Drive With Me
The Story...
Marion Taylor, a forty-nine year old academic, attends the National Arts Festival every year to give her talk on creative writing. Her lecture, The Road Trip, focusing on journeys and their symbols in fiction, is particularly popular, and the reason she keeps getting invited back onto the Thinkfest. Only this time something strange has happened to her on her own road trip to Grahamstown…
The Destination...
A personal, symbolic, engrossing story, intended to give an audience a thrilling theatrical experience. Combining the mundane, familiar and everyday, with a uniquely South African landscape and the deeply strange, Drive With Me is original, local and innovative; taking the audience on a journey in which they slowly come to the realisation that things are not what they seem… they are in a very strange place, with a very strange somebody…
Drive With Me returns to Upstairs at The Alexander Bar (after 3 sold out performances in November) with a two week run from Monday 30 June through to 12 July, pretty much the exact time of the Grahamstown festival. This will bring the festival to Cape Town without the hideous inconvenience of actually going to Grahamstown.
"The story is intense and sad and moving and funny... Drive With Me is well written. There are great moments and Choritz’s inhabiting of Marion Taylor will move you."
- Sarah Roberson, Arts blog
"Within the first minute, I sat back – intrigued, amused and with a creeping awareness that this was unlike anything I had seen before. Drive with Me is a refreshing, meticulously written piece of theatre; insightful, informative and highly entertaining. The unique angle of the play is fully harnessed by director Liz Mills, and it is clear why this play won an Ovation Award at (this year’s) Grahamstown Festival. A round of applause for Megan Furniss and for anyone who strives to keep theatre intelligent, innovative and creative."
- Marilu Snyders, What's on in Cape Town
Media & Reviews
Review of Drive With Me by Ana-Bet Bester
Review of Drive With Me by Marilu Snyders
Review of Drive With Me by Beverley Brommert
Review of Drive with Me by Steyn du Toit
Audience Responses
Absolutely riveting, gorgeous beautiful play.
Very white angstish! Brilliantly written; could identify with quite a lot of it. enjoyed the delivery of it, especially the eye contact. Felt it was very intense (maybe meant to be) but then a bowl of chillies in life is good now and then! Pleased I saw it.
Brilliantly performed!
great show but fit safety wires to each spot light please and fix a sigb in the loop street external wall good concept your little pub theatre - just like we have in London
www.mapmyway.co.za: Poetically powerful! Stunning performance by Megan that is subversively funny, but also rivetingly neurotic. An amazingly evocative journey.
An excellent piece of writing and acting. Thoroughly enjoyed every moment.
Although Megan is a friend of mine, I thought the piece was amazingly written and well acted.
a very lovely experience...wonderfully entertaining!
Absolutely loved the show. Felt the theatre space was a bit claustrophobic. The venue as a whole: Loved the decor furnishings, layout and the music. Downside: On arrival there seemed to be a shortage of staff to take our orders for food and to take our payment for our tickets (no-one behind bar for 10minutes) This was at 1805pm.
FAbulous, thought provoking, emotional, intense - wow, a real treat. Thanks guys x
Excellent voice work, and sound design. Acting work can grow in confidence, though far above average already. Comes together conceptually quite tightly at the end- well constructed overall. (Thank you for a good show).
interesting piece, particularly enjoyed the recognisable experiences invoked along the way and the elision of reality,myth and surreality. With all the rich journey references, I wonder why heart of darkness was omitted .... And finally, in terms of the story itself , I was left wondering why it stopped where it did , with the ravens of madness ; After all, in journeys of this kind surely psychosis is a waystation rather than a destination ??
excellent writing, enjoyable and evocative and well performed
Having watched this 3 times in Grahamstown and again last night, I am still caught completely unaware by Marion's transition. Megan just keeps getting better in this role, but then I may be a little biased.
Hi Alex As I made clear last night to Megan and Nic, I thought this was the perfect vehicle to place your theatre on the map with five stars in all categories. The size, the imagination, the delivery, the 'sweeping off the feet' imagery which Megan brought to the production were magical. More of this ilk, and I'll be there, boots and all. Congratulations on a wonderful evening of real theatre. I was transported! Henk
Show was intense and excellent.
Delivery often too rapid for my poor old ears - sentiment echoed by my son (47) and grand-daughter (18), but that a niggly criticism of a fine performance by Megan, greatly enhanced by a long chat with her afterwards - thrilling in fact for the grand-daughter, an aspiring theatre freak.
The whole experience was wonderful!
Phew - for me it was like being invited to a picnic and then being treated to a 5-course dinner. And such a great juxtaposition between dark and light, funny and sad, real and fantasy. I want to see it again - next time! Congratulations to all
Hi. After the show we all said we wish we'd written it. Excellent piece. Please tell Megan that Susan Levine's family loved it and so would Suz have if she'd not been in Europe. Lynne
Hi all, yes, I was astonished about her ability giving me the sensation being able to follow every little detail in her mood change on stage so I could barley breathe and was kept by her constant kind of "do- not- even-start-to- dare-thinking-not-listening-to-me" lecture. Wow, what a journey…although I probably would have enjoyed partly more moments of distance from her acting in order to create that sort of stronger range of dynamics. In all: "Chapeau Mme Furniss!" CHEERS ALAIN
Loved the venue, the bar and atmosphere Megan was amazing
Hi Alex As I made clear last night to Megan and Nic, I thought this was the perfect vehicle to place your theatre on the map with five stars in all categories. The size, the imagination, the delivery, the 'sweeping off the feet' imagery which Megan brought to the production were magical. More of this ilk, and I'll be there, boots and all. Congratulations on a wonderful evening of real theatre. I was transported! Henk
4.5. It was brilliant, excellent acting, humourous. Please get her to do some more.
Brilliant
Brilliant!
Loved it...well done Megan and Liz!
A definite 5!Remarkable theatre,surprising,rivetting,dark......an amzing actress!
An amazing unexpected journey with an Edgar Allen Poe quality. Contemporary Gothic. Thanks
Fabulous second time round for me
Intensely and brilliantly acted! Thank you!
Absolutely fabulous. Acting was exceptional. Looking forward to more. Rgs Simon
Absorbing and evocative
Absolutely stunning! A gothic tour de force by a masterful storyteller, we were blown away!!
Very brave was our initial comment! I love the way Megan uses everyday events to build into her plays so that we can all recognise and connect with the character[s]. Bravo! Second viewing always allows me to relax and enjoy the story - which I did. Live your truth xx
brilliant!
"A journey through time. A journey through memories. A journey through emotions. Megan Furniss' Drive With Me proved to be all three: starting off as a light-hearted seminar in journeys, using delightfully classical characters, it seamlessly morphed into a journey for the audience, too. A very personal, solitary drive to Grahamstown was turned into a family roadtrip, with everyone sharing in the laughs, horrors and sadnesses that Meg just seems adept at portraying with enough energy to make Koeberg redundant, taking that which was personal and making it universal."
Simply superb, I loved it!