South African Theatre

Abstract: In keeping with the auto-ethnographical approach (as postulated by Mitra (2010) and Spry (2001)) this paper strives to frame physical actions as expressive performance narratives in my own work as part of contemporary South African theatre. I aim to do so through ...

Maishe Maponya has made an immense contribution to theatre and poetry performance in South Africa. It has been suggested that, as committed and passionate poet, he is the Pablo Neruda or Federico Garcia Lorca of his country. Though Southern Africa is rich in art, music, poetry, theatre and literature and fête them when they are dead, it is notorious for its neglect of artists and their work when they are alive. This is not only not good for the artists themselves but also for their countries.  Maishe was forged in the crucible of the struggle against apartheid and first came to prominence in the wake of the Soweto Uprising of 1976. He fought oppression and denounced injustice in those dark days but then when the goals he and others fought for then and the dreams they dreamed came to be increasingly forgotten, Maponya did not hesitate to denounce this too. In the apartheid era he founded the Bahumutsi Theatre company and produced militant and electrifying plays. With the celebrated Allah Poets, he and the well-known playwright, Matsemela Manaka and the ‘Poet Laureate of Soweto’, Ingoapele Madingoane, staged dynamic performance theatre. After the fall of apartheid in 1994 Maponya became increasingly critical and published two brilliant and hard-hitting collections of poems,  'This Land is my Witness: Poems on the State of the Nation' and 'Truth be Told: Da’s Kak in die Land', both published by Themba Books. The apartheid government hounded and harassed him, banning his plays. The democratic post-apartheid government, simply ignored him – along with many other great South African writers and performers. It is time to give our artists their due and celebrate their lives and works while we still have them.

This volume provides an in-depth analysis of the work of Indian South African playwright Ashwin Singh, which, through the diversity of characters from all ethnic backgrounds, forges an inclusive South African identity. The essays in this volume show how Singh's plays bring South Africa's blatant prejudices and social ills to the forefront as only by confronting unpleasant realities can any far-reaching changes actually take place. The academics and cultural practitioners who have contributed to this volume approach Singh's work from a variety of angles, ranging from history, psychology and experimental literary forms to the performance of the plays, the relevance of the stage directions and the symbiotic relationship between the playwright and the director. The contrast between the climate of optimistic political protest and the complacency and disillusion of the new democratic era is seen to reassess the actions of the past in the light of present outcomes.

On 30 June 2006 at the annual National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, two giants of South African protest theatre, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, performed as the original cast of the landmark struggle drama Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972). The revival marked the first production of the play in over twenty-five years. After its brief stint at the National Arts Festival (30 June–5 July 2006), the play transferred to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town (11 July–5 August) and then entertained a monthlong run at the State Theatre in Pretoria (17 August–17 September). After its turn at the State, the production stopped shortly at the Hilton College Theatre in KwaZulu Natal (19–23 September) before settling into an extended engagement at Johannesburg's Market Theatre (28 September to 22 October). In March 2007, the original cast revival of Sizwe traveled to the British National Theatre before finally ending its tour at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in April 2008. The two black artists may have endeavored, through the 2006–8 revival of Sizwe,
to separate their identities from the figure of Athol Fugard as author that had hung over much of the play’s production history. In order to further this aim, revival director Aubrey Sekhabi, a playwright in his own right, relied on a late 1970s BBC live recording of Sizwe and not the 1974 Oxford-published script identified as authored by Fugard. In this way, Kani and Ntshona restored to a whole new generation their improvisational coauthorship of the play.

Though both South Asian and South African literary and cultural studies boast deep critical traditions,
rarely have critics specifically focused on dramatic literature and the performative acts of Indian South Africans. Theatre – as an aesthetic genre as well as a social institution – has been remarkably under theorised within Indian Ocean communities, even though its power in Indian South African communities and within South African history and culture has been amply documented and analysed In theatre studies of South Asia, scholars have pushed new frontiers about the studies of colonial modern theatre as well as post-independence Indian theatres, inspired by a performance-studies turn, but the push to link theatre and performance studies with Indian Ocean, and migrant, contexts has yet to fully manifest within scholarly circles. Through an examination of Ronnie Govender’s
play 1949, this article argues that theatre as a medium offers the opportunity to create specific versions of history and community identity not visible in prose literature or the novel. These versions of history and community identity are analysed with reference to the broader history of South Africa as well as
the manners in which Govender’s history both incorporates particular aspects of earlier definitions of Indian identity in South Africa and innovates to create images of Indo-African shared spaces.

These notes are extracted from slightly longer writer's notes published as part of my playtext of "Ubu and the Truth Commission". The play is performed by Handspring Puppet Company and was directed by WIlliam Kentridge. The play is being revived at Edinburgh this month, and so I am attaching the notes as they have edited them. There is also a link to a series of photos taken by Luke Younge, of the production. The link to see the images is:
    https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A3G4TcsmGKz48i

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is an internationally-regarded-if contested-touchstone for transitional justice, but it functioned above all as exemplary theatre, bringing together thousands of disparate voices. Like the theatrical space generally, it provided a forum for differing narratives about the past to be aired in post-Apartheid South Africa. In Ireland, on the other hand, there has not been – nor are we likely to see – any truth commission. It is this essay’s contention that drama is the nearest the society will get to exploring the past, with the theatre a safe space in which storytelling and debates are taking place beyond the impasse of the political culture. This article approaches this through four plays: Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver and Owen McCafferty’s Quietly (both 2012) and David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue and Mongiwekhaya’s I See You (both 2016). All reflect complications of dialogue(s) taking place on the past, and themes of reconciliation, in their respective territories.

One night in the dark days of apartheid a house in the comparatively upmarket Soweto township of Dube was petrol-bombed. The young activists who were responsible had labelled the owner a sell-out for creating a hit television series on government-controlled television. His house was gutted. All his papers and manuscripts went up in smoke, including the  scripts of his prolific theatre oevre. It is a great tragedy that of the over sixty plays staged by South Africa’s greatest ever theatre impresario and playmaker, Gibson Mtutuzeli Kente, only four scripts survive. Of these only one is based on an authentic script. The other three were put together by actors who did a wonderful job recalling the dialogue. The surviving scripts have just been published in a collection entitled Selected Plays IV: All That’s Left. Gibson Kente began his stage career in the mid-sixties and never stopped producing until shortly before he died in 2004.  The four plays in this volume – Sikalo, Lifa, How Long and Too late – all date from the heyday of Kente’s career, namely the years leading up to the Soweto Uprising in 1976. The rest is silence. The Selected Plays series is published by Mshengu Publications. So far seven collections have been published - in an effort to preserve and make accessible African plays that would otherwise be lost. In All That’s Left the scripts of Kente’s plays are preceded by detailed introductions and accompanied by virtually the only surviving photographs of scenes from the plays.

In his lectures in 1975-1976, Michel Foucault conceptualised the inclination to commit murders in political circumstances, and delineated it as ‘political death’ (2003).1 Such killings encompass both corporeal and psychological execution exercised through diverse means, for instance, murder, manslaughter, genocide, social ostracism and exposure to deadly environments. Apparently, today political death is implemented either through implicit biopolitical stratagems or overt violence by those who are already in power or those who attempt to gain power, and is prompted through phenomena such as racism, patriotism and xenophobia. This paper aims to examine ‘political death’ prompted by racism, and interrogates the ways and means by which these murders are actualised and rationalised, but ultimately rendered invisible in society, as represented in Athol Fugard’s Anglophone play-text, Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972): Set against the backdrop of the apartheid epoch, Fugard’s play focuses on the ...

Euripides’s Medea has been staged a number of times in the new South Africa. This study's purpose is to provide a practical example of a rewritten Medea set in a contemporary Afrikaner community. The political climate and gender views employed in the Euripidean Medea are an- alysed and compared to that of the new text. The themes in the Euripidean Medea are analysed as well as possible themes in the Afrikaner community to provide the new text with contempo- rary social trends in the white Afrikaner community. The style of the Euripidean Medea is an- alysed and adapted in the new play to create a style that can be accommodated in contemporary South African theatre. Appropriating Medea in an Afrikaner community will hopefully provide future theatre-makers with a narrative of the practical process of appropriation from which more universal principles on the practice can be derived as the play has never been fully rewritten in Afrikaans to create an authentic play.

A revival of Credo Vusamazulu Mutwa’s 1993 African epic, "uNosilimela", opened at the Wits Theatre in Johannesburg on 21st May. A timely homage to an extraordinary man and a seminal piece of theatre. When the play was first performed in Johannesburg and Soweto, though it did have a tremendous impact on some, it did not by a long chalk have the impact it deserved. There is a danger that it will not have very much more of an impact now, twenty-five years after the statutory collapse of Apartheid. "uNosilimela" is almost a text book for young Africans on the beauty and the values of precolonial culture, what these days is often referred to as ‘Ubuntu’. An important part of the culture of a people is its arts and here again Mutwa not only fills the plays with the songs and dances of numerous languages and cultures but reveals what they mean and what their function is. He also rejects any ethnic chauvinist tendencies, an important message in this time of zenophobia. "uNosilimela" is rooted in the myths and astronomical knowledge of the ancestors. Structured like a traditional storytelling, its staging, built on Mutwa’s ideas about precolonial performance as well as those of the present time, is one of the most original and exciting elements of the play. For the African playwright and director he suggests it is in African forms and content, storytelling and ritualistic performances that the answers are to found. Their unique dramaturgy has the potential to unlock majority theatre in South Africa.  At the end of the play the earth is destroyed and as one of the characters cries out: “A new Africa will be born out of the ashes of the old. It is the will of God!” Mutwa yearns for a new Africa that is united and knows and is proud of its African identity. This is a powerful call – not only for Africa in general but particularly for South Africa where the people seem to have forsaken their roots and the values of their ancestors and forsaken Ubuntu in order to assimilate themselves into the dominant globalised culture of the white minority and the West.

The dissertation Topographies of Cruelty: Radical Performances in South African and British Theatre, maps physical, social, political, aesthetic, and psychological landscapes of cruelty performed on the body, in the imaginary, in language, in performers, and on the stages through radical theatre performances. By identifying and locating the forms, features, and functions of cruelty employed in the selected plays, this dissertation aims to provide a valuable contribution to the field of literary and cultural studies and to discourses on global violence, crisis, and oppression, the power of literature, and the human capacity for kindness in the face of terror. It also attempts to investigate forms of cruelty in South African and in British theatre on equal terms, thereby countering the hegemonic Eurocentric bias by taking a decolonial, feminist stance.
The radical performances investigated in this doctoral thesis render extreme acts of cruelty and confront their readers and audiences, as witnesses, with actually exercised or experienced pain and violence. Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998), Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse (1980) and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003) deal with psychological cruelty, verbal cruelty, and cruelty in the imagination. Yaël Farber’s A Woman in Waiting (1999), Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise (2000), and He Left Quietly (2002), as well as Lara Foot’s Tshepang: The Third Testament (2005), in turn, negotiate extraordinary and ordinary acts of cruelty as well as life-in-crisis on stage as a conscious mode of giving testimony to committed atrocities and inflicted trauma in recent South African history. The performances #JustMen (2018), a South African workshop play against gender-based violence, and Mojisola Adebayo’s The Interrogation of Sandra Bland (2017), a theatrical response to the Black Lives Matter movement, are both collective activist pieces advocating for social and political change.

Apartheid in South-Africa pervaded every dimension of public and social life. Theater, both as a form of art and as a sphere of public life, was thus also subjected to the policy of segregation: under the Group Areas Act racially mixed casts as well as mixed audiences were prohibited. There were places, however, where those restrictions were bypassed and where white theater directors cooperated with non-white artists. Examples include the Market Theater in Johannesburg and the Space Theater in Cape Town,where non-racial productions were created by one of the most prominent South African playwrights and directors, Athol Fugard. The economic situation of those independent theater companies, as well as the political situation in the country, informed the used means of expression. This is where the theory of Jerzy Grotowski came into play. This paper shows how Grotowski’s premises were realized in the South African context and what influence they had on the South African tradition of workshop theater

This forthcoming publication by Robert Mshengu Kavanagh on the work of the great South African playwright, choreographer, composer and and arts entrepreneur, Gibson Kente, is reviewed by Duma Ndlovu, poet, writer, film and television producer and director. Ndlovu's stage productions include "Bergville Stories" and his television drama "Muvhango" and Uzalo". Robert Mshengu Kavanagh has written extensively on South African theatre and was active himself in South Africa in the 1970's when Kente was in his heyday. The book rejects the compartmentalisation of Kente into a 'township' playwright and attempts to measure his real achievement in the context of the history and traditions of majority theatre in South Africa.

This article explores the process of constructing visual metaphor for a youth verbatim theatre production within the South African, Afrikaans school context. The process of verbatim theatre creation within this context is explored, with examples from both the process and the production Wag, ek kry gou my foon [en soos sulke goed] (2017). The article further examines the aesthetic and thematic applications of visual metaphor and argues that visual metaphor can be used to circumvent problems or restrictions that arise in the data collection phase of the verbatim theatre process. These range from the context wherein the production is created, the length of the production, and especially ethical boundaries, including the responsibility of the verbatim theatre maker to represent both the subjects and material at the intersection between verisimilitude and contextual restrictions The article examines scenes from the production to conclude that visual metaphor can enrich the verbal aspect of the verbatim research to expand, replace or comment on the content generated and explored during the data collection phase.

Culturally, white theatre in what was known as Rhodesia replicated the bourgeois theatre of London's West End. The many theatre companies that mushroomed at various forts, towns and cities churned out farces, comedies, musicals and pantomimes. Occasionally (white) Rhodesians appropriated Greek plays and Shakespeare as well as other Western genres. Rhodesians seem to have become fossilised in this tradition, which played out the values and tastes of the metropolitan bourgeois class. Modernist theatre, however, encountered a conservative spectatorship unwilling to embrace it in colonial Zimbabwe. Defenders of the Rhodesian way of life saw themselves as the last bastion preserving the values which other Western societies had forsaken or neglected. Rhodesians associated modernist plays with the atheism and permissiveness of Europe. This kind of conservatism was carried over into Zimbabwe at independence in 1980 and modernist playwrights like Dambudzo Marechera were ostracised for what was perceived as writing against the grain.

L’articolo analizza il rapporto di reciproca influenza tra il lavoro di Peter Brook e il teatro sudafricano clandestino dell’epoca dell’apartheid, in particolare i registi Athol Fugard e Barney Simon. Brook instaura con la drammaturgia sudafricana un rapporto stretto e singolare. Negli anni 1970 il suo testo Lo Spazio Vuoto diventa un modello teorico per la creazione di un teatro innovativo e rivoluzionario in Sudafrica. Brook, dopo aver scoperto la produzione sudafricana, non smette di interessarsene, organizzando durante gli anni dell'apartheid, un Festival Musique et Théâtre d’Afrique du Sud a Parigi. Dagli anni 1980 in poi, Brook porta in scena numerosi testi della nuova drammaturgia sudafricana tra cui Woza Albert!, Sizwe Banzi is dead, Le Costume, The Suit. La linea circolare che Brook e i drammaturghi sudafricani disegnano, ruota intorno alla nozione di Spazio Vuoto, riaffermandola.

Hierdie artikel ondersoek die oorsprong, ontwikkeling en estetiese beginsels van die intieme musiekspel. Die artikel begin met ’n oorsig van die Suid-Afrikaanse konteks waarin musiekspelvervaardiging geskied, en die gevolgtrekking is dat die hoë produksiekoste dit vir (veral Afrikaanse) praktisyns besonder uitdagend maak om musiekspele te skep. Daar word ’n geskiedkundige oorsig gelewer oor die internasionale ontwikkeling van die intieme vorm deur die vroeë ontwikkelinge tussen 1918 en 1959 te bestudeer. Daarna word Tom Jones en Harvey Schmidt se 1960’s-era intieme musiekspele ondersoek, gevolg deur enkele intieme musiekspele na die 1970’s wat Company (1970 en 2006) en March of the falsettos (1990) insluit. Die artikel bou voort op Melodie Galloway (2010) se definisie van die intieme musiekspel deur die begrip as uitgangspunt te gebruik om dit dan binne die Suid-Afrikaanse konteks toe te pas. ’n Meer gedetailleerde omskrywing van die vorm se estetiese beginsels word in die artikel verskaf. Deur die oorkoepelende tekstuele kenmerke van familiedrama in ’n intieme musiekspel toe te pas, word geargumenteer dat sommige eienskappe van dié sosiale struktuur dikwels ’n nuttige bron vir dramatiese gebeure vir die intieme vorm kan wees. Die artikel eindig met ’n kritiese terugskouing op ’n Afrikaanse intieme musiekspel, Fees (2016), met teks en lirieke deur André Gerber en musiek deur David Wolfswinkel, wat as ’n Afrikaanse voorbeeld van die intieme vorm voorgehou word. Die artikelskrywers kom tot die gevolgtrekking dat die intieme musiekspel ’n doeltreffende vorm kan wees om met verminderde produksiekoste ’n musiekspel op die planke te kan bring.

This article examines the controversy surrounding the London run of Brett Bailey's ethnographic display 'Exhibit B'. By placing responses to Exhibit B from critics, audience members and actors in dialogue with nineteenth‑century responses to ethnographic shows by Khoisan peoples, I will argue that ethnographic performance has always engendered an intimacy between actor and audience. Bailey’s use of ethnographic performance to narrate the history of colonial encounter in Africa far from reinscribing regimes of looking which represent the African body as the abject object against which the white spectator defines his positionality, enables him to offer spectators and actors an emancipation from predetermined regimes of looking and a space in which the intimacy of encounter enables a more active engagement with both the colonial past represented and its legacy in the present.

This essay highlights a shift in South African literature towards ideals of individualism and explores some of the paradoxes inherent in the competing claims of individuality and heritage. The characters created by Greig Coetzee in Happy Natives are examined as examples of identities constructed in terms of tradition, function and indoctrination. The comic potential of these incongruent identity constructions is then elaborated by means of Henri Bergson's description of the humour arising from an inability to adapt to changing fashions. Ultimately, appeals towards tradition and individuality begin to look like similar proposals.

H.I.E. Dhlomo along, with many other South African writers, poets, artists and intellectuals, were ignored by the mainstream, despite the fact that they and their people were and are the majority. The mainstream in South Africa, both during and post apartheid, has been and still is the arts, literature and culture of Western liberalism as mediated by the white minority. The theatre of Gibson Mtutuzeli Kente, the poetry of S.E.K. Mqhayi, the music of R.T. Caluza and the writings of Dhlomo were well known during their time, well known, that is, in the black sub-culture. But whatever is known at one time in that sub-culture rapidly recedes into the penumbra of insignificance and neglect whereas the equivalents in the mainstream of Afrikaans and English culture become national heritage. The life and work of H.I.E. Dhlomo is at one and the same time both a heroic and tragic illustration  of the dilemmas and ultimate choices of the Christian, educated elite in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

This essay analyzes the use of drag and gender subversion by two white South African performers, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Steven Cohen, during the long decade bisected by South Africa’s political transition (roughly 1990 to 2001). While satirist Uys invented his drag alter ego Evita Bezuidenhout to critique the hypocrisy of the apartheid regime, his post-apartheid performances modeled a rehabilitated, self-critical whiteness. Breaking the fourth wall, Uys (as Evita) interviewed Nelson Mandela on live television and educated South Africa’s still racially divided communities on voting laws. Rather than embracing the narrative of the rainbow nation central to the new democratic dispensation, performance artist Cohen used his queer body to enact what he calls “monster drag,” highlighting whiteness’s simultaneous alienation and privilege in relation to the black majority state. While vastly different in objective and aesthetic, these performances allowed for what the essay calls a “prismatic” deconstruction of white identity within the context of political transformation. Through a process of categorical ambiguity and affective displacement, each performer used drag to open up a space for the whites who had formerly been classified as “European” to claim a queer form of Africanness. As time has advanced and the dream of the rainbow nation has faded, however, nonwhite drag performers have increasingly taken center stage to challenge the boundaries of both queerness and whiteness. The essay ends with an analysis of black queer South African performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s ongoing series The Future White Women of Azania as an example of new directions in South African queer performance.