On Stage: Cracked up in Wentworth

In his new one-woman adult comedy, Bitch Stole My Doek, writer and director Clinton Marius has once again pushed his own boundaries.

Durban audiences shouldn't be surprised. After all, this is the man who conceptualised and wrote the phenomenally popular radio soapie Lollipop Lane that enchanted Radio Lotus listeners for almost five years.

The radio soap revolved around the female residents of a block of flats and included characters such as the brick- carrying aunty Mrs Singh-Sing, but Bitch Stole My Doe k is set in the south of Durban, in the historically coloured area of Wentworth. It is a war of words between two women over a missing item of laundry.

As a gay man who grew up surrounded by women - twin sisters and a mother - Marius is comfortable writing about the lives of women. He believes he is in touch with what they go through.

Lollipop Lane, primarily about Indian women, was a runaway success, but at one point there was a letter in a local newspaper saying that a white man should not have written this.

"I always say that you don't have to be a murderer to write about murder; you don't have to have fought in World War 2 to write about that," he says. "If people are restricted to their own voices then we are never going to cross-pollinate."

He wrote Bitch with Durban actress Shona Johnson in mind. They worked together on one of his children's shows and he was taken with her sense of humour and rapport with her audience.

"I wanted to do something that would appeal to her fan base - Wentworth is such an interesting suburb, full of salt-of-the-earth types, sailors and the hellish refineries," Marius says.

Johnson plays five characters, beginning with the central character who leans over the fence to gossip with her neighbour about everything that's wrong on the road.

Marius says that because he writes with a sense of rhythm, he can be quite an "autocratic" director. H owever, he invited Johnson to comment on the script. "She's been very supportive - to the extent of saying that she believes I'm coloured on the inside."

What makes something funny, he says, is brutal honesty and no artifice.

"They say comedy is when you reach the line in the sand and then cross it, but it shouldn't be offensive. I like to win people over - if they love the character, then I can get away with murder."

• 'Bitch Stole My Doek' is at the Catalina Theatre from December 10 to 21. Booking through Computicket