Solomon and Marion. Lara Foot Newton

Over the years, Marion has watched her life drain away. Children and husband gone, she ekes out her life in a country utterly transformed. But it’s the only home she has. As the new South Africa prepares for the World Cup finals, old divisions and suspicions seem as deep as ever, and the intruder she has been expecting, dreading and needing, arrives. Will true reconciliation turn darkness into hope?Solomon and Marion is a brand new play from an award winning South African writer, and it recently won the Fleur Du Cap Awardfor Best New South African Play.Foot is Artistic Director of the Baxter Theatre Centre and has won a bevy of South African theatre accolades. Foot has put most of her energy into helping other playwrights and theatre-makers realise their work, and she has nurtured several dozen new South African plays to their first staging. This includes producing the international hit Mies Julie written and directed by Yael Farber. Her own hard-hitting plays tackle social issues and have laid barethe brutality and sickening frequency of child rape in South Africa; Tshepang (2002) was based on a real event, the alleged gang rape of a nine-month-old baby by six men in a remote, impoverished community. Foot used refined, ironic humour to sketch a portrait of the community, then turned everyday objects into symbols with horrific poetic effect. Karoo Moose (2007) returned to the subject of child rape and a rural town – a shattered, forsaken community where ‘there are no fathers’. A 15-year-old girl is sold for sex to pay off the gambling debts of her jobless and spiritually crushed father,‘an opportunist with no opportunities’. And in Solomon and Marion, Foot explores the cruelty of the meaningless murders which betray her country. Hear and Now, Karoo Moose and Tshepang are also published by Oberon Books.