Sunday Morning

The festival line-up for the Main Progamme at the Grahamstown Festival has been announced.  Yay.  And our play 'Sunday Morning' is part of their new one-man-show line-up.  Yay again.  Recently we changed the name from 'Roadkill' to 'Sunday Morning'... A little less violent!  And a lot more poetic.  It's a leap, I know, but it fits the work much more.  And titles are not meant to send people away.  I like 'Sunday Morning' because nothing ever happens on a Sunday Morning... Long lazy lie-ins... full fatty breakfasts... hours pouring over the newspaper.  Normally.  But not this morning.  Da Da Daaa.

Along with the new name we are expanding and adapting our stage design with the brilliant and talented Alastair Findlay as well as our poster design with the brilliant and talented Chantelle Louwrens... How lucky we are.  So yes.  Hope to see you in Grahamstown.

The new poster artwork x

Robyn Sassen wrote a wonderful review for us during our Goethe on Main run last year... and here it is if you fancy a read...

My View:  A gem of a story that unfolds like a curvy road, “Roadkill” will give flight to your heart and turn your head.

What a privilege it is to be witness to the consummate and collaborative skill of a team that works together with such generosity and respect, not only for the narrative unfolding, and the audience witnessing it, but for one another. "Roadkill" is one of a new generation of theatre gems, moving boldly and beautifully from funding-draining issues which draw irrevocably from the true business of theatre-making. This team works with what they have, to make theatre. And what they have is priceless.

But it is more than all of this. Not only is Cuningham’s performance as the crux and central character of the work flawless – he takes you from raucous laughter to the brink of bitter tears, and then pops a really funny metaphor at you to get the tears running in earnest and your audible sobs maskable in a paragraph of laughter – but it is the magnificently crafted writing of the work that enables it, devoid of set, of other cast members, of fancy expensive finery, to soar and touch the chords of what it is that makes us human.

While we don’t get to know Cuningham’s character by name, from the outside, as it were, we get to know him from the inside first, and explore with him his sense of deep sadness at how his life as a fine art photographer has not turned out to be the astonishing critical success he was led to believe it would. He has his flaws, but he’s human, and the angers and sadnesses he articulates about dissolved dreams and a sense of powerless in beholding the seamless transition into his life by his girlfriend are convincing, articulate and something you can empathise with because you, too, are human.

But more than this, the story is coloured by writing so graphic, so poetic and so carefully hewn, that images flit through your sensibilities, illustrating the work in your mind’s eye.

Above all, it’s a work which you emerge from, flushed in the presence of something wonderful, conceived of, like William Blake’s oft-quoted universe in a grain of sand, through the idea of a story cast against a world of shattered values in an urban microcosm. True greatness: a play which calls out not only for festival circuits, but for long runs in mainstream theatres.