Fetal Alchohol Syndrome

TakeAWAY’s Fetal Alchohol Syndrome (FAS) commitment has resulted in the newly established TakeAway Trust, a registered Public Benefit Organisation dedicated to raising universal awareness of FAS. Over the years we have designed and produced several interventions on the topic, and our community theatre show Die Liefdeskind has ratcheted up up almost 300 performances over the past four years.

A woman confronts our FAS cast

Our new intervention revolutionises the public performance genre – a totally improvised day-long performance that was piloted in shopping malls around greater Cape Town, where we played with the laws of attention to attract an itinerant audience and give people a space to tell our performers what to do, instead of us telling them. Interestingly, we found that the public found it difficult to separate reality from fiction – people got very upset with our performers’ drinking while pregant – even though they were in masks, and were only miming taking a drink.

We discovered in research conducted around the show that 9 out of 10 people do not know what FAS is, and that the majority (63%) could not identify a possible consequence of maternal alcohol consumption. There is still a lot of work to do!