‘We were all living on the edge of a blade’
SANDTON – The Auto and General Theatre on the Square is proudly extending their showcasing of Blonde Poison until 8 February.
Daphne Kuhn of the Auto and General Theatre on the Square, the theatre hub of Sandton, is proudly extending the showcasing of Gail Louw’s Blonde Poison until 8 February.
The riveting solo-play starring multi-award winning actress, Fiona Ramsay as Stella Goldschlag, encapsulates the dangerous world of espionage, and the treacherous road to survival in World War II.
The play sees Goldschlag track back through her memories of living as a Jewish-German woman in Nazi-Germany and being pushed to the edge of survival. “To deal with [a] war of such genocide and horror through such a personal story makes the history come alive, and those issues come alive because it’s so personalised,” said Ramsay.
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Goldschlag charms the audience with her blunt, direct humour and poised character. “The physicality was the hardest thing about Stella for me to do because she is so contained and very matter-of-fact in a way that she doesn’t enjoy herself very much. So that was hard for me because I enjoy myself a lot. But her charm is her candour and her directness, and that’s what I enjoyed about her because it’s not like me.”
Director Janna Ramos-Violante and Ramsay have previously worked together on about 10 productions over the past four years. “She’s much younger than me and I love working with young people because new, inspired visions are fantastic,” said Ramsay. “Working with Janna was just absolutely exciting. She had a very clear idea of what she wanted to do with the play. And we worked on the set and the design so it’s been a creative collaboration between the two of us.”
Written by published playwright, Gail Louw, the one-hour performance forces audiences to question their own ethical and moralistic ideas, wondering how far they themselves would be willing to go to survive under such violent political circumstances.
“It’s not me that I’m playing,” said Ramsay. “It’s an aspect of human nature that I’m reflecting back to the audience, and exploring it. And the line that is most telling to me in this play, and that I have to feel all the time, is ‘We were all living on the edge of a blade’ because that sums up the whole era for me. And it sums up Stella’s life.”
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