Yvonne Abrahams
Yvonne Abrahams (1926-1975) was a playwright, actress, director and drama teacher.
Contents
Biography
Born Yvonne Silbert in Krugersdorp in 1926.
In 1950 she married Rupert Abrahams, an attorney. Two weeks later she contracted poliomyelitis and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Though she could no longer play the piano and compose, she continued to write plays and short stories under her married name, and much of her time was taken up with teaching speech and drama.
She died in 1975.
The life story of Yvonne Silbert, a one-woman show, was produced by Norah Taylor and Bess Finney.
Contribution to South African theatre, film, media and performance
As a playwright
Before she was twenty she wrote a musical play called Take It or Leave It!, produced in Johannesburg by Norah Taylor in 3 - 7 August 1948.
She went on to write numerous plays, musicals and other performance works for stage and radio, usually under the name Yvonne Abrahams. These include:
The Tower (credited to Yvonne Silbert)
Look Before You Leap! (also known as The Dress Rehearsal),
The Wages of Virtue (credited to Yvonne Silbert)
The Cat among the Pigeons (also known as Man on an Island)
Her children's plays include:
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Some of the play texts mentioned above exist only as incomplete scripts (most of them held in the Historical Papers Research Archive, The Library, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa), including a play about Polio and one about Drugs, both untitled.
As a teacher
A friend of Norah Taylor and Bess Finney, she travelled around the reef teaching Speech and Drama, and - among other projects - produced a number of Shakespearean plays at Afrikaans high schools.
Sources
"Biography of Yvonne Silbert", contained in ZA HPRA A2054: Papers of Yvonne Abrahams (Copyright Historical Papers Research Archive, The Library, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa).
http://historicalpapers-atom.wits.ac.za/abrahams-yvonne
http://historicalpapers-atom.wits.ac.za/writings-of-yvonne-silbert
A complete carbon copy of the text of [[[The Tower]] (with addition of photocopies of the lost pages, hand dated 1984), found in the archives of the Stellenbosch Drama Department in 2022.
A complete carbon copy of the text of [[[The Wages of Virtue]] (with addition of a few handwritten changes), found in the archives of the Stellenbosch Drama Department in 2022.
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