play is grounded in a specific place, evoking the tenement buildings and apartment blocks of Johannesburg.

Coming from Jo’burg (she says she “grew up in the Market Theatre”, where she held senior directing posts in the late 1990s, and initially found it difficult to settle down in Cape Town), Foot Newton maintains an “exchange of ideas” with her friends and associates at the Market and the State Theatre, and “while the Baxter building is very different to the Market, the basic principals are similar: Mannie [Manim] founded the Market with Barney [Simon], and now he’s running the Baxter”; although, she adds, “the Baxter is not funded, whereas the Market and State are, so we’re constantly feeling like the poor cousin!”

Through the Market Laboratory, she was involved in developing the work of community theatre practitioners into professional productions. She continues in this capacity through the Ikhwezi initiative at the Baxter, and is mentor director of the vibrant Udaba Bafazi, the second production from the Ikhwezi Festival to be staged professionally. This success nevertheless highlights some of the specific challenges facing South African theatre. But when I ask Foot Newton – who spent 2004 working with Peter Hall in London – about the differences between theatre-making here and abroad, she smiles and insists that the grass is a universal shade of green: “Things aren’t that different at theatres overseas; we all ‘struggle along’!”