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GOING DOWN

GORGEOUS

GOING DOWN GORGEOUS (1998)

Going Down Gorgeous is strictly protected by copyright.

Applications for performance rights, both professional and amateur, should be addressed to:

PD Uys Productions

productions@evita.co.za

But please read the play with pleasure.

Download the text of Going Down Gorgeous

Uys scorches through four decades using the idioms and thinking process of a Johannesburg kugel. This piece is taut, tense and funny. This Uys script encapsulates our tortured approaches to one another; yet his imperious and capricious playing of Nowell makes her open-mindedness uncomfortable, even shocking, viewed in the context of our country's political separateness. Where Nowell and her like were open, warm and brave, Uys subtly indicates how others held back. He also demonstrates Nowell's background and sensitivities to be her strength. Throughout Uys is a word-spritzer. He is enormously intelligent company.

– Mary Jordan, Business Day, 28 May 1999

Pieter-Dirk Uys's Nowell Fine affirms the biting reality of the state of affairs among South Africans then, now and maybe even the future. This one-acter certainly makes one laugh — a lot — but at the same time one looks back on what a ridiculous nation we were, are and can still be.

– Tracy Craucamp, The Citizen, 26 May 1999

Going Down Gorgeous  delivers beyond expectations. It's a super slice of satire with Uys at his most ace!

– Billy Suter, Natal Mercury,  30 April 1999

Where there are many reasons to forsake a sense of humour in favour of self-fulfilling prophecies of doom and destruction, Nowell Fine gives one a peculiar, even twisted taste of optimism in a world which seems increasingly to bleach the lenses of even the brightest rose-hued specs.

– Marc Devenish, The Argus, 20 January 1998