The Return of Elvis Du Pisanie
SEP 2026
More info
Who would have believed that a simple act of switching on a car radio could change the course of your life!?
In the darkness, a car pulls up at a street lamp. Eddie steps out into the void, to confront the horror of his own fears. He stops at the place where, almost 30 years ago, the universe shifted … the night he became hopelessly lost. Haunted by an event that changed everything, he begins to find words to name it. A miracle happens, but perhaps not in the way you might expect. Eddie du Pisanie - a forty-nine year old East Rand salesman - is retrenched and decides life is no longer worth living. He writes a suicide note to his wife and is about to gas himself in his car in the garage, when he switches on the car radio. The Elvis Presley song he hears does more than take him back 30 years - it recalls an event in his childhood that changed his life forever. Abandoning - for the moment - the idea of suicide, he drives the 200 kilometre journey to the town in which he grew up, to a lamp post opposite the ex-Carlton Bioscope in Witbank. Can we change our own destinies...? “Elvis” du Pisanie is about to find out…
PUBLISHED REVIEWS
‘Ashley Dowds delivers a tender and nuanced performance in The Return of Elvis Pisane’ - THE CAPE ROBYN
‘Theatre doesn’t get much more brilliant than Elvis Du Pisanie’ - BIANCA COLEMAN
‘gritty, funny, tragic, universal and something that will bring you to the brink of tears in all its dimensions’ - ROBYN SASSEN
‘Staan terug, of 'n vuishou gaan jou tref!’ - BEELD, AJ OPPERMAN
“from the whisper under lamppost until the reunion with the King of Rock and role...I was mesmerized by the greatness of the Word and Performance...."THE RETURN OF ELVIS DU PISANIE" is THEATRICAL PERFECTION. Sylvain Strike
‘It is worth saying clearly: this is a show about a man who has written a suicide note. It begins in a dark place. But Slabolepszy and Dowds handle that darkness with such honesty and, ultimately, such generosity of spirit, that the journey through it becomes something genuinely uplifting. You leave not with heaviness but with something closer to gratitude for the past, for the moments that shaped you, and for the fact that someone put this story back on a stage.’
BARRY MORISSE