Andrew Frederick Buckland is a South African award-winning playwright, performer, film director, mime, performer and academic.
Biography
Born and schooled in Zimbabwe. He is married to actress Janet Buckland and their son Daniel Buckland is also an actor, another son, Matthew was an Internet entrepreneur and businessman who died in 2019.
Training
He trained at Rhodes University, graduating in 1979 with a BA Honours in Drama.
Career
He became a junior lecturer, then joined the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal as actor. In 1992 Buckland became a member of the First Physical Theatre Company and a lecturer in the Drama Department at Rhodes University. Later senior lecturer and finally professor, Buckland retired from Rhodes University in December 2017.
For PACT he played in, inter alia, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Importance of Being Earnest, Savages, Tom Jones and Bloed in die Strate, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Performed in Romeo and Juliet, Monday After the Miracle, Shrivings, The Runner Stumbles. Andrew gradually began to create his own theatre works and in 1987 he and Janet Buckland founded Mouthpeace Theatre in Johannesburg, working closely with their friends Lionel Newton, and director Lara Foot-Newton. He created a distinctive style of theatre for himself, utilizing the techniques of physical theatre and mime to relate his poetic fantasies. Among his best known works are Touchstones, Pas de Deux, which he had co-written with Soli Philander, the much-admired and multiple award-winning The Ugly Noonoo, Between the Teeth, Bloodstream, Feedback, Noisy Walk, The Water Juggler /The Well Being, and ****. Laugh the Buffalo, directed by Janet Buckland; the ghost of Christmas Present in Scrooge ; 2014: Crazy in Love His The Investigation of an Ugly Noo Noo was staged at the Warehouse in 1988. Touchstones, 1984, Grahamstown Festival. The Ugly Noo Noo: A Trilogy, Market Theatre, 1989. The Inconvenience of Wings by Lara Foot in 2016, Makana on the Islandin 2001 at the Grahamstown Festival. He starred in David Mamet’s Speed the Plow at Upstairs at the Market in 1990, A Doll's House at Upstairs at the Market in 1990, in a return run of The Ugly Noo Noo at the Market Theatre in 1991. He directed Soli Philander in Philander’s Take Two at the Laager Theatre in Johannesburg in 1991. Performed in Love for Cirque du Soleil in 2009. He played Hamlet for the SABC in 1983. His film work includes roles in Shotdown, The Schoolmaster, Dirty Games, The Good Fascist and Quest for Love.
