Lucille Gillwald
GILLWALD, Lucille. (19**-19**) Bilingual actress and director.
Contents
Biography
Training
Career
Became a leading force in amateur theatre in Welkom in the Orange Free State in the early 1970s, working with the ***?? Society in the Ernest Oppenheimer Theatre. Turning professional she worked with Barney Simon on the “Winterveld Project”. In 198* she began to work for the Market Theatre where she became instrumental to its workings.
Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance
She played a small role in Taubie Kushlick and Brian Brooke’s production of Arnold Perl’s play Tevye and His Daughters (1966).
She directed inter alia Poppie (by Elsa Joubert) for the Market Theatre and took it on a successful tour of New York and the USA.
Other shows director include Nag, Generaal (1988), Curl Up and Dye (1990), Nongogo, Buried Child, Hey Smile Wit' Me, The War at Home, Skirmishes.
Directed actress Elize Cawood in Stephen Gray's Schreiner: A One Woman Play (1983, Grahamstown Festival) and at the Laager in August 1983. She directed The Glass Menagerie starring Shelagh Holliday and Lesley Nott at Upstairs at the Market in 1981.
She directed Reza de Wet’s Diepe Grond starring Dawid Minnaar, Susan Coetzer, Gys de Villiers and Doris Sihula at Upstairs at the Market in 1986.
Her production of Sam Shephard’s True West was staged at the Market Theatre in 1985. Her production of John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea was staged at the Laager in 1986. She directed Sing jy van Bomme in 1988 and Susan Pam’s Curl Up and Dye at the Black Sun in 1989.
Home Free (The Laager, 198-)
She co-wrote and directed U'phu Van der Merwe? in 1987.
Awards, etc
She was awarded the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Award for resident director at the Market Theatre in 1985.
In 1985 she was nominated for the DALRO and AA Life Vita Awards as Best Director for The War at Home.
For Diepe Grond Lucille won the AA Life Vita Award for Best Direction and Best Production of a New South African Play.
Sources
National Arts Festival programme, 1988, p. 42.
Tucker, 1997.
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