From the Stage to the Page: Trauma, Reconciliation and Remembering in Craig Higginson’s Dream of the Dog and The Dream House
Résumé
In the wake of the demise of apartheid and the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a number of South African plays directly addressed the issues raised by the TRC, in particular the difficulty of achieving reconciliation and of recovering from a traumatic past. Some ten years later, Craig Higginson’s play Dream of the Dog revisited these issues of trauma and reconciliation in a more subdued manner. This essay offers to look more closely at the workings of trauma and the possibility for reconciliation that the play’s several versions and revisions foreground, as well as at the specificities of the theatrical genre they reveal. This suggests that the past may take time to be properly re-membered.