Dame Janet Suzman and Khayalethu Anthony feature in Solomon and Marion, a story of two injured souls searching for redemption in a fragile, post-apartheid South Africa, which is to play at Birmingham REP.
South African author Lara Foot directs her own two-hander, with Janet Suzman in the role of Marion.
Lara Foot, artistic director of Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre, said, “I wrote this play with Janet in mind. The tone of her voice was in my head.
“The play was inspired by a conversation I had with psychotherapist Tony Hamburger. It was motivated, in a sense, by a time in Cape Town when South Africa felt desperate both politically and socially.
“The negativity around crime and instability was made more intense when the actor Brett Goldin was murdered in 2006, just before the company was due to leave for the UK to perform in the Baxter Theatre Centre’s production of Hamlet at the RSC, which Janet directed.
“The empathy that I felt for Brett Goldin’s mother, coupled with Janet’s heartache, courage and resilience, invoked in me a feeling which sparked an intuition and led me towards writing Solomon and Marion.”
In the play, two very different characters, an ageing and heart-broken woman and a mysterious young man, each from opposite ends of the South African social spectrum and each carrying stories of significant loss, are thrown together by extraordinary circumstances.
Marion has watched her life drain away. Isolated from her home and grieving for her dead son and lost husband, she is struggling to find meaning in a country that has been utterly transformed.
As the new South Africa braces itself for the inevitable protests and unrest that precede the 2010 World Cup finals, hope enters her life in the form of Solomon, the grandson of Marion’s former servant.
South African-born Janet Suzman has twice won the Evening Standard best actress award. In a career spanning five decades she has played almost all Shakespeare’s female leads as well as directing adaptations of Othello and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
Khayalethu Anthony who is 27 was chosen from 14 actors through a rigorous audition process. He is a founding member of the Imbawula Theatre Company and performed in the international touring production of J M’s Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.
Solomon and Marion, designed by Patrick Curtis with lighting design by Mannie Manim, will be performed in the Studio at Birmingham REP from Thursday 16 October until Saturday 1 November.