STAGE, SCREEN and television actress, Susan Danford, tackles four different characters in Kristen Thomson's one-woman play, I, Claudia, at the Baxter Sanlam Studio until July 26, following its South African premier at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown.
This extraordinary story maps the raw but beautiful interior world of an irrepressibly funny misfit adolescent, suffering the triple afflictions of puberty, unpopularity and her parents? divorce, told through four wonderfully exaggerated comic characters.
Using four expressive masks, which cast a spell that reaches into the heart and soul of Claudia, Danford craftily transforms into the quirky "official pre-teen" trembling on the cusp of adolescence, her grandfather, her father's new girlfriend, and the immigrant school caretaker, a former theatre director in his old country.
Her parents' divorce leaves Claudia reeling, she has a science project which is overdue, her father is remarrying and, to top it all, she has to deal with the throes of puberty. Her mind is too bright and her clothes too tight as she struggles to fit in. Book at Computicket.