Reza de Wet

Reza de Wet (11 May 1952 – 27 January 2012) was a South African playwright.

Reza de Wet was born in a small town (Senekal) in the Free State, South Africa. She had worked extensively as an actress, had a master's degree in English Literature and lectured in the drama department of Rhodes University in Grahamstown. She was a prolific, and socially conscious writer who had written 12 plays in 15 years (five in English and seven in Afrikaans). She won nine awards for her scripts (five Vita Awards, three Fleur du Cap Awards and a Dalro Award) as well as every prestigious literary award (a CNA Prize, a Rapport Prize and twice the Herzog Prize) and productions of her plays have won more than 40 theatre awards. Yelena won the Vita Award for Best Script (1998–99) while Drie Susters Twee (Three Sisters), was named Best Production for the same year.

She has won more theatre and literary awards than any other South African playwright, including the prestigious Herzog Prize (1994), the highest honour in Afrikaans literature. In Open Space, an anthology of new African plays, she is the only woman represented and one of two South African dramatists. Aside from chipping away at the societal mores of Apartheid and racism, stylistically, her stories masterfully weaved Biblical myths, tribal and Afrikaner folktales, magical realism, and stream-of-consciousness storytelling in such a poignant and wholeheartedly original way, as to completely reinvent the psychological-thriller format.

A feature film based on 'Diepe Grond' (African Gothic) was adapted for the screen and produced by Damon Shalit and directed by Gabriel Bologna in 2012. In 2013, the film was screened in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, where Reza De Wet lived, to commemorate the anniversary of her death.

In 1985 when playwright Reza de Wet unleashed her creative vision, fully formed and perfectly pitched, on an unsuspecting and quite impotent South-African theatre scene, she presented a subtle but radical alternative to the agitprop and comfortable entertainment seen on South African stages at that time. Right from the beginning of what had become a sustained and prolific career, she proved to be able to unnerve and amuse in equal measure while tapping into a dark and richly subversive vein, mining both gold and puss from a festering Afrikaner psyche.

South Africa in the 1980s was a very different place from the country of today.

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