RADIO THEATRE REVIEW: DIE HUISBESOEK.

WITH this little tool, I will settle my differences. Photograph courtesy http://www.ammo.com

WHEN YOU LISTEN to this week’s radio drama on Radio Sonder Grense, you will feel many prickles of lockdown incredulity as a bizarre tale of marital closeness, distance and schizophrenia fills your head. But those prickles have as much to do with a story with a thorn in its tail as with the fact that the performers are all adhering to social distancing rules, as they perform. Die Huisbesoek is an award-winning script from 2019, which debuts this evening at 8pm, and it’s one that will keep you on the edge of your lounge chair.

It is here that we first meet Celia (Rika Sennett). And she’s angry. She’s so angry with her husband, Paul (Dawid Minnaar) that she is making a whole bunch of rational/irrational decisions about what it to with him. The kind of decisions that one makes in a blind rage. She calls upon her priest (Cindy Swanepoel) for a spot of counsel. The two women are completely superb as they toss, hither and yon, the pros and cons of murder most foul, melba pudding and falling in love.

And yes, there is a gun involved. A loaded gun, heavy on the touch.

Skittering between high drama with edges of hysterical hilarity and psychological thriller, this cleverly made play touches on moments in Flora Rheta Schreiber’s Sybil, which was made into a film in the 1970s, as it plays with the notion of the power the conch gave in William Golding’s 1953 novel about savagery, The Lord of the Flies. Either way, your hair begins to stand on end in the story’s denouement within its last couple of minutes. It will leave you with your mouth open in surprise. Listen, now!

• Die Huisbesoek (The home visit) is written by Wilmi Wheeler. Directed by Christelle Webb-Joubert, and featuring technical input by Neria Mokwena and Evert Snyman, it is performed by Dawid Minnaar, Rika Sennett, Ria Smit and Cindy Swanepoel. It broadcasts on RSG on 21 May 2020 at 8pm, will be broadcast again in Deurnag, the station’s all night programme, on Monday 25 May 2020 at 1am and is available on podcast through the radio station’s website: rsg.co.za