The Girl in the Yellow Dress
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.
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 this
festival than the shared naked foot stroking that turns nasty, then violent.
Oldham? She’s flame-haired, beautiful and sexy, with a killer comic personality
and sudden depths of vulnerability: a new Maggie Smith, and there’s no praise
higher.
