NEWS

VILLAGE FLOWERS

The Hillcrest Rotary Anns invite visitors to Flowers through Hathaway Village at the Crafters Village in Camelot on May 30 and 31 from 10h00 to 16h00.

Well-known floral artists will display their work in eight houses of the village include Norma Raynor, Jean Henfrey, Fay Fenn, Jean Hancox, Tanya van der Watt, Althea Higham, Margaret Vorweg and the Sogetsu School of Ikebana.

Artists Yvonne Campbell, Annice Changouin, Sue Green and Colleen Sayers will exhibit mixed media.

Hathway Village forms part of the beau-tiful Camelot estate and there will be a crafters village in the gardens which are worth a visit in their own right.

Teas and refreshments will be available and there is safe parking. Hathaway Village is in Wishart Road, Hillcrest.

Tickets at R20 include refreshments. For details phone Joyce Mickel on 765-5213.

FEST ACCOMMODATION

With ever-increasing numbers attending the Standard Bank National Arts Festival each year, the fast-growing demand for accommodation in Grahamstown has been a source of concern to Festival organisers as often the services offered are unsatisfactory and/or overpriced.

The newly-introduced Accommodation Guild has introduced a code of conduct which will ensure value for money. Festival-goers are advised to make their bookings through agencies belonging to the Guild. Contact (0461) 25777. (Booking kits are now available for the Festival - see separate story)

FESTIVAL DRAMA

There's a wide variety of excellent dramatic fare offered for this year's Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown from July 4 to 14.

Leading American dramatist Terrence McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion! is set in a country house, the focus being on the long-standing friendships of eight gay American men. Its appeal, however, is said to be universal. McNally has been likened to Chekhov for the way in which he combines humour with pathos and for his treatment of such themes as the passing of time, loss and death.

Presented by Pact, Love! Valour! Compassion! will have its South African premiere at the Festival.

PIANO

Another premiere is the Civic Theatre's production of The Piano Lesson, a drama that earned African American playwright August Wilson his second Pulitzer prize and had the judges comparing him with Eugene O'Neill.

The place is Pittsburgh; the year is 1936, and the players are the members of a black family at odds about how they should handle racism.

Janet Suzman and Gcina Mhlophe have adapted Brecht's famous parable about urban poverty, The Good Person of Setzuan, in a contemporary South African context and titled the Good Person of Sharpville. The adaptation for the Market Theatre shows the difficulty of building a just society in the midst of crime and destitution.

IRREVERENT

Pieter-Dirk Uys's irreverent look at the Truth Commission, Truth Omissions, has audiences serving as the judge and jury when Evita Bezuidenhout takes the stand in this tongue-in-cheek production which, as the title suggests, has more to do with lies than with valid evidence.

Another one-man show is 1949, a

premiere featuring Durban-based actor

Charles Pillai. A dramatisation of four short stories by Ronnie Govender, it's tribute to the people of Cato Manor, the first community to be rent asunder by the notorious Group Areas Act. In the year of its official redevelopment, the play spotlights the race riots in Cato Manor in 1949 when Africans turned on Indians.

Deon Opperman's Donkerland is an epic work about the rise and ultimate fall of the Afrikaner nation. Presented by the Standard Bank National Arts Festival, the ATKV, the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival and Pact Drama in association with Nasionale Pers, the story unfolds through the lives of seven generations of a family living on a farm in Natal. A period of 157 years is covered, from the time of the Great Trek to the present.

WINNER

1996 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for drama, Lara Foot Newton, directs Arthur Miller's The Crucible about the witchcraft trials held in Salem in the United States in 1962.

Two classics feature at the Festival drama programme - Janice Honeyman's theatrical rendition of Charles Dickens's novel, A Tale of Two Cities, to be presented by the Civic Theatre, and Shakespeare's Macbeth directed for Capab by Marthinus Basson who has a reputation for bold and arresting work.

Human Race

is a production that Andrew Buckland will workshop with the President's Award Gumboot Dancers. The leading exponents of this type of dance in the country, the six-man troupe performed at the VE Day ceremony in London in 1995. With three women from the Rhodes First Physical Theatre Company, they will present a mix of dance, mime and story-telling.