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"... a solid addition to international drama." --Library Journal Going beyond the parameters of conventional literary drama, these seven new plays express life issues in post-apartheid South Africa--Islamic fundamentalism, women's rights, ecology, Afrikaans culture and the new multi-racial life of the inner city. While theater rooted in the anti-apartheid movement was rich and vibrant, it was also singleminded in focus, obscuring the diversity of South African culture now brought to life in these works.
Includes the plays Missing, Crossing and Miracle The three plays in this volume are hauntingly beautiful pieces with simple fable-like characters who are touched by magical events. A circus has a mysterious significance in Missing (Mis) as a mother and daughter are visited by a blind policeman on the nights it comes to town. In Crossing (Drif) a stormy night brings a hypnotist to the home of two sisters who live by a ford, two women who bury the bodies of fortune-seekers who fail to heed their warnings about the river when it is in flood. Miracle (Mirakel) centres on a theatrical troupe and again exemplifies the author’s earthiness, humour and child-like wonder.
Includes the plays African Gothic, Good Heavens and Breathing In A farm lies in ruin. And with mother and father now gone, a brother and sister face eviction by an officious lawyer. Abandoned, they endlessly enact the rituals of punishment once visited upon them by their parents. Widely regarded as a milestone in South African theatre, the multi-award winning play African Gothic tells the story of their final 'dance macabre'. Despite overwhelming critical acclaim, it was also fiercely condemned by Afrikaans conservatives as being a subversive portrayal of repression. Good Heavens is a comedy thriller with the dark poetic heart of a folk-tale. Two spinster sisters, with their ailing mother an...
During a night-long vigil preceding the funeral of their brother Kostia, Anton and Aleksander Chekhov are drawn into an agonising and explosive confrontation with each other and with deeply hidden aspects of themselves. As the play unfolds, it becomes a searing portrayal of human misery and the redemptive power of the creative impulse.
This powerful version of Chekhov’s famous drama reflects the South African phenomenon of the 1990s. With the hindsight of the new millennium we can look back and see that the miracle did happen. The new order did take over from the old. The fruitless cherry orchard was chopped down. The old men who couldn't move with the times have been left behind and forgotten. Chekhov's great pre-revolutionary drama, dreaming of youthful energy replacing the worn-out inertia of a dying world, lends itself vividly to this new setting in post-revolutionary South Africa.
This volume considers the linguistic complexities associated with Shakespeare’s presence in South Africa from 1801 to early twentieth-first century televisual updatings of the texts as a means of exploring individual and collective forms of identity. A case study approach demonstrates how Shakespeare’s texts are available for ideologically driven linguistic programs. Seeff introduces the African Theatre, Cape Town, in 1801, multilingual site of the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in Southern Africa where rival, amateur theatrical groups performed in turn, in English, Dutch, German, and French. Chapter 3 offers three vectors of a broadening Shakespeare diaspora in English...