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University of Botswana
Travelling Theatre (UBTT) to Produce a Strindberg Classic for Maitisong 2012 as
Part of World-Wide Centennial Commemorations of the Death of August Strindberg
in 1912.
The
University of Botswana Travelling Theatre (UBTT) is currently working on a
production of the Swedish playwright, August Strindberg’s classic, The Father, which will be produced for
the forthcoming annual Maitisong Arts Festival for 2012.
Adapted for local audiences by Owen Seda,
current coordinator and artistic director for UBTT, The Father will be premiered at The Ladies No.1 Opera House in the city of Gaborone on
Saturday April 14, 2012
as part of world-wide celebrations to mark the life and times of the iconic Swedish playwright August Strindberg who died exactly one hundred years ago this year.
August Strindberg was born in 1849 and died in 1912, aged
sixty-three. Strindberg is generally considered to be one of the founding
fathers of modern drama alongside other playwrights of his era such as John
Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov and Maxim
Gorky. The Father ranks among
Strindberg’s most well-known plays which include The Outlaw, Black Banners,
The Confessions of a Fool and Miss
Julie.
About the University of
Botswana Travelling Theatre (UBTT)
The
University of Botswana Travelling Theatre (UBTT) is a student based theatre
company which is based and coordinated in the Department of English at the
University of Botswana. While it draws the bulk of its membership from students
in the Faculty of Humanities, it also attracts membership across disciplines,
affording acting, and play production opportunities to students from other
faculties at the University of Botswana who have an abiding interest in the
arts. The group currently has a membership of fifteen comprising staff and
students.
UBTT
has a long history of performances at the University of Botswana dating as far
back as the 1980’s. Over the years the company has produced numerous plays as
art theatre as well as a number of other plays for social engagement through
community theatre and theatre for development projects in diverse contexts. For
a long period of time, the University of Botswana Travelling Theatre has played
a pivotal role in not only serving as a cultural wing for the Faculty of
Humanities at the University of Botswana, but also as a forum through which
interested staff and students can realize their potentialities and vocation in
the performing arts.
The Significance of
Strindberg’s The Father in Botswana
The
University of Botswana has chosen to produce The Father for two principal reasons. First, The Father ranks among
August Strindberg’s most iconic plays and secondly it was chosen for its theme
which is based on struggles over paternity.
The Father portrays
the tragedy of a man and a woman struggling for the possession of their child.
The father, a military captain, is intellectual, a freethinker and a man of
ideas while his wife is narrow, selfish, and unscrupulous in her methods when
her antagonism is wakened.
In husband and wife’s battle of
wits to determine the child’s destiny and its upbringing, the father is
concerned with the intellectual development of the child, while the mother is
interested only in the exclusive possession of the child. Therefore she fights
the man with every means at her command, even to the point of instilling the
poison of doubt into his mind, hinting that he is not the father of the child.
Not only does the mother seek to drive her husband mad, but through skilful
intrigue she leads everyone, including the family doctor, to believe that the father
is actually insane.
The theme of struggle over
paternity rights is bound to strike a familiar resonance in all modern
societies, such as Botswana, which have an abiding interest in issues and
debates to do with gender and feminism.
Production Team
The Father is being produced with a cast
of eight featuring Gaone Toteng and Ms Dimolemo Kenneth in the lead roles of Lt
Col Rebaone, the military officer (The Father) of the title and his wife Kemmonye
respectively. Other members of cast include Chandapiwa Chiziyo, Ivan Bonno,
Ratanang Mopedi, Kgosi Mpueng, Lenny Thotloetso, Fred Modiri Onkabetse, and
Phatsimo Segwagwa, with Kamogelo Tamocha and Tefo Molefhi serving in the role
of Stage Manager and Assistant Stage Manager respectively.
The
play is being directed by Owen Seda, a lecturer in Theatre Studies and English
Literature at the University of Botswana and current coordinator of UBTT with
the assistance of Ivan Bonno, a Staff Development Fellow in the UB’s Department
of English.
The
play will be premiered in Gaborone on Saturday April 14, 2012 as one of the
University of Botswana’s entries for the 2012 annual Maitisong Festival.
O. Seda (Dr)
April 2012.
Appendix A
Digi Pics from Rehearsals of The Father
030 Gaone Toteng (The Father) in a scene
with Phatsimo Segwagwa (the elderly family housemaid)
031
Gaone Toteng (The Father)
034
Full cast for The Father (UBTT)
037
Gaone Toteng (The Father) in
confrontation with his wife Kemmonye (Dimolemo Kenneth)
042 Dimolemo Kenneth (The wife) with the
family doctor (Fred Onkabetse)
046 Gaone Toteng (The Father) and his
daughter Mogametsi (Ratanang Mopedi)
