Biography
Richard Kaplan is a South African playwright and medical researcher based in Cape Town. His plays are tragicomic and character-driven, using comedy, drama, and magical realism to explore grief, love, and identity within queer and Jewish life. Set in worlds where the living and the dead exist side by side, his plays feature angels investigating lonely estate agents, dead mothers refusing to leave their sons and drag queens stumbling towards unexpected grace. His work includes Selwyn & Gabriel, The Finkelsteins Are Coming to Dinner, Let There Be Sparkle and Heterofuckingsexuals & Other Queer Love Stories.
His plays have been staged at the Cape Town Fringe Festival, the Alexander Bar & Theatre, the National Arts Festival, the Hilton Arts Festival and the South African schools festivals.
Artist Statement
Who appears in my plays, and what they want, matters more to me than what happens.
Jews. Queers. Queer Jews and drag queens, and their mothers. Angels. Sometimes God. And often, somewhere, the dead - not as ghosts, but as memories that refuse to be erased, as though the living and the dead share one secret world.
In Selwyn & Gabriel, the angel is truth and light and love. In The Finkelsteins, the young man who arrives is love and adventure and sex and joy - a breaker of boundaries.
My protagonists live in a state of belonging/not belonging - a spiritual sense of being out of place in the physical world, yet deeply connected to the emotional world we all share. Selwyn is Jewish and queer and alone - a poet, and for one night, a dead man among the living. Gabriel is both an angel and a Black man in South Africa - heaven and earth embodied in the same person.
Their circumstances have the specifics of place. Their emotional centres are not bound by it.
Plays
“Selwyn and Gabriel by Richard Kaplan is a beautifully written piece of new South African writing and is well worth seeing."Ashraf Johaardien, executive producer of the South African National Arts Festival, Lit Net.
Selwyn & Gabriel
Directed by Tara Notcutt, featuring Mbulelo Grootboom and Kai Luke Brummer. Staged over two seasons at Alexander Bar & Theatre, 2017–2018, before transferring to the National Arts Festival. Selected for the Western Cape Schools Festival, the South African National Schools Festival, and the Hilton Arts Festival. Adapted and translated into Afrikaans for television by Red Pepper Pictures in 2021.
↓ DOWNLOAD THE SCRIPT (PDF)The Finkelsteins Are Coming to Dinner
Directed by Adrian Collins, featuring Andrew Laubscher, David Viviers, and Megan Furniss. Premiered at the Cape Town Fringe Festival, transferring to Alexander Bar & Theatre, 2016. Two Fleur du Cap Theatre Award nominations. David Viviers received the Cape Town Fringe Fresh Performer Award for his portrayal of James.
↓ DOWNLOAD THE SCRIPT (PDF)Let There Be Sparkle
A good-natured, irreverent theatrical comedy that playfully explores the idea that deep within each of us lies something good and beautiful striving to emerge. A staged reading of the play under its original title “Madame Butterfly and the German Plumber” was presented at the Alexander Bar & Theatre under the direction of Wessel Pretorius.
Heterofuckingsexuals & Other Queer Love Stories
A cycle of four interconnected one-act plays following a chain of queer lives across one extraordinary night and the morning after, each expanding the world of the last. The cycle blends outrageous comedy with genuine tenderness to explore sex, love, race, masculinity, and the pressures of navigating a predominantly heterosexual world. Not yet produced.
The cycle comprises: Please Feed the Cat, I Love Your Dad, Hanging Out with Buddy Zimmerman, and Heterofuckingsexuals.
↓ DOWNLOAD I LOVE YOUR DAD (PDF)Other Work
Richard leads the LGBT+ Health Division at the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation in Cape Town, where he oversees clinical research, health programmes, and advocacy initiatives.