Written 100 years ago, now on stage with new life : AS DIE TUIG SKAWE

The play finds you before you've even taken your seat.

A boy weaves through the foyer selling newspapers for a tiekie. Two women, completely in character, guide you toward the theatre as though you've simply wandered into 1926 and asked for directions. The saxophone finds you before the play does. By the time you sit down, you're not watching a play about the past anymore. You're standing in it. A century after J.F.W. Grosskopf's As Die Tuig Skawe won the very first Hertzog Prize for Drama, it returns to a professional stage, reimagined by director Lara Lourens through a modern Gothic lens. It is worth the century-long wait. The story is simple, and that's exactly why it hurts.

Gert and Krissie Obrien, a marriage buckling slowly under poverty and disappointment. Fred Moller, a man from Krissie's past, reappearing with everything Gert can't offer. A choice. A harness, tightening. Lourens directs with a clear, unmistakable hand. She doesn't just place her actors on the stage, she keeps finding new ways to live inside it. The same central structure, the same stretch of sand underfoot, and yet scene after scene it feels different, lit differently, breathed into differently. The ensemble doesn't read as individual performers taking turns. It reads as one company, moving as one instinct, and that commitment doesn't stop when the lights come up for interval. The cast pulls audiences into old Afrikaans children's games in the foyer, and the audience clearly felt it. Laughing, playing, fully won over. That instinct pays off inside the play as well. The first half is patient, almost too patient, easing you gently into the Obriens' world before it lets the weight really land. But this is a production that trusts you to wait for it. When it turns, it turns completely. The second half tightens like a held breath, and the ending doesn't just conclude the story. It lands in your chest and stays there.

At the centre of it all is Lizelle Pike. There isn't a comfortable way to describe what she does with Krissie, because "performance" almost undersells it. She doesn't act the role. She becomes it, so fully that at some point you stop watching an actress and start watching a woman come undone in real time, in front of you, with nowhere to hide. Krissie arrives already tired, but it is a tiredness Pike has clearly studied. It lives in the set of the shoulders, in the economy of her movement, in the way she moves through small domestic tasks as though each has been done ten thousand times. This is a woman who has learned to want less, and Pike lets you feel the effort of that long before the text admits it. When Fred walks in, the change is almost imperceptible, which is what makes it devastating. Pike doesn't play Krissie's past as a big reveal. She lets it seep. A pause a beat longer than comfortable. A glance that starts toward him and is pulled back. Over the course of this play you watch a woman quietly recalculate her whole life while her face insists that nothing is happening. What makes it extraordinary is the contradiction she refuses to resolve.

Her Krissie loves Gert. The tenderness is real, and Pike never lets it curdle into contempt, which would have been the easy choice. She is also suffocating, and she is also alive in a way she hasn't been in years. Pike plays all of it at once, and the contradictions never cancel each other out. They make Krissie human, and they make her choice impossible to judge. Her voice is an instrument in its own right. It sits low and controlled, then catches, drops and steadies again with a precision that never feels controlled. She understands that restraint is the loudest thing you can do, and she is fearless about doing less. She has a gravity most performers spend a career reaching for. A single held silence from her carries more than most monologues manage in ten minutes. Every glance is doing work. Every stillness is doing work. Nothing is wasted, and nothing feels performed. It feels lived. She is a generous scene partner too.

Opposite Sallas de Jager, she gives the marriage the ache of two people who know each other completely and can no longer reach each other. Opposite Kaz McFadden, she lets the air go dangerous. There is one moment, quiet, still, barely a breath, where the entire theatre seemed to stop breathing with her. It is the image that followed us out of the building. It hasn't left yet. De Jager gives Gert a steady, aching dependability. A man holding on with both hands, long after his hands have nothing left to hold. McFadden brings real charge to Fred, a man who arrives like the weather.

A special mention must go to newcomer Jenna Volschenk, as Lizzie, is a brilliant young actress doing stellar work. She finds the small, specific truths of the character and trusts them, playing Lizzie with a watchfulness and honesty that never tip into performance. She listens as well as she speaks, and the nuances she brings, the small shifts in the way Lizzie holds herself and responds to the people around her, make her feel like a whole person rather than a function of the plot. This is an actress to watch. The wider ensemble carries the world around them with warmth and total commitment, never once treating a smaller role as a smaller responsibility.

Xander Koekemoer's live score is absolutely magnificent. Played in the room, in real time, it breathes with the performers rather than sitting underneath them. It swells where the text is holding back and thins to almost nothing when the silence needs to do the talking. It is the production's pulse. The set does an extraordinary amount of work. The structure at the heart of the stage carves the space into beautiful levels, giving the story height and depth, and it is never merely something to look at. It is a performance space in its own right, played on, climbed, leaned against and lived in, so that the actors are constantly finding new ways to inhabit it. Then there is the water, which is real. On a live stage, that is profound. Film can fake it. Here, it is simply in the room with us. We hear it, we watch the light move across it, and we understand that it cannot be taken back once it has been touched. Every splash and ripple is unrepeatable, and the actors have to live with it in real time. It grounds the world in something tangible and gives the Gothic a physical, almost breathing presence. In a production about people trapped and slowly worn down, it feels like the right kind of dangerous. The lighting design earns its own line, too. Quiet, atmospheric, doing the emotional work the text asks for without ever announcing itself. It is the clearest thread of "Gothic" running through the production, and it is beautifully handled throughout.

By the time the lights finally go down, the theatre doesn't erupt. It sits there for a second. Thinking.

That's the harness doing its work.

Turns out a hundred-year-old chafe can still leave a mark.

AS DIE TUIG SKAWE Written by J.F.W. Grosskopf Directed by Lara Lourens Starring Lizelle Pike, Sallas de Jager, Kaz McFadden Live score by Xander Koekemoer Presented by The Third Law (Pty) Ltd, in partnership with the FAK and the South African State Theatre. Played in the Arena at the South African State Theatre, Pretoria, 23–27 September 2026