After a successful rookie year on the US screenwriting competition circuit, Cape Town writer Paul Ian Johnson has earned recognition in a new direction – as a playwright.
Judges from the Performing Arts Network of South Africa (PANSA) yesterday named Johnson’s stage thriller, False Witness, the Best Play and overall winner of the 2007 National Lottery / PANSA (Western Cape) Festival of Contemporary Theatre Readings. False Witness had already earlier been named the judges’ 2007 pick for Contemporary SA Drama, a category previously won by Mike van Graan’s Green Man Flashing.
Describing the play as “a wonderfully inventive political “whodunnit’ with fantastically-drawn characters’, judges’ cited Johnson as a “highly-skilled and visionary writer’ who had delivered a “well-crafted plot that keeps twisting and mounting suspense.’ Judges for this year’s competition were Marianne Thamm, Johan Esterhuizen and Malika Ndlovu.
Attracting top-flight theatre talent, False Witness was staged at UCT’s Intimate Theatre under the direction of Fleur du Cap winning director, Matthew Wild, with actors Warrick Grier, Royston Stoffels, Jacqui du Toit and Vaneshran Arumugam in key roles.
Johnson’s first theatre achievement comes just a few weeks after a semi-final placement saw him become the best-placed South African in the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ prestigious Nicholl screenwriting competition. Earlier this year, Hollywood director Gus van Sant selected Johnson’s modern-day western, The Last Marine, among the winning Top Ten Finalists at the 4th American Zoetrope Screenplay Awards (making Johnson Zoetrope’s first-ever African finalist).
Self-educated as a writer, Johnson is currently developing a sailing movie for local producers.
