Ian Bruce

Ian Bruce (19*-) Actor, director, playwright and manager.

Youth
Born in Boksburg.

Training
Trained as an actor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Career
During a long political exile in Holland from 1976 onwards, he co-founded the Tekhwini Theatre Foundation (NATA) with Anthony Akerman and Joseph Mosikili, and began writing plays. Returned to South Africa in the early 1990s as an IEC monitor, manager of a Port Nolloth guest lodge and working with communities in the Richtersveld.

In 1998, he began working with the New Africa Theatre Association in Cape Town, for which he and his wife, Ina Bruce (néé Ina Vermeulen), created a host of productions, educational plays, and Industrial Theatre works. He later became the executive director of NATA.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance
He appeared briefly in the early nineteen seventies on the SA stage for The Company and in early SABC TV productions such as The Villagers. In 1999 he had a role in a Maynardville production of As You Like It.

As playwright he wrote Falls The Shadow, (his first play, produced in Holland, winning a Dutch Arts Council best new play award), My Father's House, (only work at the time to evade South Africa's censorship laws, PACT, 1989, directed by Francois Swart), The Gift, Good Rubbish, Kept in Mind (winning a Radio SA award for the play), and Groundswell (New Africa Theatre Association, 2006), Transit (2009).

Awards
Fleur du Cap Best new indigenous script: Ian Bruce (Groundswell, 2006), Transit nominated 2010.

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