Disgrace at the Maidment Theatre

Stuart Devenie as Lurie and Hera Dunleavy as his daughter Lucy - a prickly relationship. Picture / John McDermott

South African academic Professor David Lurie is having a hard time fitting into the new post-apartheid climate. He is 52, teaching Communications 101 and Advanced Communications 201 in a Capetown university, those courses having replaced his past calling in now-obsolete classics.

He is divorced, twice, and a cold practitioner of bought sex. He also uses his fading powers to seduce female students, whenever he can get away with it. But one so-called seduction is closer to rape and the professor finds himself the subject of a university committee of inquiry.

Lurie resigns in disgrace and goes to stay with his daughter Lucy, who lives on a smallhold farm.

There, Lurie discovers a new occupation in an under-resourced animal refuge.

A home invasion also reinforces his realisation that the whites of South Africa must adapt to the new world order.

Lucy has her way of coping, a pragmatic resolution. Lurie's passage is more complicated.

As actor Stuart Devenie, who plays Lurie, and director Colin McColl hone the production in preparation for its world premiere on Saturday night, they are finding many levels of meaning in Carl Nixon's script and in Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel.

"Lurie's life, it's a very common thing for men of a certain age," observes Devenie, whose sardonic powers are stretched to superb effect by the script's crisp prose.

"His spirit has been ground down and he has developed a very brittle and sophisticated persona to protect himself from that. The surface has got deeper and deeper and he's in great danger of becoming an unremitting cynic, a misanthrope."

"It's not that he's not self-aware that his powers are fading as far as being a lecturer, his sexual prowess. He can feel everything going and he's trying to compensate," adds McColl.

Devenie believes Lurie is an angry man who masks his rage with cynicism.

"But you cannot maintain that pose. Lurie prides himself on his disinterested cynicism but when confronted by the reality of the rape, the denial really kicks in."

When Lurie caves in so easily at the committee of inquiry, it is an act of self-sabotage to remove himself from a situation he loathes.

But when he goes off into the countryside, with the ludicrous notion of writing an opera, he doesn't realise he's heading into new territory in every sense.

"His world order is flipped. In Capetown, he could live his life without having anything to do with the blacks. He would never have come into contact with the poor blacks except when they came to clean his house," says McColl.

Lurie's relationship with his daughter - whom he suspects of being a lesbian, among other things - is prickly. "The relationship is beautifully observed," says Devenie. "He is scathingly sarcastic about her relationship with the other woman - but only to the audience. This is the wonderful thing; the primary relationship is between Lurie and the audience and that's what gives it its theatrical power."

At the beginning of the play, Lurie proclaims, "I continue to teach because it provides me with a livelihood and also it teaches me humility."

But that is not true. "He's so arrogant, talking about humility," says Devenie, "but at the end he has found it and he has found something to do."

Which involves working at the dog shelter. No real dogs are on stage but their terrified presence is created by footage and sounds recorded at an Auckland refuge - cries and howls so heart-rending they have made music designer John Gibson cry.

The plight of animals at the hands of man is a concern that runs though all of Coetzee's work. But by working with the animals, Lurie finds some sort of peace.

"What interests me about Disgrace [are] the similarities with King Lear," concludes McColl.

"He starts off arrogant and full of himself, and life sorts him out. He comes to a sense that he's more humble in the end, got a kind of grace at the end."

"From disgrace to grace," says Devenie, firmly.

What: Disgrace, adapted for stage by Carl Nixon from the novel by J.M. Coetzee
Where and when: Maidment Theatre, previews tonight and tomorrow; world premiere Sep 24. It runs until Oct 15