The Girl in the Yellow Dress

Synopsis

Craig Higginson’s powerful new play is a dark, witty and sexually-charged psychological drama. Set in Paris, the play explores the relationship between Celia, a beautiful young English teacher, and Pierre, her French-Congolese pupil. Brimming with humour, rage and longing, this gripping play provides both a minute exploration of an increasingly hazardous romantic entanglement, and an insight into the tensions around class, race, language and identity that lie at the heart of present-day South Africa.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 6 August 2010

It’s hardly begun, but already the fringe has thrown up the most brilliant new actress in Marianne Oldham, playing Celia, a flaky English teacher in Paris who has been stalked by a Congolese refugee.

Promising new South African actor Nat Ramabulana is a more than fitting foil as the deceptive Pierre in the game of witty linguistic foreplay to a cataclysmic relationship.

Craig Higginson is dramaturg at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, and he’s developed this spell-binding two-hander with Live Theatre in Newcastle and the Glasgow Citizens; it’s also a pedantic, semantic delight in its battery of past participles and future conditionals.

Played out in five short acts on a white minimalist book-lined set, you could complain that the dance of mutual seduction is a little pat, even predictable, in its revelations.

But you’d be hard pressed to find a sexier scene...

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