By Gianluca Tadiello – The Year of the Bicycle, an award-winning production about friendship that is set in the heart of growing up in post-apartheid South Africa, has garnered both critical and commercial success, winning a Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award in 2013 with sold-out shows locally and internationally, including multiple runs at The Grahamstown Arts Festival and a run at the Festival Schone Aussicht in Stuttgart.
Written and directed by Joanna Evans, the play follows the friendship of 8-year-old South Africans Amelia and Andile, after the latter kicks his ball accidentally into Amelia’s neighbouring garden whilst visiting his domestic worker grandmother in Hout Bay, from his home in the local township. An unexpected friendship develops that explores the lives of a new generation of young South Africans, through their shared consciousness when another twist of fate brings the distanced pair together again years later.
Evans received a professional Development Grant from ACT and the Nedbank Arts Affinity in 2015 to publish The Year of the Bicycle through Junkets Publishers, creating a platform for this dynamic and important work. The production officially opened at the Market Theatre this weekend with performances running till the 22nd of May 2016.
Joanna Evans
“An instantaneous resounding applause and standing ovation. What more needs to be said? The Year of the Bicycle is good and the people know it. They feel it … viewing South Africa’s tense transformation, through children’s innocently perceptive eyes, makes for a superb, moving, haunting piece of theatre.” – Sarah Roberson, The Critter.
The play features exceptional and seasoned performers which includes film and stage actress Amy Louise Wilson (The Book of Negroes, Scrape, Jadotville) and performer and dancer Aphiwe Livi, with dramaturgical support from renowned director Clare Stopford.
The Year of the Bicycle (Picture by Val Adamson)
Joanna explains that “When two estranged childhood friends fall into a concussion at the same moment they meet in each other’s confused minds. Their bodies are broken but their thoughts are very loud as they reach out for contact. While piecing together fragments of self their memories draw them back to 1997; the year of Ninja Turtles, learning to ride bicycles and R. Kelly’s ‘I believe I can fly’. The year when their friendship was built up and broken down by a place in which it is impossible for even a child to feel at ease.”
With clarity and humour The Year of the Bicycle negotiates the contrasts of growing up in post-apartheid South Africa: naivety and shame, playfulness and fear, abundance and absence. These are bound together by Amelia and Andile’s searing need for contact with one another, skipping from the lightness of play to the dark borders of loneliness.
Click here for more information about the ACT Professional Development Programme.