Award winning ‘Speelgoed van glas’, ‘Glass Menagerie’ in August at the Baxter

With: Anna-Mart van der Merwe, Carla Smith, Ben Albertyn, Mark Elderkin

Director, translation and design: Nico Scheepers

Stage manager: Nell van der Merwe

Speelgoed van glas, Nico Scheepers’ award-winning reworking and translation of Tennesse Williams’ English masterpiece, gets an interesting new look at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town.

Retaining the name The Glass Menagerie, this English version is Nico Scheepers’ new re-translation of his original Afrikaans interpretation and will be on stage from 31 July to 7 August. This will be followed by the much-discussed standalone Afrikaans version, from 8 to 16 August.

The characters unravel the intricate web of love and loss, spun by a matriarch to keep her family together at all costs – a web from which they all long to escape. The Glass Menagerie is an intense, heart-wrenching tale of separation, and a gripping exploration of fragility, longing and the fallibility of family.

“The events revolve around a family with an absent father. Amanda Wingfield (Anna-Mart van der Merwe) does her best to keep her family together and to pretend that things are going better than they are, but over the course of the play we witness the attempts of her children, Laura (Carla Smith) and Tom (Ben Albertyn) to escape their situation and their mother’s grip,” writes Marina Griebenow in her review for INK.

Speelgoed van glas debuted at the Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees last year and was awarded in the following Woordtrofees categories: Best Play, Best Director (Nico Scheepers), Best Supporting Actress (Carla Smith), Best Supporting Actor (Mark Elderkin).

Director, Nico Scheepers, remarked that the play gets better with every performance. He is excited to bring a production that he is so proud of to one of the leading theatres in South Africa. He tells us a little more about the new English retranslation and the Afrikaans version.

“I think the interesting thing is that I couldn’t just use the original American English text, because I had completely adapted the Afrikaans production to the nineties in South Africa, with an Afrikaans family that has an English guest visit,” explains Nico. “Therefore, I had to translate the Afrikaans text back into English using my adaptation with all the references and language as the foundation. I thought the most successful way to do it in English was to still treat them as an Afrikaans family. The actors speak with Afrikaans accents and there are still Afrikaans words in the production, so that it is still authentically South African. They are a South African family, who speak a kind of “Anglikaans” thereby making the English they use serve almost as subtitles for English audience members. It was the only way that I could see the adaptation working. And even though everyone speaks English, Jim (Mark Elderkin) who arrives in the second half still feels like an English person visiting an Afrikaans family.”

For the Afrikaans interpretation, the ensemble remains faithful to the production that has enjoyed great success at the various arts festivals, says Nico.

“It is a privilege to be able to do a production so many times in a row, and to watch how the actors’ interpretations deepen and simmer. Their last performance at Innibos recently was probably the best performance of Speelgoed van glas to date,” says Nico.

Speelgoed van glas had reviewers enthralled.

“Speelgoed van glas is not light entertainment, but it is brilliant,” writes journalist and photographer Neels Jackson, who captured breathtaking close-ups of Laura’s glass animals.

“Nico Scheepers has subtly adapted Williams’ Menagerie,” writes Laetitia Pople, Netwerk24’s arts editor, in her review. She attributes high praise to everything from role-playing and visual representation to the director’s understanding of “the human heart and the place of dreams in daily life. And that a meaningful life must be fought for.”

Marina Griebenow likens the production to a magic spell.

“It is clear that Speelgoed van glas, like Laura’s delicate and precious glass animals, is a gem that one will cherish and preserve for a long time. I look forward to seeing it again in Cape Town.”

‘The Glass Menagerie’

31 July to 7 August at the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town.

Duration: 120 minutes

Tickets: R160 to R210 at Webtickets