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SAME OLD

 STORY

SAME OLD STORY (2004/English)

Same Old Story 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 Same Old Story

Playfully dazzling in structure and laceratingly funny, Pieter-Dirk Uys's Same Old Story is post-apartheid theatre come into its own. Using the gay aesthetic, he takes South African protest theatre into new territory. Uys's work has always been subversive: Same Old Story is a post-apartheid subversion whose charge is less in what is said but how it is said, how reality is treated as fictional and how subversion itself is defined as sexual ambiguity. Technique is an embedded view of the world. Uys's glittering, unstable technique makes South African protest theatre seem glum, gauche and old fashioned.

– Robert Greig,  The Sunday Independent, 19 September 2004

It is interesting what the passing of time does to people and to humanity. Today’s present is tomorrows past. Time is a useful tool in the hands of a dramatist. This is powerfully demonstrated in Same Old Story, the 2004-version of Pieter-Dirk Uys's controversial 1974 play Selle Ou Storie. It is an extremely relevant play, not depending on the constant dismembering of the people in it. There are too many hilarious moments and one-liners to lift the drama.

– (translated from) Kobus Burger,  Beeld, 22 September 2004

The script is brilliant, if often chilling stuff.

– Diane de Beer,  Pretoria News, 21 September 2004

Same Old Story is not strictly an English translation (of Selle Ou Storie), but a fully-fledged and enjoyable comedy-drama in its own right ... enough meat on its bones — and an alarming twist — to hold its own. Uys has written this tale of pretences in such a way that it is witty, wicked, modern, saucy and crackling with human drama.

– Christine Kennedy,  The Citizen, 27 September 2004