TRACKS HOME
TRACKS
Hong Kong Tour 2019
9-10 September 2019
14:30 & 20:00
early bird tickets
now available via Ticketflap.com
250.00hk$
Tracks…
is a one-woman show by Maude Sandham and Nicola Pilkington, who excavates the myth and memory of her grandfather, Alan Sandham. A man with 6 children and a dedicated wife. A man who loved to read the classics, listen to Rachmaninoff and cook his ‘Scandinavian specialIties’. A man who worked for the South African Railway for 35 years. And a man who kept a secret. A story about the political ebbing into the personal. A story about a man of colour who slipped through the cracks of the Apartheid regime.
Credit
Tracks is co-created by Maude Sandham and Nicola Pilkington | Performed by Maude Sandham | Directed and Designed by Nicola Pilkington | Commissioned by the Wits Theatre | Presented in association with the SAHK Theatre Exchange and Treasure Chest Theatre
background and performance history
Tracks is based on the true events surrounding the exposé of Alan Sandham’s secret identity. Maude recalls the conversations with her family members and the photographs of Alan, piecing the clues of his story to try to gain a clearer picture of the man- and to try to solve why he didn’t even tell his own family the truth?
The play is an auto/biological, one person show by Maude Sandham. While she tells a deeply intimate story about her grandfather, Tracks sheds light on the effects of the segregation laws during Apartheid. This is not a unique story, but one of the millions of grey areas that lie in-between the black and white print on the pages of the South African history books.
Tracks was the commissioned work for the 2017 So Solo Festival at Wits Theatre, and ran at the National Arts Festival in 2018, as part of the STAGED Showcase presented by UJ Arts and Culture. The shows most recent iteration ran at POPArt Theatre in Maboneng, Johannesburg at the end of last year.
synopsis
During the height of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, Alan Sandham and Norma Hager meet. Within the period of eight months they are married and had their first child on the way. Subsequently the Sandhams had six children.
Alan held up a blue collar job working for the South African Railway as a bricklayer. He was often away from home working hard to provide for his family. And when he was at home, he was a disinterested father and a distracted husband. The family recall his presence as a silhouette on the horizon, coming or going from their small home in a lower-class neighbourhood. The family did not know much about Alan’s childhood. His stories were always peppered with half-truths. And it was only 20 years after his passing that his story came to light.
Alan Sandham was a person of colour who passed as white; a man who slipped through the cracks of the Apartheid regime. His marriage, occupation and locations in habited were illegal; and thus kept his identity a secret. Not only from the authorities, but from his family too. It was his granddaughter, Maude, who first uncovered her family's heritage after the discovery of a photograph: a matriarch surrounded by her children. A family that clearly would not pass as ‘white’ under the racial classification laws at the time. In 2016, Alan’s children and grandchildren met their estranged cousins for the first time. The family learned that Alan would often visit them in secret and that they had lived in the adjacent neighbourhood reserved for people of colour, only 2 kilometers away, merely separated by the railway lines.