A TALE OF back-stabbing, secret crushes and taboo, South African actor Peter Terry’s debut novel Being Bill is a monumentally fine piece of writing that seamlessly weaves together theatre rhetoric and style with diary entries and prose to create a mind-spinning yarn about life, the universe and everything, under the mantle of a state-run theatre, which first saw light of day under the apartheid regime in South Africa. You won’t be able to put this astonishing book down until the last page.

It is here where you will meet Bill Blaine, from the inside and the outside, in a rollicking tale of lust and political correctness, theatrical behaviour in public and behind closed doors, and the ways in which sure success stories can turn into sad lives. And do.

A white man in his late-ish 40s, Bill has graduated from being on the boards in the theatre, to manning a desk, and the Drama Department of the South African State Theatre in Pretoria and making decisions of an administrative nature. He’s at the top of his game, one might say: married for some twenty years to a World War 1 historian, with all the bits and pieces of life roughly where they should be, according to society.

But then, there’s a soprano in the opera company. A pretty young woman on the cusp of what looks like a brilliant career. And she certainly has all the bits and pieces that makes our Bill feel alive. And horny. And even in love.

The work, however, doesn’t allow you to forget political context: the first part of it is set in an era of major change, where women’s issues are beginning to be taken seriously. The slyer members of the ‘weaker sex’ now have the kind of agency that with bald he-said-she-said rhetoric, can destroy men’s careers with the flick of a painted nail or an eyelash, as the case may be.

This novel is relatable on so many levels: If you have ever worked in a life-consuming project that needs all your creative energies simultaneously, like a theatrical production or an arts festival or a newspaper, you will recognise the kind of camaraderie central to Being Bill. It’s an energy that pulls people together when higher authorities start rationalising and cutting jobs. It resonates with a war logic: your team, whether you love them or detest them, are the men and women who fought in the trenches with you, and you all speak the same language, forever.

And if you live in South Africa and are a theatre-goer, you will know the Brutalist architecture of the monstrous State Theatre in the Pretoria CBD, with all its concrete on the outside and interminable hostile corridors within. It was inaugurated, with self-congratulation in 1981, as an immense milestone, forward-looking in all its ways. It was spawned by a fascist mindset and employed hundreds of creative people during its heyday. It was also inherited by a brand new government which slipped into the bureaucratic chic and energy, cruelty and gamesplaying almost seamlessly.

You may remember some of the scandals from that institution and indeed, the whole theatre industry itself, which bled into tabloid newspapers in the mid to late 1990s and thereabouts. But such is the pace of Terry’s writing that you quickly stop trying to piece together who is referenced, who is hidden behind other names and what shockers you really do remember, and get sucked into the vortex of the fictional tale.

On one hand, Terry’s writing style evokes that of veteran British actor Simon Callow, who has written, among other things, a delicious introduction to Wagner. There’s a kind of deadpan humour which almost clinically evokes the voice of the onstage performer, and the words ring with the kind of splendour that makes you want to hear it read out loud. Preferably in Callow’s own voice.

Unlike Callow, Terry dexterously slips between narrative styles. Ostensibly written in the first person, the book is not speaking in Terry’s voice, but Bill’s and it takes a page or six for you to get into the rhythm of this stylistic quirk.

His writing is replete with contemporary reflections on beauty and malice. It’s juicy with sex and sodden with Schadenfreude and self-flagellation in so many ways. But as a novelist, Terry also has the temerity to turn his focus on things that you rarely find dealt with as side issues in novels, from late-middle aged carnal joy to colostomy bags, the horror of ageing comingles significantly with youthful lust and dreams brutally broken. The skill of his writing enables huge issues to creep into the text in an almost off-hand manner that doesn’t detract from the momentum of the tale, but rather adds to its sense of colour.

It’s an unstoppable read that breaches hilarity and tragedy with nifty turns of phrase which can take your breath away, to say nothing of plot twists that will give you goosebumps. Ultimately, Being Bill is a story about life, bumpy and clotted with ugly vagaries and pushes and pulls, as it is. It’s about grabbing the moment and understanding things retrospectively while you are moving forward, and all of those good and clichéd things. And yet, Terry gives a spin on the narrative and with his barbed voice and years of experience of theatre shenanigans, that culminates in a novel clean of cliché and full of fresh and thrilling wisdom.

Being Bill is written by Peter Terry and published by Old Wolf (2025)