Event information
Paul Slabolepszy's award-winning one-man play returns to The Antique Theatre & Bar, performed by Ashley Dowds under Slabolepszy's own direction. First staged in 1992, the play follows Eddie du Pisanie, a 49-year-old East Rand salesman who is retrenched and, alone in his car contemplating suicide, switches on the radio to hear an Elvis Presley song that pulls him back to a childhood memory on a Witbank street corner that changed the course of his life.
The play won the Vita, Fleur du Cap and Dalro Awards for Best New South African Play, Best Actor, Best Production and Best Director in a single year, more than any other South African play in the country's theatre history. It has since toured internationally by invitation, including performances in Washington DC and Chicago.
Dowds has performed the role in recent revivals at Theatre on the Bay and the Pieter Toerien Theatre, drawing on Slabolepszy's original staging, a single lamppost and a raised pavement stencilled with the street name Union Crescent. The production moves between comedy and pathos as Eddie recalls the people and incidents that shaped his life, avoiding both outright tragedy and easy sentimentality.