Cast

Over the Hill was first performed at the Standard Bank Grahamstown Festival of the Arts, in July 1985, as part of a double bill with Under the Oaks, after which it toured nationally. Jonathan Rands played Steve, James Borthwick, Charlie, and Kate Edwards, Lynette.

This version of the script first appeared in South Africa Plays, edited by Stephen Gray and published in London by Nick Hern Books and in South Africa by Heinemann-Centaur.

A rugby dressing room after a ‘Sport Pienaar’ (provincial sub-section) game.

It is like any dressing room anywhere in the world except, being Nelspruit, there are perhaps more orange peels on the floor than there would be if this were, say, Cardiff Arms Park.

Empty beer cans, cigarette stubs and other bits of rubbish, litter the floor. A low massage table stands in the centre of the room. Against the stage left wall stands a wicker kit-skip (dirty jerseys, shorts, socks hanging out). High above the skip is a long narrow window (which overlooks the car park behind the stadium). Along the back and stage right walls is a single row of slatted benches above which are located clothes hooks – twenty-odd, evenly spaced. The entrance to the dressing room (from a corridor) is located in the stage right wall, while the archway to the showers and loos (marked ‘Shower/Stortbad’) is in the back wall, stage left. A lone rugby ball is situated near the shower exit, beneath the benches.

Under the only hook supporting any clothing, alone and sipping at a beer, sits STEVE ‘Sophie’ Sofianek, a twenty-four-year-old flyhalf. His bruised face suggests the game has been a hard one and the togs he still wears positively steam with the sweat of battle.

In another part of the stadium – high, distant and quite muted, a long-winded congratulatory speech is coming to an end. The manager or coach of STEVE's team is trying to speak above the din and heckle of the players.