“For Generations” – a play by Kurt Egelhof

“For Generations”, an exciting new theater production, written, produced and performed by veteran actor and media personality Kurt Egelhof. The play will run at The Grahamstown Festival between the 26th June and the 5 July. Tickets are available from Computicket.

Kurt Egelhof says, “The play was written in response to a challenge facing modern fathers: raising their sons in a so-called free and fair South Africa, where role modeling has become a serious problem. If our youth do not have good private role models to look up to, what are their chances of becoming good human beings if they are to look to the public arena for their role models?”

“When you think that for Coloured youth today, their/our “men” carry the ripples of tainted reputations associated with various men, on trial for, and some already punished for, some very serious crimes against society”

“So, I asked myself: what challenges did my grandfather face in the pre-WW2 South Africa that gave birth to the rise of the Afrikaner government and their 1948 victory? As this brought a whole new set of challenges for my father’s generation of the 50’s, it in turn laid the foundation for the social upheavals of the 70’s (my generation) – to a point where finally, here is my son attending a private school, but still looking down the barrel of a future that is loaded with unpredictable outbursts of social discontent on the basis of race and class, all framed by a serious morality implosion”

“Is this what we want to give to our children as a future we say we fought hard to create? “

“In the midst of all these issues that seem to lurk from generation to generation, where do Coloured people pitch themselves as equal participants in a society that seeks mostly to strip a man of his dignity in so many way, and then expect him top raise a boy as a good and upright citizen”

That’s essentially the basis or point of departure the play takes”

“So yes, it is somewhat documentary, but mostly, it attempts to interrogate a man’s emotions as a secret, sidelined thing that our society has never bothered to take cognisance of – begging the question: how long do we think we can get away with robbing a man of his dignity and think we can get away with it Scot free? One day, one of his children will figure it out, and come back to collect on his father’s behalf”

The opening performance is on Thursday 26th June at the library hall in Grahamstown.

“Constructing the piece was quite a painful journey because, it appeared to me that the men in my family died with a lot of unfinished business – and so recreating those emotional states seemed almost like opening the doorway between life and death, to allow them to come back to the present time to finish those unfinished things. To make the apologies they may have left unsaid; or to at least be given the chance to say those things we often leave to long unsaid”

“An interesting revelation was the way Coloured people tended to practice their apartheid inflictions on each other – in the sense that for example, a barman who worked in a whites only bar at the time, would refuse to serve a Coloured man if he dared come in there, on the grounds that he would lose his job…the food on his table. So, they damaged each other’s dignity in order to maintain the status quo. Are we still doing this to each other today, not just as Coloureds but as a nation?”

“I chose specifically to speak to the maleness of who we are, because it seems to me that over the past few decades, men are the culprits when it comes to all these atrocious crimes: murder, rape, theft, fraud etc….. what went wrong that there are no more good men left for boys to look up to and say: one day i want to be like him?”

The challenge has been made to the MEN of this generation. If you’re able to, checkout the play. From the sounds of it…it should really be something special. Book now @ Computicket!