I indulged myself and created a play based on a real life character I was interested in - ‘Charles Manson’.

I had to do some nifty footwork, to try and 'explain' and justify why I did it - given that the subject matter had absolutely nothing to do with South Africa, or the politics that was swirling around everything at the time.

It shows, I suppose, some of the looming grindingly banal colonial political correctness - that I was almost required to explain 'why' I chose to write the play.

(The inherent unspoken inference from all the questioners being that anything written which isn't directly about South Africa, I suppose, was somehow suspect).

The simple idea of writing something because it felt like an interesting story, just never occurred to some folks.

In the reviews section, you can read the awkward painful bullshitting I had to do, to justify and explain its 'relevance' to South Africa.

That said, it seemed to work nicely as theatre, and was a reasonably dense piece, which pleased me.

I chose a very simple ‘logo’ to sell the Play concept.

Using an extension of the standard circular ‘face’ logo, I roughly created a hand-drawn ‘peace sign’ ( the standard CND logo) - with the center broken by the title.

I added little ‘dripping’ bits here and there, to suggest that the paint wasn’t dry. Or perhaps it's dripping blood, depending on the mind of the viewer.

Again, unfortunately, this isn’t a ‘clean’ copy of the poster - the photocopy has black bits on its edges, which interfere with the otherwise clear white page with the central logo.

Also, this version has an additional, rather tacky font 'critics comment' added to the lower part.  With hindsight, I think ‘Ew'.

 But at the time, in order to sell it to the crowds at the Grahamstown Arts Festival, it needed the additional ’seal of approval’ (I felt) by adding a critic’s review comment as well as the Amstel playwright of the year Award nomination.

 The ‘original’ version also had a much smaller ‘ian fraser’ at the top, and no additional wording. It still stood out dramatically amidst the sea of posters at the Festival, so the circular concept worked nicely.