Directing Hwindi

Harare, June 18th, 2018 | Simon de Swardt  

Hwindi is a comedy TV series that satirizes the immense difficulties Zimbabweans face in their battle to stay alive. On the 20th of April, Harare audiences watched a staged reading of the pilot episode which is the first of a dozen planned episodes. I wanted to do a staged reading with Almasi for a couple of reasons: it offered us an opportunity to experiment with casting and staging, and it also lets us gauge audience response to the script.

This pilot episode was written primarily by Andrew Iliff and Farai Mudzingwa, but also includes contributions from Ranga Mberi who is one of the series writers. In the writing, we aimed to create a tightly woven storyline that would nonetheless leave room to explore in the subsequent episodes. So there are a couple of unsolved mysteries to create material for future episodes! The pilot script also aims to set everything in motion for the series, and it thus ends with a simple question: will Trymore manage to rebuild his business, and what will become of him and his coworkers after their collapse? The rest of the series will follow these storylines to their natural conclusions…

A key component of the reading was the debate after the show – it was encouraging to hear the audience’s opinions and feedback, positive as well as negative. From this process, we will refine the script and tweak a couple of things before production of the TV pilot begins in earnest.

I would like to thank Danai Gurira and everyone at Almasi Collaborative Arts for their generous support in staging this reading, and especially Zaza for running everything smoothly. Thanks also to the actors for all their hard work and incredible talent, and the writing team for creating such a fun project which seems to have gone down well with the audience.