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ADAM SMALL
The Orange Earth
TAFELBERG
Dedicated with love
to my long-deceased parents
and to my children
John and Leon, Zaidee and Peter
First performed on stage at the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town, in 1978.
Directed by Jo Dunstan, with Bill Curry as Johnny Adams.
Also broadcast as a full-length radio drama by the BBC in 1984.
The Orange Earth is an on- and ongoing, relentlessly angry denouncement of the evil political system of Apartheid with its heyday in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties of the previous century – what the playwright in his native Afrikaans calls the “aan- en aanhoudende verbete, woedende aansegging van ’n bose politieke stelsel”.
Set in those hard and bitter days of coloured and black people’s resistance to Apartheid, the drama’s Afrikaans version is somewhat tighter than the full length BBC text. Whether in English or Afrikaans, Small is in any case sceptical of polygraphy, and believes that a competent director of either The Orange Earth or Goree will compare the two scripts, no doubt with a beautiful and professionally mature outcome.
The play opens with the terrifying sound of the explosion of a powerful home-made bomb. With the stage and house lights still off, all the audience experiences for a while are the unsettling voices, in the dark, of witnesses to the explosion. The on-stage action begins only when Johnny Adams appears on the stand and light floods on him.
MAIN CHARACTERS OF THE PLAY
• Johnny Adams
• John (Jan) Adams, (Johnny’s father)
• Babie1 Adams (Johnny’s wife)
• Bokkie Visagie (Prison Warder)
1 Preferably pronounced Baby.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
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