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SPOTLIGHT: Fearlessly entertaining THE VULGARIANS lives in the artistic tension between intellect and impulse, cruelty and compassion
- Marina Griebenow
- 7 hours ago
- 15 min read
Marina Griebenow
On a quiet weekday morning in the foyer of the Masambe Theatre at the Baxter Theatre Complex, the small rehearsal space hums with the charged stillness that comes just before a storm —or a premiere. Very soon THE VULGARIANS, the latest play by Louis Viljoen, will meet its first audience.
For now, it belongs only to its makers: writer-director Louis, and the actors Emily Child and Nicholas Pauling, long-time collaborators who know the rhythms of his language almost instinctively. Between pages of text, fragments of scenes and the natural light filtering through the theatre doors, they speak about brutality and humour, the strange ecstasy of rehearsal, and what it means to wrestle with Louis’ dark, disconcerting words once again.
When asked whether they’re ready to face an audience, Louis lets out a low laugh. “No, God! No,” he reiterates, before adding, almost as an afterthought, “But we will be.” The excitement in his tone betrays the final stretch of a process that has already taken them through two weeks of rehearsal elsewhere before moving into the Masambe. “This is where it starts to take shape,” he explains. “Now that we know what the set’s going to be, everything shifts a little bit in the space.” Emily, seated nearby, nods. “We’re doing all the detail work now,” she says, “it’s about refining. You find out how it breathes in the space.”
Their first audience is due on Tuesday, 4 November 2025, with the team aiming to be ready by this weekend, according to Emily. It’s a tight schedule, but they are accustomed to working within the constraints of independent theatre. “The last play we did in nine days,” Louis says, shaking his head. “Eight to ten full days, that’s all we had. It’s stressful, but it’s just the reality.”
Despite the pressure, there’s no panic. Years of collaboration between Louis, Emily and Nick have built a relationship of trust. Each knows when to speak, when to watch, when to let the text do the work. The rehearsal process is more compressed than in earlier decades, when productions often had four to six weeks to prepare, something that is regarded as a luxury nowadays. Yet what stands out here is the calm focus, a shared understanding that readiness isn’t about perfection, but precision.
“We’ll be ready,” Louis repeats. Around them, parts of the unfinished set waits in the half-light, a promise of the world that will come alive in just a few days’ time.
In South African theatre, the difference between funded and independent work can often be measured in hours, quite literally. “If you have to do it, then that’s what you have to do,” says Louis, shrugging with a mixture of resignation and resolve. “Because everything is an expense.”
For independent artists like Louis and his collaborators, every stage of production —from rehearsal space to set building— comes directly out of pocket. “Hiring rehearsal space is a huge cost,” he explains. “Most of the venues charge by the hour. R350 an hour doesn’t sound like much until you start with zero.” The economics of it all reveal an uncomfortable divide. “A big section of the industry is now funded,” Louis says, “especially Afrikaans work. So the people who own rehearsal spaces assume everyone has funding. They think there’s an open tap.”
I observe that this creates an unintended distortion in the ecology of South African theatre: the assumption of funding drives up costs, leaving the unfunded even further behind. Louis agrees, though he resists any suggestion of rivalry. “It’s not that Afrikaans theatre hurts English theatre,” he says. “The real issue is that the rest of the sector has no funding at all. People don’t understand what we mean by ‘independent theatre’. They think it just means working outside of an institution, but with backing. For us, it literally means starting from zero.” Everything they earn goes back into the work: paying collaborators, building sets, sustaining the production through its short run. “It’s still our job,” Louis says. “We work very hard to make money off it. But it’s a hard climb.”
Despite these challenges, the work goes on, resourcefully, sometimes even miraculously. “We were passing a church on Kloof Street,” Emily recalls, “and decided to ask if we could use it for rehearsals. They were wonderful, really cheap, and they let us rehearse there. Others are not so lucky. “Friends of ours were doing a play recently,” Louis relates, “and they had to rehearse in a park.” No funding, no space, just the will to make something. In a country where theatre funding is both uneven and fragile, that will — the sheer necessity to create — remains the heartbeat of independent theatre.
Louis pauses for a moment to reflect, not on the play at hand, but on the sheer length of the road that brought him here. “This is my 24th play,” he confirms. “I don’t count the first one I wrote called Rocks. I wrote that just after school. And there was another, The Abusers, in Johannesburg which I also don’t count. I start counting from The Bile Boys.”
That debut, staged in the Arena Theatre on UCT’s Hiddingh Campus in January 2010, marked the beginning of a number of collaborations that have stood the test of time. “Greg (Karvellas) was in it,” Louis recalls. “As was I. And Gideon (Lombard). It was his first play.” The memories of those early productions still flicker with the reckless energy of youth, the raw experimentation that would come to define his later work. All of them are now established and recognisable names in the South African theatre industry.
When asked what keeps him writing, the answer comes without hesitation. “I have to,” he says simply. “I cannot do anything else. I’ve tried other things and I’m terrible at them. This is what I do. It’s not a hobby. It’s something I love.”
It sounds as if writing is the essence of him. “Yes,” he agrees. “That’s why Covid was so hard. There was no purpose. Even now, if you take a long break between plays, because of scheduling or space, there’s still something to aim for. During Covid, there was nothing to aim for.”
For Louis, writing is inseparable from the act of performance. “I cannot write into a void,” he says. “It needs to be for the stage. It becomes easier once I have a slot. I don’t have to have a play yet, but if I know, say, that in April next year I have a slot, I can aim for that.” He grins when I suggest that play number twenty-five might appear then. “Yes,” he concedes, “April or May, around there.”
As for what sparks an idea, it can be anything — “a line, a title, a moment”. Sometimes it’s the actors themselves. “When Nick said he wanted to come back for a bit, I told him, ‘I can write you a play.’ By then, I already had this slot at the Masambe. Then I asked Emily. ‘If I’m writing for Nick, can I write for you too?’ That’s how it started.”
And just like that, out of a line, a friendship, a slot in a small black-box theatre, another Louis play begins to take shape —the next in a neverending, restless conversation with the stage.
After several years of writing and directing plays steeped in darkness, Louis admits he was ready for something different. “The past four plays I’ve done here in the Masambe have been very heavy,” he says. “Lots of violence, like in Mrs Mitchell Comes to Town. There’s been lots of assault and rape and violence and the awfulness of the world. So I knew I wanted to write something lighter. And I’ve always wanted to try a sex comedy. This was the opportunity. The idea came up and it just happened to be incredibly filthy.”
He pauses, perhaps aware that the word “filthy” lands with a certain charge. “Is it filthy?” I ask, amused. “It’s pretty filthy,” he concedes.
Louis calls his new work “an unsophisticated sex comedy”, and when I ask exactly wherein the comedy lies, his answer reveals both the spirit and the irony of the project. “It lies in the exchange between the characters,” he says. “Sex is funny. If you look at it objectively, it’s a funny act. And our pursuit of it is also quite funny. Humans lose all faculties, it seems, in the pursuit of this and in the doing of it. If you look at it from the outside, it’s a very funny thing we do.”
He wanted, he explains, to frame this ridiculousness within a veneer of elegance, characters in tuxedos talking their way around the act itself. “I’ve always liked the idea of an unsophisticated sex comedy where people talk around the sex and they’re all in tuxes. I wanted to use that framework.”
So the laughter, it turns out, lies not in the deed itself but in the dialogue—the fumbling, the evasion, the absurdity of human desire. “There’s no nudity or actual sex,” Louis notes. “If we had that in the play, it would be overkill. What we have here is already dirty and X-rated enough. We don’t need to add to it.”
And yet there’s no moral distance, no mockery from above. “I don’t want the play to be perceived as if we’re pretending to be above sex and everything,” he insists. “We really are in it. We wallow in the grossness of it all. That’s why I thought it would be fun to call it unsophisticated.”
The word, like the play itself, is both honest and mischievous —a wink and a confession from one of South African theatre’s most articulate provocateurs.
Louis speaks about his enduring collaboration with actors Emily and Nick with the kind of candour that only long friendship allows. “I don’t like saying this in front of them,” he banters, “but they are my favourite actors. So whenever I have the opportunity to work with them, why wouldn’t I? We’ve now all done so much work together that there’s a shorthand that exists.”
Nick adds with a laugh that their working relationship is “bullshit-free.” The trio, he says, “plough through it. Sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s easy. But it’s also just fun. We work hard and then we have a drink afterwards.” Louis agrees. “Which you can’t always do, you know. With some people you’re not friends, so everyone goes home. Or people have other lives. With us, there’s always a guarantee of at least… okay, let’s have a nip. We like to hang out.”
Turning to THE VULGARIANS, I ask whether, like The Hucksters, it is another excavation of complicity, guilt, self-deception, and truth.
“I think there is something of that,” Louis concedes, “but it doesn’t delve into the darkness and the awfulness of that side of life so much. We do explore some of those themes, but it’s really an examination of the relationship of this married couple, Florence Bastien and her husband Thomas, and of finding yourself in a place in life where you have become at ease.” He pauses before adding, “And then to examine what that means. Are you really happy? If you now have all the things that you’ve worked for, then where are you? Where is the happiness in that? Is there real happiness, or have you just reached an end point?”
The play, he explains, revolves around a couple whose apparently solid marriage begins to splinter under the mere suggestion of infidelity. “There’s not necessarily infidelity,” he clarifies, “but the notion of it becomes the catalyst. It opens up old wounds and things that they’ve glossed over are, in the course of an evening, suddenly exposed. The question then becomes: how will they move through this in order to fix their relationship or to find themselves in a different, more rewarding place?”
When I ask whether these feelings of guilt have anything to do with the couple’s unrefined or even criminal past, Louis smiles.
“Not to give anything away,” he says, “but I think the guilt and dissatisfaction are more with their current reality than with where they come from. Making them ex-gangsters was just a fun way of exploring the dynamics. They were outlaws and outsiders; now they’re insiders. It’s also about ignoring your true nature. You clamp everything down and you hide things and you throw all that awfulness about yourself into a well, but it’s still there. And it’s about what happens when people decide to dive back into that well and what’ll come out of it.”
Our conversation shifts to language, that defining feature of Louis’ theatre. I ask whether words still carry the same power to wound and persuade in a world dominated by what I would call “illiterates like Trump and Musk”. What, I wonder, has happened to poetry —Louis’ poetry?
“You now see less and less places where words are used to effect,” he says. “People think it’s become filmic, but it’s not filmic. It’s just become fucking boring. It’s just uninteresting language. What makes theatre fun is the fact that it’s not reality. If you can pull people in with language, that’s fun. Also, it’s a challenge for me, especially if I’m working with actors I like. Then I can try a little bit harder. It can be harder, because I know that they can do it. There is a thing in THE VULGARIANS that is explored that is not a real thing; it’s something that we make up, but we make it a reality. The audience will understand very early on. We’re not hiding anything; it is very explicit.”
I ask whether THE VULGARIANS contains one of his trademark twists. He laughs. “I suppose there is one, but it’s weird —it’s our version of a rom-com. Maybe the surprise isn’t as great, because the big thing that starts everything off happens quite early in the play —this thing we can’t speak about now. What then becomes interesting is moving past that. It becomes a real exploration of a relationship. We really have moments of sweetness between these two people who really do love each other. The hope is that the audience wants them to figure this out.”
In the rehearsal room, says Nick, the process is “forensic”. Every detail is investigated, questioned, examined from all sides until the meaning reveals itself. Emily agrees, though she adds that the atmosphere remains “fun, open, relaxed and casual”. What distinguishes Louis’ rehearsal space, they explain, is the absence of fear and of pretence. “There’s no bullshit,” Nick says simply.
Disagreement, far from being discouraged, is expected. “We can even have fights,” Emily laughs. “I fight with Louis a lot.” Their exchanges are part of the method. Arguments become the friction that produces clarity. “You’re welcome to challenge things,” Nick adds, “because that’s how we figure out what it is that we’re actually making together”. This freedom, he says, makes for “the most open and relaxed work environment,” one rooted in collaboration rather than authority. “There’s no hierarchy,” Emily insists. “None,” Nick echoes. “Which is very refreshing.”
Louis himself insists that the lack of hierarchy has everything to do with the work ethic they share. “We leave ego out of it,” he says. “It’s about the work at the end of the day. You leave that shit at the door because it just gets in the way. There’s also no time.” The plays are demanding and there’s no room for self-indulgence. “The stuff is hard,” Emily admits. “We don’t have time to deal with our individual shit. We deal with the work first and keep the rest for drinks afterwards.”
That intensity, however, is also what draws them back to Louis’ world again and again.
“We just love working together,” Nick says, “even though it’s tough.” For Emily, each new production is “a real test of skill.” She confesses that she sometimes wants “to scream and explode because it’s so difficult,” but she relishes the challenge. “It’s wonderful to test oneself every now and again and see if we can get it right, though it sometimes takes until the end of the run to even begin to get it right.” Nick nods in agreement: “I think he’s the best writer I’ve ever performed. In this country, easily. It’s always nice to work with the best. And the muscularity and challenge of the script are good to take on board.”
Louis’ plays are famously dense. They are language-driven, rhythmically precise and punishing in their demands on actors. To sustain that level of verbal and emotional concentration, Emily and Nick prepare as though for a marathon. “We have to be emotionally prepared for the fear every night,” she says. “There’s always the fear of words not coming out.” Before every rehearsal, and often before performances, they meet to run lines — “to work through tough things” — long before the formal call time. “An hour before work starts, we’ve already been working,” she says.
Yet, as Nick notes, once the structure is internalised, thinking too much can be fatal. “You dare not overthink it,” he says. “Once you’ve got it, you’ve got to give in to the rhythm. You start the show and at the end you wake up and go: Yeah! That’s when you know. If you stop to think ‘that moment went beautifully’, then you fuck it up. You just ride it and then wake up at the end.”
The rhythm, they agree, is both instinctive and intellectual, a fusion of analysis and intuition. “Meaning is the crux,” Emily says. “If you know what you’re saying, it helps with the heightened text.” Louis likens the approach to performing Shakespeare: “If you don’t understand what you’re saying, you can’t deliver it properly. Some actors hit the emotion, but the audience can tell there’s nothing happening there. It has to be specific.”
In this case, the specificity is sharpened by having the playwright in the room. “That’s what’s so wonderful,” Emily explains. “If we don’t understand a rhythm or a moment, Louis is amazing at explaining it and we can hear it as he imagined it. Then we go: ‘Oh, that makes sense!’”
Nick reflects that, in Louis’ plays, the audience must be invited into the world almost immediately —not lectured, but gently initiated. “At the top of the play, there’s always a hook,” he says, “a moment that keys them into the meaning.” Louis nods: “You’re not teaching the audience, but you’re letting them know the rules of the world. You are making it clear so that they can lean in and understand.”
This clarity extends to movement. The physical life of a play by Louis is as economical as its language is dense. Emily explains, “Anything we think we want to do, we cut down by about 90%. We often start with lots of blocking, and then we pare it down, down, down. The key is specificity. Less is more, and every move has intention.” There is no filler, no restless pacing. “Being still,” Louis adds, “is actually more powerful.”
In the intimate space of the Masambe, where Louis has staged much of their recent work, stillness becomes a kind of amplification. The heightened quality of Louis’ language —at once poetic, brutal and hyper-real— might easily tip into theatricality, but his actors resist this. “Because it’s its own universe,” Emily says, “we just accept that that’s how people speak in this world. Once you submit to that, it’s not separate from feeling. That’s how they communicate their thoughts and emotions.” The result is not artificial, but distilled. “The images are so clear,” she continues, “that it’s actually quite easy to connect.”
Louis credits his performers for grounding the text in human truth. “You need actors who can make it human,” he says. “The language cannot exist on a cloud somewhere. They have to understand what they’re saying and then convey a real emotion —not be emotional, but show what they feel. Tell the truth.”
And yet, there is no mistaking that every character “speaks Louis”. Emily laughs at the notion but concedes that it’s true: “It is Louis’ voice you hear. It’s his universe, his style. You can’t do funny accents or try to show you’re from another town —it doesn’t suit the world.” Louis agrees: “The emphasis is not on physical or vocal transformation like in a classical text. The characters are distinct because of their intentions —what they want, what they fight for.” Each personality, he says, emerges from “the tension between desire and denial, cruelty and vulnerability.”
That tension can make the work seem cerebral, but Emily insists that the technique becomes second nature once internalised. “It’s like Shakespeare,” she says. “Once it’s in your body, you can lean into it. Even if you blank, you open your mouth and it comes out. If we’ve done our job properly, the text lives in the muscle memory.”
As to whether there is an emotional cost to performing such intense material, Emily shakes her head. “It’s energising,” she says. “Particularly in terms of skill and artistry.” Nick agrees: “The reward is in telling the stories. Just bringing the plays to life is amazing.”
Even so, there are limits. “There were three lines in this play,” Emily admits, “that I had a big discussion with Louis about. And we took them out.” Louis, she says, is always open to argument, provided there’s reason. Nick adds that the decision is never about censorship, but purpose. “It’s not about whether the imagery is too brutal,” he says. “It’s about whether it serves the argument or alienates the audience unnecessarily.” Louis agrees: “Something may work in the room, but you have to imagine it in front of an audience. The goal is to keep them, especially when the material is angry or gross or difficult. You work harder to hold them.”
He laughs at the idea of alienation as an aesthetic strategy. “We’re not doing Brecht,” he says. “It’s still for the audience. At the end of the day, it’s entertainment. People pay to see it. It’s not an academic exercise or a thesis —it’s theatre.”
When asked which of Louis’ characters have stayed with them, Nick hesitates before naming three: The Hucksters, The Visigoths, and The Frontiersmen. “The characters in The Frontiersmen were terrible men,” I remark. “Yes,” he smiles, “but those three, definitely.” Emily’s favourite remains The Pervert Laura. “It will always have a special place in my heart,” she says. “People think because it’s heavy, performing it must be heavy, but it’s not. I don’t take that home. My job is in the theatre. My personal life is separate.”
As the conversation turns to geography and distance, Nick admits that life in Canada —in the French-speaking part, far from the English theatre world— can be isolating. “It’s pretty lonely right now,” he says. “But my girls are happy there, and my little one walks to school on her own. She’s safe.” Louis cuts in: “We’ll just keep dragging him back to do stuff with us. The world’s small and people live between countries all the time.”
In the end, that smallness —the closeness of the collaborators, the intimacy of language, and the tautness of a phrase— is what defines Louis’ theatre. His work insists that meaning lies not in grand gestures or moral resolutions but in the precision of thought, the tension between intellect and impulse, cruelty and compassion. For Nick and Emily, the challenge is perpetual, and the pleasure inexhaustible. What emerges, from their conversation as much as from their performances, is a deep mutual trust —the kind that allows art to be fearless, exacting and alive.
THE VULGARIANS is onstage at the Baxter’s Masambe Theatre from 4 to 22 November 2025. It carries an age restriction of 18. Tickets can be booked online through Webtickets.