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Pieter Toerien Productions
The Return of Elvis du Pisanie, written and directed by Paul Slabolepszy, is all at once sad, amusing, and gloriously uplifting. A story that moves from pure nostalgia, through extreme heartache, to unbridled joy.
Can we change our own destiny? “Elvis” du Pisanie is about to find out.
Eddie du Pisanie (played by Ashley Dowds), a forty-nine year old East Rand salesman, is retrenched and decides life is no longer worth living. He writes a suicide note to his wife and is about to gas himself in his car in the garage, when he switches on the car radio. The Elvis Presley song he hears does more than take him back 30 years - it recalls an event in his childhood that changed his life forever. Abandoning - for the moment - the idea of suicide, he drives the 200 kilometre journey to the town in which he grew up, to a lamp post opposite the ex-Carlton Bioscope in Witbank, there to retrace his life, to try to find out what went wrong, how it went wrong, and perhaps most importantly, why it went wrong.
Can we change our own destiny? “Elvis” du Pisanie is about to find out.
“A milestone for South African Theatre.”(Humphrey Tyler, Sunday Tribune)
“Profound poetry... equal to anything by Beckett or Pinter”. “Nothing less than the new Bosman." (Iain MacDonald, The Argus)
“A tale - fragile and beautiful as blown glass - of dreams lost and found.”(Brenda van Rooyen, Pretoria News)
The Return of Elvis du Pisanie - first performed in July, 1992 - has the distinction of having won more awards (in a single year) than any other play in the history of South African Theatre - 1993 Vita, Fleur du Cap and Dalro Awards included Best New South African Play, Best Actor, Best Production, Best Director - as well as The Star “Tonight”/IGI Life Vita Award for Comedy. It has also be presented by invitation, in Washington DC and Chicago, USA.
While Paul Slabolepszy was still at school in Musina, in the far northern province of Limpopo, Paul Slabolepszy remembers telling stories beneath a gigantic baobab tree in the middle of the playground, to all who would listen. He was only 12 years old at the time, but the seed was being planted for a life of storytelling, of entertaining and enlightening his fellow South Africans in a way he never imagined possible. To raise funds for the local Scout Troop, young Paul and his friends put on a “concert” at the Musina MOTH Hall. The show was written by the budding storyteller, and he and his friends collected the costumes and props, built the set and made the posters as well, which were pasted to every available lamp post and shopfront in the tiny dorp. The presentation was not exactly the stuff of Shakespeare, but it was enjoyed by all who saw it and the money collected was put to good use.
Interviewed in The Star “Tonight!”, Paul wryly observed that the more things change, the more they stay the same. He still writes his own plays (and the odd movie and TV show), still builds the sets and collects the costumes, and still puts up his own posters.
Whoever would have believed that the little kid from the banks of the Limpopo would journey from the MOTH Hall in Musina to the Old Vic Theatre in London – probably the most famous theatre in the world – to present his own play SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE PALACE, in 1984. The play has become a drama classic and is a set-work at many schools around South Africa.
A founder member, in 1972, of South Africa’s first non-racial theatre – The Space, in Cape Town – with Dr. John Kani, Yvonne Bryceland and other leading theatrical lights, Paul Slabolepszy has, to date, written 38 plays, 12 produced screenplays and many sit-com episodes for television. He has appeared across the stages and screens of our country as a multi-award winning actor as well, and learnt the basics of his craft studying at the University of Cape Town where he obtained a BA degree (English & Drama).
With over 30 years in the business, Paul is well qualified to advise those who would choose a career in the “Performing Arts”, and points out that – far from the glamour and “razzle dazzle” that a life onstage or onscreen might project – the daily demands are awesome. Discipline is paramount. To stay in shape as an actor, Paul still regularly visits the gym. Whether you like it or not, your body is your instrument, and to be able to sing and dance as well as act, is going to help enormously in a profession where opportunities can sometimes be thin on the ground.
Which brings up perhaps the most important factor regarding a career in the performing arts... versatility. Not everyone can be an actor, and although training to be an actor can be enormously helpful in the field of communications, public relations, law or politics – students need to have other “strings to their bows”. In the theatre playwrights are needed, as well as directors, stage managers; set, sound, lighting and costume designers; choreographers. While in film and television camera operators, editors and artistic directors are thrown into the mix. More and more documentaries are being made for television, and researches with a feel for the language of film are greatly in demand.
If you ever saw Paul Slabolepszy on stage as Eddie Du Pisanie around twenty years ago, you’ll remember the thunder and lightning and hilarity of that story. It is one of those events on stage (Like Sylvain Strike and Andrew Buckland’s ‘Firefly’) that you are COMPELLED to go and watch again, and maybe again. I saw it four times. Once the houselights go down, you’re on a rollercoaster of a journey through Eddie’s life, and when that reveal happens - the reason for the dark space around him - no spoilers - it sweeps you right out of your seat. You wonder why you couldn’t see it coming. But that is because the story is written by an actor/ playwright with so much tenderness for the characters, that you live vicariously with them in each moment. You’re hardly thinking ahead. That and the fact that it was shaped and tended by with the directorial eye of Lara Foot.
Eddie Du Pisanie is an everyman. We’re all born ‘of a billion bright probabilities’, as Maria Popover puts it, into a cosmic helplessness: ‘We have various coping mechanisms for it - prayer, violence, routine - and still we are powerless to keep the accidents from happening... the galaxies from drifting apart.’
And when those accidents happen and the self-blame eats into us, they poison the entire reason for existing. Eddie is born into a specific time in South Africa, to a father who’d been damaged during the second world war. (Without giving away the spoilers, you begin to see the seeds of that early in the story). The tragedy that rolls out as a consequence, is not an everyday one, but its one that we can recognise in so many others that we personally feel intimately related to. The way of finding hope - for any kind of redemption - can only be dealt with in a way that shakes us out of our known existence into a new way of existing... That is Eddie ‘Elvis’ Du Pisanie’s ‘return’.
Eddie almost ends it all one night, and then decides to take one last, idiotic gamble. This is the territory of miracle seekers, Hale Bop comet bunkers and Elvis sightings (long after he has been gone.) But hope is a seductive beam of light that can streak across the bleakest skies. Eddie follows a memory of a place at a very specific time in his life. It still glimmers with all the people and events that it held decades ago, including the one event that changed everything. And we have to remember, however dark things are, there is hope!Eddie hangs out under a streetlamp - the spot where he’d etched his name into the pole with the girl he loved when he was sixteen - waiting for a miracle that had been promised to him before his life folded inside out. It’s his last shot. You know how place markers, landmarks and smells take you right back to the moment? The same happens on the night Eddie pulls up onto the curb in view of the Carlton Bioscope, where he grew up as a boy. Stepping into that light though, also means that he steps back into an eviscerating memory that he has tried to cauterise from his life. Confronting that memory is his only way out.
That Carlton Bioscope is a huge part of Eddie’s childhood. The Saturday morning matinees featured larger-than-life heroes such as Dick Tracey, when it was easy to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys. It was Eddie’s escape from the starkness of the mining town, and the increasing rage of his father. In the weeks following the cliffhanger episodes, Dick Tracy about to be blown to smithereens, you get to understand the desperate scream from the young boys in the cinema:
“Get up, Dick! Get uuup!” It’s also the voice of Eddie, the little boy, screaming across the decades at his older, broken soul under the streetlamp:
“Get UP Eddie! Get UP!”
Theatre On The Bay from 30 May - 15 June, 2024.
Duration: Approx’ 75-minutes, No interval.
Age restriction: PG13.
Ticket prices: R180 – R250.
Bookings: Webtickets or (021) 438-3301.