Altovise Lawrence and the art of stepping into new skins

Naledi Award-nominated Altovise Lawrence and her co-star Mothusi Magano, in the James Ncobo production of Oleanna, at the Joburg Theatre in 2024. (Photo: courtesy of Altovise Lawrence)

By Diana Neille

8 Apr 2025

The stage and film performer has earned an award nomination for her complex role in Oleanna.

To be a performer is, to a large extent, the act of fitting a brief, meeting an expectation, possessing a collection of traits that fulfil a mandate: the character is a young woman, medium height, dark hair, expressive eyes, who is angry at the world.

To be a performer is also to possess an irrepressible desire to express the nuance, complexity and depth of feeling of the human experience. It is to connect with a character and make it as real, as relatable, as human as you are.

In the gap between these two definitions, on the rarest and luckiest of occasions, art happens. The director writes the brief; the performer makes it actually mean something. The gap becomes a dimension. It moves people. It takes hold. It becomes culture. It defines us. It helps us to evolve as a species.

But the gap can also just be that: an absence, a gap art falls through.

Altovise Lawrence is a performer who defies the absence of art. Born in Reiger Park, Johannesburg, in 1991 to a family of aspirant creatives and handed a microphone at age three, Lawrence feels performance is a sacred act – a pact between comrades to do spiritual battle together.

Straight out of varsity, in 2014, Lawrence appeared in a Market Theatre production of George C Wolfe’s 1986 ensemble revue The Coloured Museum. As a brand-new graduate, she performed alongside some heavy hitters, directed by theatre veteran James Ngcobo, before going on to a slew of film and TV roles.

“As an artist, everything you create will always be bigger than you. The moment I show it to people, it is bigger than me. And I think the embodiment of [a character] makes certain things spiritual in that becoming,” Lawrence said.

Playing the part

Altovise Lawrence (right) and Mothusi Magano played the two antagonists in James Ncobo’s 2024 production of Oleanna. (Photo: Curtesy of Altovise Lawrence)

In 2024, she won the part of Carol in the 1992 two-hander Oleanna, a craftily complex, he said/she said drama by Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright and filmmaker David Mamet.

Lawrence’s portrayal has earned her a Naledi Theatre Award nomination for best female lead in a play.

Written with the clear intention of forcing the audience to pick a side in a thorny, increasingly fraught argument between a successful male college professor and his underprivileged female student, the original Oleanna was designed to create controversy. Audiences in the early and mid-1990s grew outraged and argumentative at the so-called identity politics espoused by Lawrence’s character, Carol. A woman in the front row of a theatre in Bath, England, shouted at the character mid-performance for chastising the professor’s pet name for his wife.

Then the #MeToo era shifted dynamics in Carol’s favour. All of a sudden, the professor was “jumping into the mouth” of a defenceless young woman, according to the director of a production staged in the same country, in 2021.

In other words, Oleanna is a play that requires its characters to tirelessly provoke each other and their audience. With a run time of roughly 90 minutes of non-stop dialogue, that’s already a significant weight for two actors to carry between them every show, for weeks on end.

But in the Joburg Theatre version last August, Lawrence and her acting partner Mothusi Magano had a second layer of complexity to grapple with. Their director, once again Ngcobo, made the decision to set Oleanna against the backdrop of #FeesMustFall.

For Lawrence, this made playing Carol both a deeply personal proposition and a massive responsibility.

“I experienced #FeesMustFall,” Lawrence said. “I remember marching to the Union Buildings – shots ringing out, we were running and there was tear gas.

“But there was also a scandal that many people lived through at the varsity I was at … with a professor that did horrible things to students. I can remember the day people started confessing, at an emergency meeting when I was in my second or third year,” she said.

“We listened to this account, this trial almost, where different women and men stood up and [explained what was perpetrated against them].

“So when I built Carol, the world was not a foreign world. It was a firsthand experience to a certain extent … And that’s what I brought into the ... work.”

For Lawrence, the art is in taking characters such as Carol so seriously that they don’t just require building, developing and eventually wearing like a second skin. They also need to be removed again when the day is over.

“It’s important in acting to de-role,” she said, “to take off that particular character... You need to physically shed [it], or you will carry it home.”

A real commitment

Being afforded the opportunity, time and encouragement to don or shed a character you have honed over months isn’t an everyday occurrence in a country like South Africa, where funding for the arts gets more elusive by the year.

“A few years ago, when our audition forms started asking for our social media handles, that for me is where the shift started,” Lawrence said. “That’s not what I’m here for. You gave me six pages to prepare, and I’m going to lose out [to somebody else], just because I don’t have the desired social media following? When the industry doesn’t really care about the work or the art … you don’t want to be part of a particular project, because it’s not driven by wanting to tell a great story or pushing the boundaries. It’s just about money.”

Lawrence was increasingly feeling that the gap between commerce and art was shrinking.

“For the longest time, I was such an angry artist. I wanted to march and burn things down, because, why are things the way they are?” Lawrence said.

“You feel this deep need for change and you want a different type of storytelling. But I realised that it doesn’t help to burn everything to the ground. We’d just have to come back and rebuild it again.

“Once you start understanding the business of the industry, your world shifts as a creative, and you stop taking certain things personally. Now [I’ve learnt] to walk out of a room knowing that I absolutely smashed that audition, for me.” DM

Diana Neille is an investigative journalist, filmmaker and documentarian.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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Playing the part

A real commitment