'OUT OF BOUNDS' BY RAJESH GOPIE

Premiered at Johannesburg's Market Theatre and privately performed for Nelson Mandela, this is the thought provoking story of Lal and his family: South African Indians aspiring, struggling, living and growing, during and after Apartheid. With ideas and images that are universal and simple author and performer Rajesh Gopie shows that families all over the world are the same in many ways.

Out of Bounds is an excellent slice of life drama, a bright tapestry lovingly laced with attention to detail…an energetic and heartfelt display of acting, delivered with warmth, verve and fine comic tuning.

Out of Bounds gets to the heart of real people and real lives; of ordinary people who belch after meals and yell at the people they love. It is the story of Lal and his family, Indians growing up in a township on the outskirts of Durban, both during and after apartheid. The play reveals a heartfelt quest for truth, portraying parents who are impatient with their children and children who are ashamed of their parents; about the awkward transitions from childhood to adolescence and on to adulthood.

My name is Lal. I am a South African
or more precisely a South African Indian
or even more correctly, I am an African of Indian origin
or Indian of African origin,
post-colonial fifth generation son of a son of an indentured son.

If you want to complicate it further, I fall within the vague grouping of North Indian - whatever that means, I don ' t know. But growing up in race conscious Durban, it seemed to mean a lot.

But it was only after I left South Africa, in frustration and anger, only after the death of my father, that I came to say with pride that I was 'an African, a South African ' in answer to the polite inquiries of my origins and the mispronunciations of my name.

Inanda, just outside of Durban, right by the Indian Ocean is where I grew up. My family had always lived there, since my great grandfather had convinced a white landowner to sell him a small acreage of land with a beautiful old house that had a wide veranda surrounding it on all sides. Over the decades, Indians had gravitated towards the area, I suppose because that ' s where Ghandi started his ' utopian ' farm. When I was born, in the early seventies, it seemed a peaceful and settled community where blacks and Indians lived together.

My father had brought my mother to the house when he was nineteen and she was seventeen and very pregnant with me. They lived there in a large and boisterous joint family - the many brothers and sisters and their wives and children, all crowded under one roof and headed by my Maji. It was a traditional Indian way of living but it became, during apartheid, a necessity. The family was a somewhat rough lot - working class, struggling hard to provide, with brothers brawling, with complicated and shifting alliance and always an underlying frustration for a country that was run on the notion that white is right.

My memories of that time hold bother bitter and sweet emotions for me. I longed to be part of a simpler nuclear family like everybody else, like on TV, but, on t he other hand, I relished the warm embrace of my grandmother and her wisdom, the many cousins, the domestic worker and even my aunts and uncles. I lived within it, but I could not see it then. It is only now in hindsight, now I am without then, that I hear their many voices: my father ' s stories, the bossy uncles, the gang of cousins, my mother and brother and, most strong of all, my grandmother, my Maji. I now know the strength it gave me - a knowledge of who I am and where I came from, a profound acceptance of my roots.

It now begins to heal me, it now begins ….

SCHEDULE

27th - 29th August 2003 at 8pm
ICA Theatre , The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH
Box office 020 7930 3647.
2 FOR 1 TICKET OFFER AT THE ICA
Tickets £8 Full / £7 Concessions / £6 ICA members.
Quote 2 for 1 offer to claim this special discount
www.ica.org.uk

12th September 2003 at 8pm
The Bull
68 High Street, Barnet, Hertfordshire EN5 5SJ
Nearest Tube: High Barnet (Northern Line).
Box Office: 020 8449 0048
Tickets: £9/£7.
www.thebull.org.uk

8th October 2003 at 7.30pm
The Courtyard
Edgar Street
Hereford HR4 9JR
Box Office: 01432 359 252
Tickets: £10, £8, £6 (£8.50, £6.50 concessions)
www.courtyard.org.uk

16th - 18th October 2003 at 7.45pm
Everyman Theatre
Hope Street
Liverpool L1 9BH
Box Office: 0151 709 4776
Tickets: £12 (£6 concessions)
www.everymanplayhouse.com

24th - 25th October 2003 at 7.45pm
Watermans Arts Centre
40 High Street
Brentford
Middlesex
TW8 0DS
Box Office: 020 8232 1010
Tickets: £12 (£10 concessions)
www.watermans.org.uk

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