(Un)seeing Salome: the transformative alchemy of embodiment. Adapting Damon Galgut's The Promise for the stage

Strike-Nakar, Sylvaine

(Un)seeing Salome: the transformative alchemy of embodiment. Adapting Damon Galgut's The Promise for the stage

Thesis / Dissertation

2026

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Drama

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

In this practice-based research study, I critically engage with my process of adapting and directing Damon Galgut's novel, The Promise (2021), for the stage. I document and analyse my process of adaptation in order to lift out key methodological insights discovered through the creation and rehearsal process, as well as from the play's reception by South African audiences. I approach the process of adapting prose for live performance as a knowledge-producing paradigm in which performance practitioners do more than simply transpose the written text into performed images that attempt to slavishly imitate or mirror the ‘original' text. Instead, I work to show that adaptation is an act of critical transformation, through which new and potentially transformative meaning can be made in the encounter between written words and the living body. Accordingly, I attend to the sensuousness of the live body in particular as a means of critically extending and complicating the written text. Both my practice as a director and my analysis of this adaptation process draw on the methods and thinking developed during my career as a theatre practitioner, influenced by my own transformative experience as a student at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. I focus on the red nose in particular as a powerful tool for accessing the transformative potential of the embodied image.

Keywords

theatre

Damon Galgut

Reference:

Collections

Masters

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