SHIMMER Chinodya (pictured), an award-winning author of international repute, will this Thursday launch a stage play titled Harvest of Thorns Classic at Theatre in the park in Harare. The play is based on his Commonwealth Prize-winning blockbuster novel, Harvest of Thorns.
BY PHILLIP CHIDAVAENZI
Chinodya told NewsDay yesterday that after the book’s official launch, people will watch the play on stage.
“The book has undergone an interesting evolution. I have never done a book that had to go through such stages of refinement,” he said.
Chinodya said he first staged the play at the Harare International Festival of the Arts (Hifa) in April 2013, when he got a slot to perform at the fiesta’s opening act.
“I rewrote the whole novel into 80 pages because the book had to be compressed,” he said, adding that he was the narrator of the story on stage while mbira songstress, Hope Masike provided the background music.
Chinodya said turning the book into a huge, riveting stage drama laced with tender, irrepressible, funny, violent and gruesome emotions was not an easy thing.
“It was such a complicated process during which Hope Masike also had to compose new songs for the different scenes in the play.”
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Just like the novel, the play traces the fortunes of the Tichafa family, through their son Benjamin’s exploits against a background of repression, racism, poverty, cultural decay as well as social and political strife.
Benjamin is caught up in the web of a violent struggle that forges him into manhood, as Chinodya recreates a graphic portrait of a gruelling war and its attendant effects on fractured lives.
Chinodya — who wrote, directed and produced the play — said the process of converting the novel into a stage drama was an amazing experience.
“For me it was a great learning process. There is an extra dimension when you watch it on stage. You are amazed by how the characters internalise their experiences,” he said.
