The Great Outdoors

by Neil McCarthy (2000).

Subject

One Liner: A darkly humorous contemporary drama, The Great Outdoors follows four Johannesburg suburbanites on a journey of love, loss and emotional risk.

EDIT>>> The Great Outdoors is the story of a suburban couple who are involved in a car accident. They are caught up in a "network of crumbling morality". The play also contains "echoes of social themes such as ethics and choices also reflected in personal and sexual arenas."

EDIT>>> Natal 2002 >> Raymond and Paula is an easily recognisable suburban South African couple. Raymond (Ben Voss) is a car salesman with an elegant marketing executive wife (Tamar Meskin). They meet up with the dark and brooding Neville (Esmael Teixeira) one of Raymond's buddies from the army who is now a police major, and Cassie (Belinda Henwood), a spirited dancer off to Miami. Raymond kills a black man near a squatter camp, fails to stop and looks to the major to help him cover it up. The major will help him - at a price. The repercussions reverberate through the lives of all four characters.

Prominent theatre critic Robert Greig described this play as “A mountain of South African theatre - one of the most complex and mature plays written in this country in the past two decades, it makes others look infantile” (2001).

Performance history in South Africa

Premièred at the Grahamstown Festival 2000, directed by Barbara Rubin, with Neil McCarthy, Jamie Bartlett, Leila Henriques and Debbie Brown. The same production was staged at the Agfa Theatre on the Square in Sandton in April 2001. Produced in the Square Space Theatre on the University of Natal campus, directed by Maurice Podbrey, with Ben Voss, Tamar Meskin, Esmael Teixeira and Belinda Henwood in April 2002. Staged at the Baxter Theatre in August 2002, directed by Maurice Podbrey, with Jamie Bartlett, Terry Norton, Adrian Galley and Victoria Bartlett.

Sources

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