[1] She is known for the wide-ranging topics of her plays,[2] though a central feature running through most of them is the focus on flawed characters in both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances.
Ruth and her sister Gila were told by the Red Cross at the end of the war that their parents had survived and were living in America.
With the support of New Writing South she was taken under the wing of Tony Milner from New Vic Productions who produced and directed many of her early plays.
[citation needed] A Gail Louw Season was presented at The Playground Theatre, London, between February and April 2024.
Four plays comprised the season including three new ones: Storming!, Rika’s Rooms, and The Girl In The Green Jumper.
Other early plays on a Jewish theme include Herschel, based on the story of Herschel Grynszpan, who killed a top Nazi official in 1938 and precipitated Kristallnacht; Killing Faith, her first produced play; and Steps Out Of Time, originally called Shabat in Zfat.
A later play, Eishes Chayill - Woman of Valour, returns to the Jewish theme by using music to explore marriage, feminism and frustration in a Haredi community.
[17] The Ice Cream Boys is based on a fictionalised meeting between Jacob Zuma and Ronnie Kasrils.
The latter was commissioned by Jeffrey Holland who has performed the role in the UK and Ireland, as well as on cruise ships, for a number of years.
[23] Blonde Poison has had eight productions worldwide, all with different actresses playing Stella Goldschlag: a UK-based one with Elizabeth Counsell; Salome Jens at Theatre 40, Beverly Hills; Carole Adams Fritsche at Verona Studio, Salem; Belinda Giblin at the Sydney Opera House and MTC, Melbourne; Fiona Ramsay at Theatre on the Square, Johannesburg; Elizabeth Hawthorne in Auckland, New Zealand; Loureline Snedeker in Boca Raton, Florida; and Dulcie Smart in Berlin, Germany.
[27][28] He has toured the play several times throughout the UK and Ireland and has given over 100 performances including at Chichester Festival Theatre.
[30] In 2020 the play was given as a dramatized reading with Peter FitzSimons for six nights at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney.
The play is based on a young woman who is sexually abused by her father, but who ends up living and having several children with him.
[49] The South African production won a Naledi Theatre Award for Fiona Ramsay as Best Lead Performance in a Play (Female).
[50][51] A Czech production Miss Dietrich Lituje was extremely successful in Prague and has had repeated runs since 2017.
It was part of the prestigious Theatronetto theater festival in 2022, and won the Tarin Shelfi Audience Award.
Blonde Poison, "...And This is my friend Mr Laurel", The Mitfords, Larkin Descending, and Shackleton’s Carpenter, discussed above under Monologues, are all based on real people, some well known.
The Half-Life of Love was produced in the UK in 2016 with an all male cast,[63][64] and in 2017 at the Verona Studio, Salem, with two women and a man.
Louw explores the experiences of an ordinary woman caught up in intense love and loss during extraordinary times.
Rika, the protagonist, inhabits two worlds: the present which, in her state of dementia, makes no sense, and the coherent past, peopled by ghosts.