Jessica Campbell

interviews

PAMELA NOMVETE                                 

Her starring femme fatale role in

the long-running South African

TV serial Generations made her a

household name. She recently

returned to the U.K. and found

herself cast in NOW OR LATER

at the Royal Court Theatre, one

of the most seriously successful

political plays of the year.  Even

the Prime Minister of Britain

came to see it.

________________

When rehearsals for Now or Later began, neither cast nor director could have imagined how topical Christopher Shinn’s play would be. Set on the eve of an American presidential election, the polls are looking up for the Democratic candidate.  Then some controversial and compromising photographs of his son, university student John Jr. (played by Eddie Redmayne), surface on the internet.  The snowball begins to roll.

In turn his friend, campaign party workers, his mother and finally his father engage him with the dilemma his actions have constructed for each of them.  In the audience we feel the force of the moral argument of each interlocutor.  We follow with mixed feelings John Jr.’s defence.

One of the most intriguing dilemmas is that explored in the scene where campaign aide Tracy, played by Pamela Nomvete, is sent in to convince John Jr. to make a public apology. Tracy, being black and female, sympathises with his feeling of alienation and is one of the few people in his father’s entourage whom John Jr. trusts. Ultimately, like the others, she betrays his friendship to keep the campaign on track.

________________

Intrigued by the actor and her brilliant performance, I manage to contact Pamela Nomvete to ask her if she’ll give me an interview. To my amazement she agrees, despite the fact that I am clearly still at school and that this  - hopefully less clearly - is the first interview I’ve ever conducted.

We meet in the Royal Court’s edgy, underground bar before the Saturday matinée. I begin by offering her a drink.  To my immense relief she chooses water rather than wine, which I might not be served.  She is wonderfully exuberant and incredibly easy to talk to.  

Pamela’s life, like the play itself, shows that politics is never simple. Complex and full of unexpected twists, her own story demonstrates that even the most straightforward actions can have unforeseen consequences and provoke unexpected reactions.

Born to South African parents, Pamela’s father was amongst the original intake of black students at Cape Town University when universities there were desegregated. He then left the country with his wife to take up a Quaker scholarship to Manchester University, England, where he studied economics. Pamela’s older sister, then a baby, remained behind in the care of her South African grandmother. In England her father spoke out against apartheid and as  a result he found himself exiled from the land of his birth.  It took five years of negotiation before he and his wife could obtain the relevant papers to gain permission for their daughter to join them, an act of apartheid cruelty against her parents which upsets Pamela to this day.

Pamela’s father became an economist for the UN and the family spent several years travelling around Africa.  She was in fact born in Ethiopia. At a time of political turbulence when the schools were closed down, Pamela, then  fourteen, was sent to Cheltenham Ladies College in England. After such a peripatetic childhood, it must have been a shock to end up in the institution whose most recent claim to fame is having created the term ‘chav’ - an acronym for Council House Adolescent Vermin. It was here that, quite by chance, Pamela discovered acting. A friend was performing in the Cheltenham Festival and needed a partner; Pamela volunteered.

After leaving Cheltenham she attended the Welsh College of Music and Drama - an experience she likens to “coming out of jail”. On graduation she worked with the Bristol Express and the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1994 she returned to South Africa to vote in the first free election. Though she had intended to stay only a month, she fell in love with the country, and the country fell in love with her.

“There was very limited training for South African actors at the time.   I had an English education and spoke ‘proper British’”.  But in a country which both “revered and despised the western world” Pamela provoked mixed reactions. While the people of South Africa adored her, the new industry was riddled with prejudice and many resented her privileged education.

Nonetheless, within two years Pamela was starring as Ntsiki – the character everyone loved to hate - in the hugely popular soap opera Generations. She was soon a household name. In one of the more bizarre incidents arising from her role, Pamela was famously slapped across the face by a restaurant manager who despised her TV character and seemed unable to distinguish between reality and fiction. She mentions being followed in shops and having fans chase her car. “Fame is weird,” she shrugs. “It’s completely surreal… Your life is not your own”. This and a desire to pursue more challenging roles convinced her to leave Generations after five years. “I wanted to get back into the real world.”  This she certainly did.

After a short spell in television, Pamela was cast as the part of Martine in Sometimes in April, a film which takes a dark and detailed look at the 1994 Rwandan genocide.  She describes the experience as a “healing process”, both for herself and for Africa.

“Raoul Peck [the writer and director] insisted on having the premier in Rwanda. It was shown on a giant screen in a stadium. Two Rwandans translated the dialogue over a microphone. . .  It took two hours to get the 40,000 people settled into the stadium but when it was over the audience left in fifteen minutes - in silence.”

Shooting the film was a harrowing experience for Pamela. Even now she shudders while describing how she and Raoul Peck visited a particular church before the filming began: “There were still bullet holes in the ceiling and blood on the walls. There were piles of ripped clothes everywhere, even babies’ clothes… and skeletons of bodies hacked to death with wooden machetes.  Amongst this carnage there was one perfect statue of the Virgin Mary.” This image appears at one particularly poignant moment in the film, where the camera pans from a pile of dead girls lying on a classroom floor to a statue of the Madonna still presiding in the playground. Pamela explains that the Rwandans believe God lives in their mountains, going out into the world during the day, returning to sleep in the mountains at night. But it was said that during the genocide, God never came home . . .

She describes Sometimes in April as the “trigger that sent me back to real world”.   In 2005 she starred in Zulu Love Letter in the role of a journalist in post-apartheid South Africa, struggling to re-build relations with her estranged daughter. Amongst numerous awards, the film won the UNICEF prize for the Promotion of Women’s Rights and Pamela won the Best Actress award in both the Fespaco Film Festival* and the Zimbabwe Women’s Film Festival.  She returned to London last year and within a few months had secured the part of Tracy in Now or Later at one of Britain’s most respected theatrical venues, the Royal Court Theatre.

The quality of the show has also attracted esteemed political audiences.   Cherie Blair was at an early performance and the night before our interview several thespian luminaries, including Kevin Spacey and Alan Rickman, came to see the play, along with Sarah and Gordon Brown.  Afterwards they joined the cast for drinks.

When I ask what Gordon Brown is like in the flesh, she replies simply, “Sweet and humble.”

“And isn’t it daunting to know that the Prime Minister is watching – and possibly being influenced by – your play?”

“That is what this profession can do.  It’s magical. It’s insane.  And it can create enormous change”.

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The author of this interview is

Jessica Campbell, a student at the Godolphin and Latymer School in London.

© October 2008