Women, Politics and Performances in South African Theatre Today (Contemporary Theatre Review)

WOMEN, POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE IN SOUTH AFRICAN THEATRE TODAY—2

CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL Editor in Chief Franc Chamberlain, Nene College, Northampton, UK Editorial Board Leon Gitelman (Russia) Malcolm Knight (UK) †Jacques Lecoq (France) Judith Malina (USA)Neville Shulman (UK) Anatoly M.Smeliansky (Russia) Maria Delgado (UK)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Aims and Scope Contemporary Theatre Review is an international journal concerned with all aspects of theatre—from text-based drama and current developments worldwide, to work of an interdisciplinary or cross-cultural nature. The journal includes primary material, production notes, documents and interviews as well as research. Contemporary Theatre Review complements the companion Contemporary Theatre Studies book series. Notes for contributors can be found at the back of the journal. © 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under national laws or under the photocopy license described below, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system of any nature, without the advance written permission of the Publisher. World Wide Web Addresses Additional information is also available through the Publisher’s web home page site at http://www.gbhap.com. Full text on-line access and electronic author submissions may also be available. Editorial enquiries by e-mail: <[email protected]>. Ordering Information Four issues per volume. Subscription are renewed on an annual 1998 Volume(s): 9 Orders may be placed with your usual supplier or at one of the addresses shown below. Journal subscriptions are sold on a per volume basis only. Claims for nonreceipt of issues will be honored if made within three months of publication of the issue. See Publication Schedule Information. Subscriptions are available for microform editions; details will be furnished upon request. All issues are dispatched by airmail throughout the world. Subscription Rates Base list subscription price per volume: EUR 67.00”. This price is available only to individuals whose library subscribes to the journal OR who warrant that the journal is for their own use and provide a home address for mailing. Orders must be sent directly to the Publisher and payment must be made by personal check or credit card. Separate rates apply to academic and corporate/government institutions. Postage and handling charges are extra. *EUR (Euro). The Euro is the worldwide base list currency rate; payment can be made by draft drawn on Euro currency in the amount shown, or in any other currency within the eurozone at the euro-denominated rate. All other currency payments should be made using the current conversion rate set by the Publisher. Subscribers should contact their agents or the Publisher. All prices are subject to change without notice. Publication Schedule Information: To ensure your collection is up-to-date, please call the following numbers for information about the latest issue published: +44 (0) 118-956-0080 ext. 391; +1 973 643–7500 ext. 290; or web site: http://www.gbhap.com/reader.htm. Note: If you have a rotary phone, please call our Customer Service at the numbers listed below. Orders should be placed through one of the addresses below:

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Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 2, p. iii Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Contents

Speaking With and Without Words—An Interview with Nomhle Nkonyeni Lizbeth Goodman

1

Two Conversations with Yvonne Banning about Gender and Drama in South African Theatre During and After Apartheid Lizbeth Goodman

4

A Conversation with Janet Suzman on South African Theatre and the Politics of the ‘Classics’: Shakespeare and Brecht During and After the Cultural Boycott Lizbeth Goodman

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A Comparative Perspective on Two Plays by South African Women Michael Picardie

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‘My English Name is Patience’: Mediating the Voice of the Other in South African Theatre Today Dennis Walder

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Patterns of Change; Audience, Attendance, and Music at the 1994 Grahamstown Festival Dudley Pietersen

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Glossary of Terms, Names, Events, and Places

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Suggested Further Reading

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 2, pp. 1–4 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Speaking With and Without Words—An Interview with Nomhle Nkonyeni Lizbeth Goodman

This interview was recorded at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, after a performance of Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena, directed by Jerry Mofokeng, with Bill Curry as Boesman and Nomhle Nkonyeni as Lena. This adds the perspective of an ‘actor’ to the voices included in Part 1 of this volume, for while Mhlophe and Dike both perform their own plays and poemdras and poetry, there is a different process involved in taking words written by someone else and finding a way to bring them to life on stage. Nkonyeni faced this challenge in a revival of one of South Africa’s best known plays, written by a white Afrikaner male. She was the first black actor to play the part of Fugard’s Lena, a black character written to be played by the (white) actor, Yvonne Bryceland. [For more details on Fugard and Boesman and Lena, see Dennis Walder’s article, pp. 51–59.] KEYWORDS: Audiences, Attendance Patterns, Class Divisions, Gender, Performance, Politics, Political Theatre, Racial Considerations in Performance, South African Theatre, Women’s Voices. GOODMAN: Nomhle Nkonyeni, you are one of South Africa’s most respected performers. You are also, at the moment, performing in a potentially controversial role: as Lena in Fugard’s play. Of course, the character herself is black, so your portrayal is in many ways more appropriate than the portrayal by Yvonne Bryceland. But that is the ‘Lena’ most people know. Can you tell me first of all: when were you asked to play the part of Lena, were you influenced by Yvonne Bryceland’s Lena? NKONYENI: I did see that first production with Yvonne Bryceland; I saw it in Rhodes University. I saw her playing Lena; she was very, very good, and I remember it was 1975 when the market wanted to do it, and I was approached to play a part. I was excited but the portrayal of Lena by Yvonne Bryceland was still very fresh in my mind, the image was still very fresh because it left an indelible Lena in my head. So I felt I would be doing disservice to the character because I felt I was portraying Yvonne, not the character. So when I was approached twenty years later to do it I was quite excited, I must say.

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GOODMAN: How have you approached the character? How did you find your own way of playing Lena? NKONYENI: I can’t remember how Yvonne presented her character, so that was not such a big influence or problem for me. I did my own research. I read the script and studied quite a number of different kinds of Lenas, not in the theatre but in the streets. She is such a character; we can find many of her. There are quite a number of Lenas, so I went out and talked to them, asked who they were and where they came from and how they became what they are. You see I am talking about the characters now, finding characters in people. I was inspired by one woman in particular: I chose a very dominating woman in this case. She dominated her husband, she was quite strong but she gave him a lot of trouble, and I asked her why You know, what she said is true of so many women. She said, if she were to beat this thing, her husband, up, it, or he, would die. So she can not touch it or him, can not fight back. It is not because she is too weak but because she is too strong, too kind maybe. She said, ‘I let him beat me up but he knows one day if I turn my back and say “hey” he will die,’ When I heard that I knew she was most like my Lena, and I chose to be like her: to be a Lena who was strong, who wasn’t a wimping woman. GOODMAN: You do portray Lena as a very strong character, but that is achieved quite subtly at times. Even in the moments when you are silent and Boesman is speaking, attention tends to be focused on you, as Lena. Of course, I don’t mean that you are in any way upstaging him, but rather that the character Lena, and her situation, and the situations and interests of the audience, all seem to collide in a concern for and interest in Lena, in you. NKONYENI: Really. That’s hard for me to notice when I am being Lena. But I’m glad, because Lena deserves that kind of attention. I didn’t set out to make her be this or that, but to give her the right to be, and what she ends up being is very strong. GOODMAN: You have certainly succeeded, and so Lena succeeds. There is an energy coming from that character and your portrayal of her; she doesn’t ‘miss a trick’; it’s not so much a portrayal of a woman who knows instinctively, but rather of a woman with strong instincts. So she seems wise, even in her silences. NKONYENI: That is what I felt playing her, that she speaks without words at times. Yes, that is how I feel about Lena. Boesman can do anything, say anything, try to put her down, but at the end of the day Lena is his strength, he leans on Lena. Whatever he does, she is there and he can not deny her, can not do without her. He may ignore her, but at the end of the day there are things he picks up from Lena: it is her strength that makes him survive. That’s what I felt. GOODMAN: How do you feel about performing in Fugard’s play—a play which deals with issues of race and gender, in South Africa in 1994? Is it an important play for our times? NKONYENI: Yes it is, because it’s worse in this country and it’s worse in this town than it has ever been before. Maybe some things in life have improved, but there is so much uncertainty now, so much insecurity, fear, frustration, and also hope. So, we find quite a lot of Lenas in this town. When you ,walk down the street and meet a strong woman, a Lena, and you talk to her, you will probably find that she is a very articulate person, a well thinking person, and you might start questioning yourself about where is she from, what made her into a ‘Lena’ of today. So, yes, Boesman and Lena is an important play, and maybe more so for women, for strong women. It offers a kind of hope, though not in any big way. Some reviewers and critics say the play is outdated, but I don’t think so. It’s a classic, it’s beautiful. GOODMAN: Just to play the Devil’s Advocate here: on the one hand, it’s easy enough to see why some critics would be hesitant; it is easy to pre-judge this play, even though it is often considered a

SPEAKING WITH AND WITHOUT WORDS

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‘modern classic’; some may see it (in a very superficial reading) as indulging unwittingly in some racist stereotyping, or sexist stereotyping, or in some dangerous appropriation when a white man writes about black and ‘coloured’ men and women … But of course, the play is much more subtle and more powerful than all that. And it really is amazing that it touches so directly on major issues of race and politics and gender and power. The theme of the silencing of people and the negation of personal experience speaks very loudly, on the eve of elections for a potentially free(er) South Africa. NKONYENI: Exactly, exactly. And the reviewers have picked up on the excitement of the play too. Quite a number of them have managed to open up some of their perspectives. Everyone now is looking for theatre to say something which might help us all to make sense of politics, the government, life. GOODMAN: Yvonne Bryceland, the white actor, played Lena, the black character, in the original production. Now you play Lena. How does your status as a black actor affect the way people react to the play? NKONYENI: Casting me as Lena was a very big change, and it does seem more fitting now, in 1994. I was, as I said, worried at first that the Bryceland impact would be so deep on audiences that my role would be lost. But it didn’t work that way. Many audience members did see the original performance done by a white cast, and now they see the same play performed by a coloured and black cast. They see that it is a different play, and yet the same play. Meanings change, different people react at different times, for different reasons. GOODMAN: The play is very successful in Johannesburg. Do you think it would have the same audience response in different parts of the country? NKONYENI: The way the play is received around the country will depend partly on the racial issue. Some areas and some theatres draw in more black audiences. And responses always differ with black audiences. GOODMAN: How? NKONYENI: I’ll tell you: with black audiences we don’t tend to get such an attentive listening ear. There is a tendency for a lot of laughing and jokes, enjoying the show and maybe identifying with some of the characters or situations. Maybe this is because it is easy to laugh at things that are foolish or stupid or even cruel. Laughter is a good release, and black audiences do tend to laugh more. This used to worry me sometimes. I would think that audiences hadn’t heard me or didn’t follow what was happening, because they would laugh at things which white audiences would tend to find sad. But I asked some black students and they said to me: ‘No, Nomhle, we did not miss out; we heard everything and we still laughed because we saw somebody being beaten up we saw somebody suffering’, and then I understood that it was easiest to laugh at that. Maybe it is too real to be sad. But white people find this play sad, mostly. GOODMAN: Could the quieter white audiences be attributed to some sense of guilt or responsibility, as well as sadness? NKONYENI: Maybe, but I don’t think this play is about pricking somebody’s conscience. If it does work that way, it’s not our intention, and I don’t think it was the author’s either. It is a very funny play, because it is so sad, so real. And that’s not about guilt, it’s just life. Lena doesn’t look for anyone to blame, she looks to see how to survive, and how to find humour in it all.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 2, pp. 5–26 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Two Conversations with Yvonne Banning about Gender and Drama in South African Theatre During and After Apartheid Lizbeth Goodman This is an edited version of a series of ‘conversations’ and lengthy correspondence. The first conversation was recorded on 28th August 1993, at Banning’s home in Cape Town. Further ‘conversations’ were conducted by post in August, 1994 and August, 1995 and April, 1996. The ‘conversations’ differ from the interviews in Part 1, and the first piece in Part 2, primarily because the issues are of a more general nature. The subject here is not Banning’s life and work—except in so far as they are ‘readable’ between the lines—but more her perceptions of the state of play for women in South African theatre, and university drama departments, today. KEYWORDS: Apartheid (and after), Class Divisions, Cross-cultural Study, Cultural Developments in South Africa 1993–6, Feminism, Gender, Hope, Performance, Politics, Political Theatre, Power Politics, Racial Divisions, Spatial Divisions, South African Theatre, ‘Taboo’ for Women, Teaching of Drama at Universities in South Africa, Theatrical Politics, Township Theatre, Venues (locations of), Violence, Voter Education. BACKGROUND: Yvonne Banning travelled from South Africa to England for her early theatre work. She trained at The Guildhall School of Drama in London; worked in British repertory theatre and television. When she returned to South Africa in 1965 she did an English BA with a teaching diploma at Natal University in Durban. She worked freelance in acting and radio, before television arrived in South Africa. She taught ‘everything from university to special education’, and then moved to Johannesburg, ‘had babies and finally wound up teaching part-time at the University of Witswatersrand (Wits) School of Dramatic Art’. This was 1984. She did a masters degree and got a permanent post at Wits. In 1992 she moved to a new post in the drama department at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where she was Head of Department from 1993–5. CONVERSATION I—1993 GOODMAN: Until very recently, South African universities have tended to be classifiable in terms of racial composition of the student body. How would you define the racial composition of the major universities: UCT, UWC (University of the Western Cape), Stellenbosch, Wits, Natal, and other major universities? Also, where do you see UCT (and other universities) going if the political climate truly does shift next year? BANNING: There are 10 major university drama departments—4 in Natal (Zululand, Natal-Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and DurbanWestville) 2 in the Transvaal (Wits and Pretoria), 2 in the Western Cape (UCT and Stellenbosch), 1 in the Eastern Cape (Rhodes), and 1 in the Orange

TWO CONVERSATIONS WITH YVONNE BANNING

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Free State in Bloemfontein—as well as two ‘technical’ drama departments, in Pretoria and Durban. The University of the Western Cape (UWC) teaches drama through the English Department. All these universities have distinctive identities—racially based, as a result of apartheid, but also language based. There are the ‘white liberal English’ universities—Wits, UCT, Rhodes, Natal; the ‘white Afrikaans’ ones—Pretoria, OFS and Stellenbosch; DurbanWestville began as an ‘Indian university’ and Zululand was one of the infamous ‘tribal universities’—the ‘bush colleges’. The historically ‘white’ universities have been trying to redress this in their staff and student bodies, but there’s still a long way to go. The education system is in such chaos: we’ve got 14 different educational authorities, so it’s hard for students coming through the various ‘black’ and ‘coloured’ systems to meet university entry requirements. The UCT drama department currently has nearly a 50/50 percentage of black (mostly Xhosa speaking) and white (mostly English speaking) students in first year, but only 5 out of 20 black students in third year. We also have a range of so-called ‘coloured’ students whose home language may be Afrikaans or English or both. So it’s complicated. Rural/urban distinctions are also a complicating factor – many of our black students come from rural Transkei and Ciskei. The UCT drama staff are still totally white; Wits has three black staff members. But change at this level will take a long time—we’ve got to ‘grow’ our own black postgraduates. We have to resist solving the problem quickly by simply importing black academics from the rest of Africa. GOODMAN: You mentioned that you know the University of Natal rather well. I know that Natal has two campuses, one in Durban, and I’ve heard that Durban has a lot more indigenous theatre going on than, for instance, Cape Town. Would you say that’s true? And could you say a bit about the relationship between the university and the theatre? BANNING: Yes, the two campuses of the University of Natal are located in Pietermaritzburg and Durban, about 80 kilometres apart. Pietermaritzburg specializes in community theatre and educational drama. Durban works fairly closely with their performing arts council (the state funded one) in creating festivals for indigenous, mostly African work. There are a number of community arts organizations in Cape Town— the Community Arts Project (CAP), the New Africa Project, Young Peoples Theatre Education Trust— groups which have managed to keep going for some time, partly through funding from overseas. We have informal exchange with them; most of the staff here have taught in the programmes. Mavis Taylor, the previous Head of Department, launched New Africa and runs it, for instance. There are a number of groups making theatre in the townships, but they are very fragile: no money, few resources or venues, fragile infrastructures. They tend to collapse when social/political tensions are high, as they are right now. I’d like to see much closer and more formalized connections between our department and other departments, and with practitioners, but a lot depends on what happens after the elections; whether the level of violence stops spiralling. GOODMAN: In talking about ratios of the student body by race, and about the representation and funding of indigenous theatre, we’ve been moving onto the subject of ‘affirmative action’ or ‘positive discrimination’. Do universities currently hold, and act on, such policies?

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BANNING: Oh yes; UCT, for instance, has a very strong affirmative action policy for both disadvantaged black students and for women. They call it the Equal Opportunities Project but in fact it is still enormously difficult to get black women, particularly into drama, so most of our black students are male. GOODMAN: Why is that? Is it more difficult for black women to find time and money for higher education more generally, or is the problem more extreme in the area of theatre (for instance, is there an operative cultural ‘taboo’ against women performing)? BANNING: Both. It’s hard for women to find time to study, and there is a kind of prejudice, or even taboo, of sorts. Women in South Africa have been so oppressed for so long. They mostly have to be the breadwinners, they mostly lack the education that gives them access to the universities and they are mostly not seen as being important enough to send off to tertiary education because they have got other responsibilities. It’s a huge problem. GOODMAN: I spoke to Miki Flockemann, who teaches drama in the English Department at UWC. I sat in on one of her graduate seminars, and among the authors studied that day were Shakespeare, Brecht, Soyinka, Fugard, and Gcina Mhlophe. One of Miki’s students gave a brief presentation about Mhlophe, and in the discussion which followed, Miki pointed out that on the whole, women students respond very positively to Mhlophe’s work because it is, often, the first text by a black woman they’ve had the opportunity to study. But she also said that she was surprised to find that the students have problems with the play because of the languages; rather than feeling included by the multilingual aspect of it they sometimes felt excluded by it, or perhaps mis-represented. Some of the women students refused to read out the praise poem included in the text of Mhlophe’s Have You Seen Zandile?. Why might this be? BANNING: Yes, this doesn’t surprise me but it does interest me very much. It isn’t actually taboo for women to perform in any religious sense that I’m aware of, but traditionally most of the African cultures keep men and women fairly separate. They have separate kinds of work and separate kinds of social structures. So, women performing in public may not be taboo, but it would be unusual, even odd. Praise singers are traditionally male, yet women are traditionally the story tellers. There has been such disruption of peoples’ histories that the children these days very often don’t know their own histories. For instance, when I was teaching at a community project in Johannesburg, I found that the kids didn’t know about Soweto Day: 16th June. I had to teach them about the Sophiatown removals. The fact that kids were not aware of these important aspects of their people’s histories suggests that there may be a cultural/narrative shift in process; perhaps it is less common for urban Grandmothers to tell these stories, in urban situations, to their grandchildren these days. GOODMAN: And then a vital part of the traditional system of communication, history, and ‘performance’ is lost. Why do you think that is? BANNING: Well I think that post-1976, the children were taking the lead, and the parents were very often frightened of them. Children were resisting the parents’ tendency to caution. Parents were so disempowered they could see no hope of change. A militant generation came of age, and they are now making themselves seen and heard. Now we’re experiencing a real breakdown of family, not just a move from rural to urban, but a major shift within the urban situations as well. Families are absolutely disrupted. It’s a scary scenario. GOODMAN: To generalize, how did social protest represent itself in South African theatre ?

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BANNING: Protest theatre grew up in the late 1970s and 1980s. There were huge states of emergency, massive repression again; the protests came in waves, crashing in ‘84 and in ‘86. The newspapers were heavily censored at that time; they weren’t even allowed to say what they weren’t saying. Some newspapers, for instance, when the censorship laws were enforced, would leave big spaces in their stories to visualize the omissions. But then a law was created to prevent them from doing even that. There was no hint about what was not being said, so the theatres were enormously important as ‘living newspapers’. Actors can say things in the heat of the moment and then say ‘oh, I wasn’t supposed to say that, it was just a slip’. Also, actors had more freedom of movement as opposed to poets, who were banned, silenced. So the theatre really gave a public voice, or a voice to the public, in many ways. Most of those protest plays were seen as solidarity building; providing a platform for people to stand up publicly and say no. GOODMAN: South African protest theatre, like the protests themselves, seem to have been primarily focused on racial issues and general social issues, with very little concern for gender; would you agree? BANNING: Yes—protest was not generally associated with gender. I’m afraid in the whole history of South African resistance, women’s issues have never taken the forefront; they are still barely recognized. I think by and large—even in the ANC where women are fighting like crazy to be heard, arguing that gender issues have got to be part of the whole reconstruction of society— still these issues and arguments are continually marginalized. GOODMAN: Why? On every university campus I visit, and every theatre space large and small, people from all backgrounds are willing to talk about race relations and to predict the outcome of the forthcoming elections, but very few have anything to say about gender. BANNING: Again, I’m not surprised, though it is disappointing. It’s an unconsciousness. Women have been so co-opted into the system of male dominance that South Africans are not generally aware that it could be any other way. Male dominance is one of the meeting points between black and white traditional culture in South Africa. UCT has just done a major study to analyse the staff and student composition in terms of race and gender, and the results are terrifying. We have one extraordinary black woman, Dr. Mamphela Ramphele*, who is a deputy Vice Chancellor, but in terms of the Professors and so on UCT employs (in 1994) only about three other women. The educational system is male top heavy, unbelievably so, and of course racially it’s almost exclusively white, especially the higher you go. Women are employed predominantly in the lowest paid positions. Of course, with these results made public, the university is a bit embarrassed. They did a study at Wits (the University of Witswatersrand) as well and came back with egg all over their faces because they discovered, ‘Oh dear, oh dear look at us we are all white and male’. It is a general, not a local problem. GOODMAN: Is feminist theory taught in South African universities? BANNING: We don’t teach it in our department, not overtly, but then we don’t teach very much theory at all. The UCT Drama Department has a performance diploma which is largely concerned with actor training. We also teach drama as part of a BA degree. Feminist studies are taught in the English Department and are quite prominent in the centre for African studies at UCT, but that’s largely post-graduate and research work. It’s only recently that departments have begun to do really focused research on performance studies and theatre rather than, or in addition to, biographies of dramatists, etc. So the role of gender and feminism in theatre is still barely recognized. Maybe we’ll get there one day

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Wits is one exception. It used to offer a film course-they can’t afford it now so they are doing video—but they offer film theory and their feminist criticism is quite prominent (there is not much local feminist theory, but many interesting ways of considering American and European feminist perspectives in the South African context). But however prominent the theory, the practice is not there. GOODMAN: Same old story. Who would you say has broken out of the limitations; what black women have made an impact on South Africa? BANNING: There are a few female playwrights: Dike and Mhlophe are perhaps the best known. Black women academics writing about the theatre are even harder to find. There’s also an interesting woman at Rhodes University in Grahamstown (home, of course, of the annual Grahamstown Festival) which is another of the white liberal universities. Lulu Khumalo is her name. She’s primarily a theatre movement person. She is one of the few black women working in academic drama departments. There are some powerful women performers but women don’t write much academic material about theatre. In fact, very few theatre people actually write commentary or even document the work they’re doing. Partly we’re all busy, but that’s true everywhere, isn’t it? Anyway, there are strong black women performers but nobody is writing about them and they are not writing. So the bottom line is, black women are still sadly under-represented in the theatre and in academic drama departments. As you say, same old story. GOODMAN: OK, let’s go back to consider protest theatre: an area which allowed women’s playwriting and academic feminist issues to make themselves heard in British and American theatres of the 1970s and 1980s. You described protest theatres as coming to South Africa in ‘waves’. With massive political unrest and the elections only months away, do you think there will soon be new forms of protest theatre? BANNING: Yes, but it’s very difficult to guess how and when they will emerge (and what role, if any, women will play in them). Protest theatre played a very important part in South African culture after 1976, and well into the 1980s and early years of this decade. (Figures 1, 2, 3) All that work was extremely valuable. But many people making original theatre today are tending to try to find what it is they want to say now. There has been a big move away from overtly political theatre, back to a more personal approach: the stories that people have to tell, which I think is quite refreshing. Albie Sachs, several years ago, said: ‘no, no we have got to stop cultural protest because everyone is bored with it now.’ It became very rigid as a form. You do a bit of shouting, you express a lot of polemics in performance—boring. So I think people are now beginning to look at the details of individual lives. GOODMAN: Two black women in (Part 1 of) this volume have done just that: Dike and Mhlophe. Can you give me another example? BANNING: Barney Simon’s work is very interesting now because he always functioned through personal stories and never overtly presented the political. I think that that is becoming the new mode. I think what’s going to emerge is a form of theatre which is very much more ‘African’ in its integration of music, dance, poetry, dialogue as a cluster. I’ve seen this happening more and more with our students, and I think a lot of the Grahamstown Festival work in 1992 and 1993 was like that; certainly in the townships, that’s happening much more. GOODMAN: Are you describing a breaking down of the barriers between forms, an integration of performance arts and movement and story-telling or oral history?

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Figure 1 Sophiatown, workshopped by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, first produced at The Market Theatre, Johannesburg, Feb., 1986. Courtesy of The Market Theatre.

BANNING: To some extent, yes. There weren’t any barriers between these forms in traditional African performance but westernized performance (the dominant mode in recent years) has introduced these barriers. Now I think forms may be coming back together, which is very exciting. GOODMAN: Presumably the process of change you describe will affect the funding structure of the arts. Certainly in England, it was traditionally the case that money was made available for ballet or for opera but not, until very recently, for multimedia or interdisciplinary work, or combined arts. In other words, the forms of theatrical expression were (and still are, to some extent) affected by categories for funding invented by arts administrators. Is this the case in South Africa? BANNING: Yes, funding is an issue, but it works differently in South Africa. Here what happens is that state funding is given to the provincial performing arts councils (NAPAC, CAPAB, PACT and PACOFS)* and they determine which art forms get the money. So here, what will have the most impact on arts funding is the question of who controls the performing arts councils. That’s what’s really going to be interesting. GOODMAN: And that’s up for grabs now, is it? BANNING: Nobody’s quite sure but everyone is making proposals about how funding should be administered (whatever funding there is). People are not keen to destroy the infrastructures of the state-funded theatres, but there is a wide-spread recognition that some of these huge hightech theatres are top-heavy with administration. Now the struggle is to find a way to make theatre work in these spaces, rather than saying that we can’t use them, admitting that they’re white elephants. But these huge theatres are in the wrong places for effective protest theatre. They are not in the townships. There’s a real shortage of venues in townships for performance, and yet there are these huge bloody high-tech venues in towns, which are ideal for opera and ballet and ‘grand’ (usually imported) stuff, but not terribly suitable for the kind of informal

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Figure 2 The Last Trek, Motshabi Tyelele as Usengumama, in the Little Theatre, Hiddingh Hall production (1989). Courtesy Jennie Reznek, director.

performance mode of many South African artists. We are looking at poor theatre in a big way. GOODMAN: It sounds like a spatial problem, to do with bridging the gaps and getting people from one venue to another or one community to another.

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Figure 3 Turning to booze and popular culture: more of The Last Trek (1989). Courtesy Jennie Reznek, director.

BANNING: Yes. That’s it precisely. I was talking to a man recently, a poet and writer of township theatre. He was arguing that theatres should be community based, that writers should write about and for their own townships because no one else will interfere, and in any case, no one else will be interested. No one will travel from one township to another to see a play he argues, and you wouldn’t necessarily want them to, given the current climate of violence. But of course,

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this means that theatres and communities become more and isolated from each other, spatially and ideologically GOODMAN: Are there any operative programmes for bringing township theatres together, or apprentice programmes in drama which might help to support at least a few, albeit token, students of drama from the townships? BANNING: If only. We don’t have any permanent companies as such. The performing arts councils have a sort of ‘group’ of maybe three or four permanent actors, but ‘permanent’ means just for a year’s contract. Money is really so tight; everybody’s funds are cut, we are all working on a shoe string. Universities, performing arts councils, everybody. So no, there’s very little operative apprenticeship training. The only kind of training that’s really offered is through the universities. There are no professional drama schools like those in the UK; ours are all university departments. And then, of course, talented young people graduate with their degrees and find that they have nowhere to go. Community arts organisations such as CAP (Community Arts Project) and New Africa do provide limited training programmes, but they have limited resources and funding. We are shifting quite strongly to teaching subsidiary skills such as marketing, managing, budgeting, fund-raising, how to make your own theatre work, and how to make theatre work for other people, because these skills offer the best chance our students may have to build careers in the theatre. There is precious little work for theatre people, paid or unpaid, unless you make your own theatre. It’s a bleak picture at the moment, very bleak. GOODMAN: Let’s go back to gender and sexuality. We were talking about the under-representation of gender issues in academic approaches to drama, and in community theatre. What about issues of sexuality and choice; is, for instance, gay sexuality a ‘taboo subject’ in contemporary South African theatre? BANNING: No, the field of gay theatre is gaining recognition, slowly. We are 40 years behind in this process, as we’ve been cut off from the rest of the world for so long, and race issues have been so immediate and powerful that other issues such as gender and sexuality have been seen as less important. I think that come next year all those issues, ignored for so long, are going to start bubbling up again (provided we can contain the violence) as people discover their voices. But at the moment many people don’t know that they have a voice, or if they do have a voice it‘s positioned, either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. Either way it’s a racial discourse. So the race issue stomps all over the issues of gender and sexuality once again. Change is coming. GOODMAN: The political situation at the moment is obviously volatile. Since I arrived, the TV news has been covering the student protest at Wits, and just yesterday—the day I was at UWC with Miki Flockemann’s graduate drama group—American student Amy Biehl was murdered on her way home from that same campus. Ironically, she was studying ‘Women in Transition’. So I wonder, what kind of transition is South Africa going through, and how will it be represented? As I look around for political theatre and can’t find much to speak of, I’m also struck by the incredible ‘drama’ of the politics of everyday life. And on TV, I must admit I was surprised to see the amount of action, physical movement and the threat of violence about to break out even on air, in the TV news magazine programme ‘Agenda’. Now that was theatrical, people almost jumping up to hit each other on TV. I’ve never seen anything like it, not even in the worst of the tabloid talk shows in my native USA.

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So, could it be said that at some level, South Africa is experiencing a period of ‘theatrical politics’ rather than ‘political theatre’? BANNING: Yes, though I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before, I know exactly what you mean. People are living it out. They can’t at the moment deal with reflections of race and power relations in theatre. The theatre is so close to real life yet not real; it uses up all one’s energy. I think part of the difficulty I’m having with doing research about theatre (and I don’t think I’m alone in this) is connected to this: we are too busy living with the pressures of managing to live. The need to inspect what it is you’re living is recognized, but there’s no time or energy left at the end of the day to do anything about it. I think that comes later. GOODMAN: Can you give an example of an art form which is currently expressing the rage of South African social protest, perhaps in an indirect or nonverbal way? BANNING: Dance. In dance in South Africa at the moment, there’s a lot of falling and a lot of physically dangerous movement, requiring immense trust among the dancers. Great swirling kinds of movement. Also a great deal of body contact. Now I don’t know if that says anything about people’s responses to the conditions of living—the need to trust if we are to make contact— but there’s no doubt that however much people are wanting that feeling of ‘let’s get together’, they (we) are being driven into very small little enclaves, being forced apart by fear of what is about to happen. There’s enormous fear particularly among the young whites. Many of our students here at UCT can’t see a future for themselves; they’re really functioning on fear. Maybe those of us who are older know how to survive with fear, but young (white) people don’t always know what to do. My own children are saying ‘what are my prospects?’ There are so many unrealistic expectations about 27th April, that many young black people take the attitude, ‘oh, the promised land is coming’, and I don’t know what will happen when those expectations are not fulfilled. You know, young people in this country, especially blacks but in some ways whites too, have been deprived for so long that it seems tempting to think that having a date like 27th April means that there’s an end in sight. GOODMAN: Is the coming election—assuming that power goes to the ANC—likely to help or hurt the arts? BANNING: It’s hard to say, and the long term will differ greatly from the short term. All I can really comment on is the present. At the moment I would say that because of the economic situation which is really very bleak, the arts are not functioning. There used to be a huge amount of arts activity in the townships, little groups everywhere. That’s not happening now. GOODMAN: Like a Greek chorus, I want to return to the issue of gender. Women are still drastically underrepresented in the higher echelons of British government. Despite Margaret Thatcher’s afeminist political stance, she is often seen from outside Britain as an icon for powerful women: the ‘honorary man’ syndrome. To transfer this dynamic to the South African situation, did Winnie Mandela’s public presence affect public consciousness of gender issues, and/or public representations of gender? BANNING: Well, if s a good question and I wish I had a good answer. The ANC Women’s League is quite a coherent body and is usually effective at articulating problems and finding solutions. But I think Winnie got it tied up with youth as an issue rather than with gender as an issue, and that was the beginning of her troubles. She seems to be enormously popular with the Women’s League but enormously unpopular elsewhere, so I’m not quite sure what kind of cross tensions are at work. I don’t think gender is being represented in anything like the way it should be, in politics or the media or the arts. There are women who deal with gender in their

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work, but they are very isolated from each other. There isn’t a powerful lobby as a collective. I think the women mostly are too busy trying to keep things together and keep their families fed. I think it’s that kind of harsh reality, ‘I haven’t got time to think about how could it be, I’ve got to survive today and I’ve got to get my kids to survive today’. GOODMAN: So we return to the problem of space: physical and ideological. The spatial divide is, of course, very deliberate: one of the cornerstones of the plans laid out by the architects of apartheid. It’s more than a metaphor too. The lack of public transport is really striking: people can be moved apart spatially, taken from their homes, creating real problems of identity and isolation, as well as deep emotional, political, ideological, and social divides which are enormously difficult to bridge. The same seems to be true of ‘divides’ based on gender and sexuality: when women and gay men are denied a public voice and denied access to representations (in the theatre or media) of likethinking people somewhere else who might hear them if they found a voice, social divisions are sustained and power is retained by the ‘ruling’ (dividing) class. BANNING: That’s right, sad but true. The migrant labour system started that whole process powerfully, taking men away from the women and the children and separating them spatially, and that’s just been exacerbated by all the other problems. So I would say, the majority of families are funded and held together by the women, while the men are out on the streets, doing all the fighting. It’s interesting, though, to see that women are very prominent in the teachers’ strikes going on at the moment. Most of the teachers are women, because it’s a very underpaid sector of the economy. GOODMAN: What’s the gender/power balance in teaching? Do people in the townships need a higher education or formal degree in order to become teachers? BANNING: No, at the moment there are many teachers who are really under-qualified. There are roughly fourteen different educational authorities, for different races. How do you untangle that and dismantle it? It’s a huge problem. So most of the teachers apart from white teachers are badly under-qualified. Hence the education system perpetuates the poor quality of education in the townships, keeping many black and coloured young people out of the university system. GOODMAN: Earlier we spoke of a certain slippage between forms, and now that you mention the problems of making political theatre and instituting educational theatre programmes in the townships, I’m reminded that while I’ve noticed a lack of political theatre in South Africa, I’ve also noticed a predominance of comedy on the theatre scene at the moment. How do you explain the role that comedy seems to be playing in cultural politics? BANNING: I think it’s almost inevitable that comedy should emerge in a big way after the great political doctrinaire kind of theatre we had. The need to form a community is related to the need to find ways of confirming identify through humour: it’s the ‘you and I understand while he doesn’t so he’s not one of us’ dynamic. Also, in times of great pressure comedy emerges because life becomes intolerable otherwise. So in South Africa today, many people are making comedies, including the women of the Black Sash in their theatrical demonstrations of voting, and also our own students at UCT in their approach to AIDS through comic theatre. We also all need to be able to smile at ourselves. At the moment there is a great baring of teeth and if we can transmute that into a smile I think there’s hope for us. There’s been quite a strong upsurge of cabaret entertainment, too, because these one-person and twoperson shows are performable in small venues. You’ll find these cabarets at waterfront venues in Cape Town; it’s very much a white bourgeois entertainment.

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GOODMAN: Are there any black solo performers doing comedy? BANNING: Not that I know of. You don’t get stand-up comedy much. Black comedy tends to be more stagey, domestic, broad television-type comedy, plays. Always situational. GOODMAN: I suppose that means that women play traditional domestic roles, if they feature at all? BANNING: You guessed it. Women’s comedy is just not a form here. GOODMAN: But what about the comedy incorporated in women’s work—for instance, in plays by Gcina Mhlophe and Fatima Dike? These playwrights seem to communicate some of their most serious ideas through humour. BANNING: True, and this is the case for male playwrights as well. But comedy as a form tends to be limited to cabaret as entertainment for white people. It hasn’t yet been taken up as a form for expression of black identity. GOODMAN: Perhaps this is less to do with a slippage between theatrical and artistic forms than it is to do with a slippage of some sort between social groups, communities, cultures? BANNING: This probably is the case to some extent, but it is horrendously difficult to explain. The notion of the individual is not a firmly rooted one in Africa and among the African cultures. Identity is definitely formed by your social identity. We find this with our students; they function as a collective. ‘I know who I am and I measure my importance by seeing how I relate to other people, how they see me in my social function’, all that kind of thing. The notion of the unique and precious individual which the UCT Drama Department cherishes is utterly foreign to most of the black students; they do big extrovert performances, in stark contrast to the innerly quivering style of work by many of the white students. Now of course, the black students are trained to work in the white traditional styles. At UCT we do realist Chekhov. And of course black students want to crack that; they really want to be on top of Western culture and understand the terms and be able to perform it. They’ve been coerced into it, and they see Western forms as associated with success, so they will collaborate in asserting Western theatre forms quite strongly. GOODMAN: What’s the most important thing to be said about South African theatre and theatre education at the moment? BANNING: The most important thing that theatre and drama can do at the moment is educate people. Theatre has to become connected to social services, to social education. The days of entertainment and the emphasis on theatre as a leisure activity have got to give way to the over-riding need for education. Theatre is particularly suitable for community and informal education, since most people are going to get their secondary and tertiary and adult education in the informal sector because the formal sector simply can not cope. There’s a crying need for formal training in drama; not just theatre skills (which is what students keep demanding) but all the communication skills and political and historical and theoretical ideas that can be communicated in high-quality drama training. I don’t want to teach only skills classes. I want to teach drama in education. I want to teach people to use drama for problem solving, for consciousness raising and to make connections between social problems and the possibility of finding solutions. For instance, we need to deal with AIDS education, and most of all at this juncture we need to deal with voter education. When about half the population is illiterate, drama is custom-made to teach the communication skills necessary to vote. GOODMAN: Is this happening in South Africa at the moment? Are there plays being made or performed, in the educational or arts sectors, about voting and health?

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BANNING: Yes, there are some, and this is one of the most exciting developments of recent months. In fact, I suppose you could say this is where politics is becoming theatrical, or is using theatre techniques. Some of the most effective work has been done by the Black Sash, and that’s very interesting in terms of gender. The Black Sash was founded in the 1950s by a group of white middle class women who got together to say ‘no’. Women joined forces and marched on Pretoria when passes were introduced for women. A number of white women were involved in that march. Out of this they formed a women’s organization and called it The Black Sash because they used to wear black sashes in their protests, chanting ‘we will not break the law but we will protest’. GOODMAN: It sounds reminiscent of the theatrical strategies of the League of Women Voters in the United States… BANNING: It is similar in some respects, yes. The Black Sash have a very long and honourable history, though they are actually quite a small group and though, it’s true, many people these days question their function, viewing them as outdated. But the work they do is important. They monitor social conditions within communities, offer a free advice service for women, including anything from maintenance to getting your pension. They also offer advice on domestic violence, and monitor those kinds of situations. If there are fires in the townships they take provisions—food, blankets, etc.—out to the local people. GOODMAN: And they’ve come up with their own theatre work? BANNING: Well its hardly ‘drama’, but it’s effective as theatre, and as education. These women are not experienced in drama. They’re used to talking about domestic problems with women who queue up in their office for advice. But every day at tea time they teach voter education through theatre techniques. They ‘perform’ with sandwiches. They say to the women waiting for their tea, ‘OK: today it’s jam sandwiches or its peanut butter sandwiches. You have to choose,’ If most people say they want jam then that’s what everybody gets. GOODMAN: A small dramatic lesson in democracy. BANNING: Yes, and it gets better. I’ve heard reports of a major panic developing when Bovril sandwiches tied with jam sandwiches. After some panic and confusion, somebody suggested putting them together! But this is just a small example. It’s exciting and effective on the small scale, in that local groups are acting out democracy, learning to put ideas into practice through theatre, at least in terms of food and domestic relationships, necessities and ideas they’re familiar with. But the same needs to happen on all sorts of levels, and there aren’t nearly enough volunteers to reach the rural populations, the urban and township populations. Also, six or eight months is not enough time. GOODMAN: Are there any small ‘plays’ like this in the cause of AIDS education? BANNING: Yes, though of a different sort. Our students did a wonderful AIDS programme earlier this year. Also, Nicholas Ellenborg* in Johannesburg and his Theatre for Africa group does very interesting work. We brought him down to direct a project with our students at UCT, and they decided to work on AIDS. The piece they did was delightful, very funny, and we have taken it around a number of schools and so on but inevitably we can’t sustain it because our students have to continue their programme, so other people have taken it up and are continuing it. But there are too few of us, too little money, too few resources and of course you can’t take theatre work into the townships now very easily, for all the reasons we’ve

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discussed. These days, if you don’t belong to a township you’re not welcome there, no matter what colour you are. GOODMAN: More divisions. What might help bring theatre work and education together? BANNING: It’s difficult to know. One of the problems is that we don’t have sufficient networking going on. In the current confused social situation it’s difficult to create those networks. We are working at it through the National Arts Initiative, for formal education institutes to make contact with community groups wherever things are happening and to try and find out where theatre work is happening. But it’s very difficult to get information. Things may have to settle down a bit politically before we can really get a theatre and education network going. GOODMAN: Will things get worse before they get better, after the April elections? BANNING: Probably, at least in so far as the turbulence will detract attention from education. I think that the social unrest is going to continue for some time. And that’s very damaging, though of course the political change is long overdue. GOODMAN: We shall see. BANNING: Indeed. CONVERSATION II (After the Elections August, 1994; updated by post in August, 1995 and April, 1996.) GOODMAN: After the elections of April 1994, many of the points in our previous conversation deserve updating. First of all, what was the political impact of the elections? BANNING: Whew! Big question. We’ve lived a lot in the last few months. The election was a kind of miracle—for a brief few days we found each other and found new (or long lost) pride in being South African. Unity had meaning. It was touch and go, but even in all the logistical chaos we shared a vision and saw a future. It was an unforgettable week. I was involved in vote counting—ordinary people like me, all over the country, counting out our collective will, in grubby little halls, with our picnic baskets and spare jerseys; all kinds of people—all ages, races, languages, political affiliations. There we were, counting till we were cross-eyed. It was our election, like nothing in our history had ever been ours. This was people power. It was hard work, but it was, as we say, lekker*! Now, four months later, the euphoria is over. Now we have strikes, the murder of policemen, sporadic and senseless violence again, all the old evils—poverty, homelessness, unemployment. We have expectations that we can’t meet soon enough, resources that won’t stretch far enough, a political ‘gravy train’, revelations of widespread corruption, confusion as we struggle to get new structures in place. But we do have hope, and an RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) and a future. And a flag! GOODMAN: In what way was the media coverage of the elections ‘theatrical’ or ‘dramatic’? In other words, to what extent did the South African media use ‘Western’ TV techniques for representing political events as entertainment? BANNING: Yes, the local media did try to do that. The television coverage was very interesting. They were clearly trying to find a different mode from their habitual ‘we are the voice of those who know’ approach. Their outside broadcast coverage emphasized the vox pop— personal stories and comments—and in their studio stuff it looked as if they were trying to create the dramatic tension of ‘what will the outcome be?’ But they were stymied by the long delays: much airtime and nothing to say. So mostly the broadcasters were revealed as conspicuously human,

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fallible, overworked, desperately coping, and often inept. They became quite endearing, really! But people here really wanted to see what was happening. And to marvel. I think we all felt very involved; this is us, it’s our story, our drama. While we were in the voting lines (for hours on end) there was a lot of exchanging of personal stories going on, people delighted to talk to each other, grumble, laugh, and the media coverage of other voting lines doing the same thing confirmed the sense of togetherness. It was all very parochial; there was an intense sense of community on the voting days. Before that, with all the politicians frothing away in the studio debates, the SABC did try to make a mini-media circus, but it lacked the sophistication of, say, the Americans, who can really do that with a vengeance. The coverage of the inauguration was another thing altogether. For me it was a slightly comical mixture of the genteel social—struggling to identify who was who and what hats and fashion could be talked about, gossipy stuff—and high formal. But the whole day was extraordinary anyway in its mix of best behaviour and popular exuberance. I was glued to the telly all day, absolutely hungry to be there. I loved the way cultural performance was part of the formal proceedings—the praise singers, the high ritual of the prayers by the different religious leaders, the music. It’s probably the first time South Africans have used the arts for national celebrations—or ever had national celebrations. I think the television coverage demystified itself quite unintentionally—simply because it lacked the expertise—and as a result was absolutely appropriate. It caught the faintly ad hoc way in which the concert happened. They would cut away to the formal luncheon when the concert went into a momentary lull and there was a wonderful (inadvertent?) comedy in the juxtapositions of all the awkwardnesses of our old and new political élite beaming with good will at each other, next to the real cultural blending that was going on in the concert. Yes, it was entertaining—it didn’t have to be made entertaining. GOODMAN: In what way is the new political situation affecting the universities? BANNING: Well, we’re much more sober now. Transformation is the key word. It’s really roll up the sleeves and get down to work. At every level—from the executive, faculties, departments, unions, student bodies—people are meeting, talking, planning; proposing changes in structures, relations, courses, intakes. It’s evident that the education system is in tatters; sorting out primary and secondary education must take priority. The universities are in for a very lean time, I expect. In the Drama Department we are part of a big impetus to get arts and arts education on the map. At present only a tiny proportion of school-goers receive any formal arts education in their basic schooling. So the push is on—to construct syllabi for each of the arts, and one for combined arts; to develop teacher training programmes; to look at how informal arts education and the formal institutions can work together. We’ve got to look at accreditation, learning outcomes—everything. It’s unclear at the moment which ministry will be responsible for what and there’s a tussle going on between regional and national government, so there’s much lobbying going on, proposals flying hither and yon, much mobilizing of task groups, action groups, representative groups. We need to begin fast and proceed slowly and carefully. But there are so many real, concrete things to do. There’s a strong sense that there’s a future to make, and that unlike in the past, now we can make it, not have it made for us willy nilly. We want to be part of that. The universities are going to have to justify themselves with actions, not words. GOODMAN: And how does democracy filter down into the theatre?

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BANNING: It’s too soon to tell. The old structures are still in place, though the pressures on them are mounting. The Natal Performing Arts Council has radically restructured itself; it now has an executive that is genuinely representative. CAPAB, the Cape Performing Arts Board, appears not to have moved much. But time is running out for them. Their theatre activities are not noticeably different. Not long after the elections CAPAB had Mame, Giselle, a Verdi opera and Durrenmatt’s The Visit in their small theatre. GOODMAN: So what’s new? BANNING: That’s the question. Well, young performers and our students are beginning to make their own work more actively. Interestingly, a recurring theme is to do with questions of identity: the ‘who am I?’ syndrome—in more and less sophisticated ways. Gender issues are there, but very marginally. And—oh joy!—a young group of performers from the local street kids’ shelter brought a theatre piece they had devised to the department and it was militantly feminist: ‘Disarm rapists,’ they declared in no uncertain terms! This struck a powerful chord among women students and a defensive chill among the men. Democracy is filtering upwards, not downwards. But there is also a disturbing pull back to safety, to the things that are familiar: a sort of conservatism creeping in. Escapist theatre is packing in the white middle class theatre-goers with musicals and that sort of thing. So there’s a kind of lull at the moment, while everyone figures out what they have to say. GOODMAN: Is the situation for women any better now, either in theatre or in life? BANNING: No, not noticeably, though we are more visible, more vocal. Yesterday I heard that we have a new public holiday—Women’s Day! But there are still 364 days that aren’t for women, and that’s telling. What is important is that there are women in parliament now; there aren’t enough yet, but it’s a start. I was talking to a regional parliamentary woman the other day and she says it’s a real struggle to get through the male exclusiveness. All the standing committees are chaired by men and you have to contend with male terminology, male traditions, procedures, old boy’s clubs, and all the other male institutional practices that are hallowed by tradition. She says she just hangs in there, patiently contesting, questioning every step of the way. For ordinary women, no, not much has changed materially GOODMAN: In a nutshell, where is South Africa now in terms of the interplay between gender, politics, and performance? BANNING: Would nowhere be too small a nutshell? No, actually that’s too simplistic. Women are talking publicly and being talked about more than they were. Gender is certainly beginning to play a part in national politics; and performance looks as if it’s going to move strongly towards questions of personal identity, so gender is inescapably emerging. It was interesting that the recent gay film festival provided a strong gathering-point for women in Cape Town, both gay and heterosexual. But advertising is still dismally sexist and television churns out awful American and local soap operas which reinforce the male status quo. It will be a very slow process of gathering all the small voices gradually together until the little noises make an orchestra. But certainly in the shifting politics of the day there is manoeuvring room, and we need to take advantage of it. If we can get the arts on the political map, we’ll get gender issues there too. But we have to work at it on so many fronts at the same time. The space is there, the time is ripe—all we need is the energy.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 2, pp. 27–37 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V, Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

A Conversation with Janet Suzman on South African Theatre and the Politics of the ‘Classics’: Shakespeare and Brecht During and After the Cultural Boycott Lizbeth Goodman The many changes taking place in South African culture and theatre since this volume was begun in 1993 led to a long process of updating and revising the material included. While Goodman was waiting for final revisions from some contributors, Janet Suzman was in London directing a new play and preparing a talk about her 1987 South African production of Othello for the World Shakespeare Congress (Los Angeles, April, 1996). The two got together to talk about the state of play and to raise general issues which inform the study of South African theatre, from the perspective of a theatre practitioner now based in England, but often returning to work in her birthplace, South Africa. The ‘first draft’ of this conversation was recorded on 28 March, 1996. It was updated twice before publication. KEYWORDS: Apartheid (and after), ‘Classic’ Adaptations on South African Stages, Cultural Boycott, Cultural Developments in South Africa 1993–6, Eastern European Parallels to South African Theatre, Gender, Hope, Performance, Politics, South African Theatre, Township Theatre, Venues (locations of), Violence. GOODMAN: What was your initial connection with South African Theatre? SUZMAN: I was born and brought up in South Africa but, ironically, I never really had any connection with South African theatre. I studied drama in London after leaving university but I had never previously done any professional drama in South Africa. Then two dear friends of mine, Barney Simon and Mannie Manim, founded The Market Theatre in 1976. I wasn’t involved in a direct way with the founding of the theatre, but I was deeply involved emotionally, morally and supportively, and I was a founder patron of it. I did the first production in The Market Theatre when it was founded—Edward Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith—with John Kani* and Winston Ntshona*. My relationship with The Market Theatre was very close and it has always been very dear to me because of what it stood for. I loved the central thought behind it that there should be a forum in that vile city, Johannesburg, where race didn’t matter or wasn’t an issue. I have always been conscious of the fact that if you are going to do plays in a country where an extremist government holds sway, the play itself must mean something. Doing plays for the sake of doing plays was of no interest whatsoever. Time passed and I was very busy here in the UK, but in 1987—about three years before Nelson Mandela walked into the light—I was in South Africa. John Kani and I had wanted to do something else together after the Albee, but it was a question of finding the right thing. Anyway, there I was and it suddenly came to me that the right play for South Africa at that period was Othello, and that it offered exactly the right part for John Kani, even though he’d

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Performing race and sex, Othello in South Africa: John Kani and Joanna Weinberg, 1987. Courtesy Janet Suzman, director. Photo: Rouphyn Coudyzer.

never done any Shakespeare in his life. What is great about Shakespeare is that his work lends itself to whatever crisis is in the air. It seemed that the story of a malevolent power that sets out to destroy what would otherwise be a perfect marriage was a metaphor that could be very relevant at that stage. So with due struggle and permission obtained from the quarters that mattered—the ANC Cultural Desk and so on—we did Othello. And ever since then we have been looking for the next one. GOODMAN: What was the response within South Africa to your production of Othello? SUZMAN: If I say it was remarkable, it is not because I am patting myself on the back—it took us all by surprise. They only scheduled the play for a short run—four to six weeks, I think—but it obviously touched a nerve because it went on to such a roll it could have gone on for three months, which for a Shakespeare play is exceptional. We were playing to 101% capacity. I think I would be right in saying that it was the biggest box office draw for a ‘classic’ The Market has had before or since. Quite astonishing. That’s not attributable to me. It’s first of all attributable to Shakespeare—let’s face it, it’s a great play. While being in a sense a polemic (we were talking about the destruction of relationships, wantonly in the play), it was yet not your more direct protest theatre of the time. But because it was couched in arguably the best poetry that has been written, the audience felt that they were not being patronized by straightforward polemic. The audiences—and particularly the black audiences—grew beyond our wildest dreams. It was a complex play, and these audiences responded to it. GOODMAN: Could its success also be due to the fact that the play was from ‘somewhere else’? SUZMAN: Well, the play wasn’t making its messages easy So, in a sense you would say there was a distance—but that is the power of metaphorical theatre. Otherwise you veer towards documentary realism that can not have the dimension that poetic drama has—a leap of the

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imagination where a parable or a metaphor holds sway. That is what makes theatre powerful: film could do documentary much better, but theatre’s power is that it parades the ‘as if’. GOODMAN: What happened when that version of Othello was filmed? SUZMAN: It was insane. We filmed it in six days flat. No producer would ever do that; it was guerilla warfare. We had hardly any money and hardly any time. But it was so powerful in situ that we all thought it would be wonderful for people to get a sniff of what that cast had done. There were no tricks—I did it as Shakespeare wrote it in the sense that Othello was a foreigner living in a seemingly sophisticated white world. The cast had no preconceptions of Shakespeare, and so it had a remarkable freshness and everydayness about it. That was also because we did a lot of verse work on it—I was experienced enough to know that if you don’t get rid of the awe and fear of the iambic pentameter, you can’t meet that language with any assurance. They did an enormous amount of preliminary work and it all paid off because they felt they were speaking everyday language. So it had a kind of vividness to it which made a difference to the audience. If there were very difficult passages, I had no compunction about cutting them and changing the odd word that was incomprehensible to a contemporary audience. I think that the classic must be made contemporary. GOODMAN: It’s always difficult to capture the energy of live performance on video or film. Did you think of your directorial role in terms of capturing the stage performance on video, or did you think of it as filming? SUZMAN: I hoped it would be the latter—I wanted it to be moving pictures rather than a staged performance. Consequently in the editing I went in very close—I think probably that conveys some of the emotional power that’s taking place on stage. There was no chance of lighting it properly, so the large set-piece wide shot was not that interesting. So the only thing I could do (I was grateful for that in some ways, because of the rush involved) was to have the cameras trained right in on the actors’ faces so that the feelings would be paramount. I believe—as I think we all do—that what cinema excels in is seeing the whites of the eyes because that is where we read the characters’ intentions. All I could do in that terribly short space of time was almost crudely to cut between face and face and face. It gave it a kind of rawness and jaggedness which I think paid off. It was crude—it was video—but it had a flavour of the mood. GOODMAN: When any production of Shakespeare (or any live performance) is filmed, it automatically becomes something else, no longer the play but a permanent record of the play in another form. This is partly because a video or film can be viewed at any number of different times and places, and the viewing will be affected by the location and period and also the emotional state of the viewer. When you set out to film Othello in a South African context, how did this knowledge of making the play permanent affect your work? For instance, was making your film version a statement by you and your company, as much as a ‘statement’ by and about Shakespeare? SUZMAN: One of the things that was brought out—unlike most productions with a black actor I have seen—was John’s foreignness. Most black actors who are capable of playing Othello are either British or American which means that English is their mother tongue. What I had, which is what I really wanted, was the exogeny of Othello, this absolute foreignness—the fact that English was not his mother tongue. So when he said ‘Rude am I in my speech/he didn’t only mean that he found bedroom language difficult, he actually meant ‘it’s not my

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tongue—I don’t speak it well.’ He was that ‘wheeling stranger of here and everywhere’ that Shakespeare was writing about. So when he says ‘Haply that I am black,’ there is the terrible insecurity of someone who feels their colour matters. The fact that Desdemona is colour-blind is one of the beauties of the play. Her total love for Othello is evident in the speech where she says: ‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.’ The terrible fear that white people have of black sexuality comes out very strongly in other characters. The white liberal who says ‘it’s fine for you to come to dinner but woe betide that you marry my daughter.’ I remember a very long time ago a Progressive Party Meeting at the University of Witswatersrand. I was standing right at the back and next to me was my cousin Frances, who’s Helen Suzman’s daughter. I actually remember someone leaping up and yelling at Helen, ‘Would you let your daughter marry a black man?’ I remember Helen saying, ‘Ask my daughter,’ and Frances shouted out: ‘Yeah, ask me!’ It’s the old white shibboleth which says ‘let them get close, but no closer’, which is despicable. The play Othello brings out all those questions in the first third of the play. The questions Shakespeare is asking are about what he calls ‘erring from nature.’ In Act III, scene iii, Iago delivers a speech which is pure Calvinist dogma about how it is completely unnatural to marry outside your ‘own clime, complexion and degree.’ GOODMAN: In August 1993 I was in South Africa, having just begun research for this journal, and there were several major news events involving students and protest, the most violent of which was the murder of a visiting (white, female) American student. Thinking of that incident now, in the aftermath of the controversy surrounding the O.J.Simpson trial, and the L.A.Riots, and the Crown Heights riots, the relevance of your South African production of Othello as a play about race and gender relations is disturbingly, strikingly clear. What is it about race and gender which raises so much heated debate, in so many cultures and in so much art work, including Shakespeare’s play Othello? SUZMAN: The play is nothing if not about sexuality. I didn’t pull back from that at all. It was quite clear from the production that Othello and Desdemona were very much in love. When she says ‘Let me go to Cyprus. The rites for which I love him are bereft me/what rites are those? The rites of marriage. I pulled no punches about them being physically very close. Some people walked out of the audience because they could not take it. I had letters turning up from all sorts of bigots, but that was to be expected. But I did nothing that isn’t there in the text. I made it very clear that you can’t have jealousy that’s not sexual jealousy That’s what it’s about. That’s what Iago’s on about: ‘the green-eyed monster’. GOODMAN: If in 1987 you felt that Othello was the play to produce, why in 1996 are you choosing The Good Person of Sezchuan? SUZMAN: I think that play, Brecht’s The Good Person of Sezchuan, is about the struggle to be good in a violent world. Urban violence has been let loose, especially in Johannesburg. But violence is everywhere: in rural areas, in the townships, all to do with unemployment, apartheid, and so on (although those can’t be the only excuses). The breakdown of moral values that happened because of the apartheid laws where life was held so lightly, has meant that a thug can kill at random and at will, with no sense of moral outrage. It is a natural and absolutely horrible consequence of the apartheid laws where human life was taken to be so valueless. I don’t want to be a sociologist, and say this is the only reason why the crime-rate is so unbelievably high. What Brecht is looking at, in fairy-tale or parable form, is the question, ‘how is it possible to be poor and good?’. It’s a very inconclusive play, it’s a faulty play, but it’s a wonderfully

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theatrical play. It addresses those questions which are now paramount in everybody’s minds which are: how do we get through the day without getting mugged or cheated or taken advantage of? And the question of drugs, which is central to the later version of the play—the Santa Monica version—which is the one I’m using. Brecht when he went to America realised that the mafiosi, the drug barons, were the great destructive force. They are in Johannesburg too. GOODMAN: In your production, will it be the ‘good person’ or will it very specifically be the ‘good woman’? SUZMAN: ‘Person’ is the inadequate equivalent of the German word ‘mensch’. But I’ve decided now that ‘person’ would be too politically correct to bear. So in fact it’s going to be the good ‘woman’ of—not Sezchuan any more, but a new place called Sharkville. Brecht obviously used a faraway, magical place (in 1938, China was still a completely closed country, a place where fairy tales could take place; we know better now). But, I wanted to find another magical and invented place. My original thought was ‘The Good Person of Soweto’, but that was too real, too important actually—the word has become politicized. We know what Soweto stands for. So in the end, after a great deal of thought on the matter, the pun, the wordplay on a place with an ancient tragedy attached to it (Sharpeville) is now transmuted to a place which is completely fictional called Sharkville; a place full of sharks cruising around ready to rip you off. Its translation to a new life will, I hope, be a happy one, because it seems to fit every criterion of the question, ‘how does innocence survive when greed is paramount?’. It steers away from Tarantino, where nothing but vicious and thoughtless bloodshed takes place. Instead, the play asks: Where is morality? Do we rely on a god? Isn’t it better to put your faith in human beings? So it speaks to a newly secular age, it speaks to a city that is being beset by drug barons, and trying to survive. And, of course, that is what the new South Africa is about: trying to survive, while living with decency. GOODMAN: Why would you choose The Good Person as opposed to a play like Mother Courage? SUZMAN: Well, Mother Courage is a play about warfare—we’re not talking about countries at war, we’re talking about everyday war. ‘Sharkville’ is about everyday survival. Mother Courage is a solo play, a picaresque play about a woman with no conscience. The Good Person of Sezchuan is much more innocent, much simpler and it’s to do with communal greed. Its main character questions her own behaviour all the time; she is the diametric opposite to Mother Courage. What it has is lightness of touch. Brecht is not a heavy-handed writer—there is a sweet formality to it. There’s a sense of unreality about it. There are no mighty scenarios— wars sweeping across Europe. It would be much more difficult to translate Mother Courage to a South African context in the present day. GOODMAN: While in South Africa, I encountered a few examples of strong female characters: Elsa Joubert’s Poppie Nongena, for instance, and also Bessie Head’s Maru (an adaptation of which had just been staged in Pretoria). What does it mean for South African theatre today to choose these or other female stories, female figures, for stage adaptation? SUZMAN: I don’t know. In a way, I’m a classicist. But why use somebody else’s text? A classic is infinitely revivable—a classic speaks to a new age afresh every time it’s done and that makes it live. A play which is totally stuck in its time probably has to be put away for fifty years, to wait to see if it still speaks to another generation. You might say: why not do plays by contemporary South African playwrights? Because there are very few good contemporary

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playwrights in South Africa at present. But that will change. The boycott is a thing of the past. There is a way of learning from the great playwrights; how else do you learn in a society where you have been denied that for so long? The cultural boycott simply stopped things going into the country for a quarter of a century That was a necessary thing to happen but it has also been incredibly destructive. How the hell do you come into contact with the thoughts, techniques, subject-matter, and ideas of other playwrights if you’ve never seen their plays? That’s all I think I am—a drainpipe, a conduit. I have enabled Othello to flow in at a certain point and I am now enabling this particular Brecht play to flow in as well. GOODMAN: Will you bring the production to the UK? SUZMAN: Possibly. But when I saw the play at the National Theatre a few years ago, I sat in the plush seats at the Olivier Theatre, thinking, ‘What has this got to do with London?’ I can have an audience in Johannesburg who will understand Shen Te’s dilemma. Do you ever have enough rice in your bowl? If you’re decent can you ever say no to your poor neighbours? If you’re pregnant, how do you ever get enough food to feed that baby? And how much do you have to fight in order to protect it? There wasn’t a single person in the audience at the National Theatre who could identify for one second. We get the right audience in Johannesburg. They would understand her dilemma, they would see it—they would say, ‘Yes, I’ve been through that, I’ve been there. I know how difficult it is not to be a prostitute. I know how difficult it is to lead a decent life, a noble life, a dignified life when you are so poor.’ So my intention is to find an audience such as that. GOODMAN: Who have you cast in your production of The Good Person of Sharkville? SUZMAN: Gcina Mhlophe and I did the adaptation; we worked together on it. I wanted her input. In the cast: Sello Maake MaNcube is playing the Pilot, and I found a very good actress, Pamela Nomvete, to play the leading role. The pool of black actors to draw on is quite small because there hasn’t really been a full-time professional black acting profession because there couldn’t be. What has to happen now is that the youngsters get experience and the more experience they can have in difficult and interesting plays the better. It’s partly because of my background that I feel very strongly that there is no substitute for the experience you can get out of the difficult texts. A play at the level of a television play, where simplicity and brevity are the keynotes and where ambiguity and metaphor are very far from being in the forefront, is a limiting experience. If you want to do great theatre, you have to do great plays: there’s no way round it. It’s rather like saying you’re a classical musician and never touching the great composers. You would be a much poorer musician for that, because nothing had been asked of you, you hadn’t been stretched. One of the things that John Kani found was how much was in him that had never been asked of him before—Othello pulled it out of him. There are very few plays which make great demands on a performer and the classic plays do—that’s why they’re great plays. They make you do things you didn’t dream of doing before. Easiness and accessibility are out. Difficulty, stretching, and interest are in. And that can only make better actors. Actors should be able to cut their teeth on something with substance, and if something with substance does come their way, they can improve their talents. GOODMAN: Do you believe that theatre can effect social change? SUZMAN: I’m not sure. What I do know is that The Market—tiny drop in the ocean though it was—was a forum. The theatre is a forum; it’s a place where people willingly go on a windy cold night because they want to be with like-minded people and hold a silent discussion on ideas. Cinema

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is not really a forum—the lights are down, you don’t talk to anybody, you enjoy and you go home. Theatre is a place where a tacit debate goes on; you make a pact with the players when you become a member of the audience: you are there for a time to participate and to witness the debate to some kind of dramatic effect. Did The Market Theatre effect anything? I don’t know, but it certainly gave some people an awareness of how life could be or should be. That in itself is something. It’s rather like Tom Stoppard’s debate in Travesties— does art influence politics or does politics influence art? We know who won in that one: Lenin won, not James Joyce or Tristan Tzara. Lenin made a social revolution; the others merely made literary ones. GOODMAN: What is it about the present moment—after the elections in South Africa and before the impact of those changes can be measured—that makes it particularly appropriate to produce The Good Woman of Sharkville? What makes the play relevant now, today? SUZMAN: Right now is the only time we could get it on—it takes so long to get rights from the Brecht estate, it takes so long to get all the bits and pieces together to make the production. These are false things really, because if I’d been available last year, I probably would have done it last year. It is burning hot now—I want to do it now. If it was next year, I would be excessively disappointed. Plays should strike while the iron is hot. A year or eighteen months would not have made much difference, but two years ago the violence might not have been quite so much in the forefront of Johannesburgers’ minds. Two years ago, the amount of urban crime rose, and I hope that it will die down so that maybe in two years’ time, the police will have come to grips with violence and drugs. But over this particular arc of time, I have a feeling that ‘Sharkville’ will make some sense to people. That’s what plays are for really—to ring bells—which is why all of Shakespeare’s political plays ring bells in unhappy countries. Richard III in Belgrade—you’re ringing the bell about panic, anarchy, and the breakdown of values. GOODMAN: What was the impact of the cultural boycott on South Africa? SUZMAN: I think it was a slow sad diminishing, a depletion—it had to be that. A lot of things happenedone of them was the Americanization of tastes in South Africa. We didn’t see any television with any substance whatsoever, only stock American sitcoms, Dallas and so on, for years. The other thing we realized was: what you don’t have, you don’t miss. What do you have to measure yourself against any more if there is nothing to measure yourself against? I know it’s very unfashionable to say, but that’s the fact of the matter. Standards just whittled and withered and slithered downwards. I’m not saying that they were tremendous before, but all cultural enjoyment is to be acquired slowly and surely—you don’t just get it, like a disease. Some of those children who came to see Othello thought, ‘Hey, I haven’t seen things like that, I haven’t heard language like that!’ But if they don’t keep on going to the theatre they are not going to hear it or see it again—and whatever enjoyment they got that night has just withered away—it’s a dim and distant memory. Whereas if they had been able to build on it and go to another wonderful play the next week, and see another the week after that, or sit down and see some tremendously good and interesting documentaries on the television the week after that, slowly the accretion would have built up like stalagmites. And we know to our detriment, here as well as everywhere, that culture (I hate that word but that’s the only word we have) has to be purveyed, it has to be worked on. They don’t realize how enjoyable good things can be. What if it doesn’t work? Doing things well can be difficult, and I might do The

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Good Person of Sharkville badly I won’t know until it happens, because that is the nature of theatre. You’ve got to do it to find out. Nobody has yet written in depth about the attrition brought about by the cultural boycott. There is no point in my saying, hand on heart, that the cultural boycott was a good thing. On the contrary—when you boycott culture, you pay a price. But the price was a free South Africa, so it was worth it, I guess. GOODMAN: How would you compare that to the fate of theatre in Romania or Bulgaria or Poland? SUZMAN: East European countries and communist Russia are actually rather culturally sophisticated, with literary and musical traditions. There is no equivalent in Africa to the effervescence of talent in either Vienna or St. Petersburg or Prague or Budapest in the nineteenth centuries. These are countries that had an accretion of white culture: what we are more interested in is the maturing of black culture and its coming to terms with the Eurocentric, without feeling threatened. One of the reasons I like Brecht is that he is such a man of the theatre; he doesn’t have literary pretensions, and the language he uses is beautifully simple. The play’s European origins will, I hope, be irrelevant. The interesting thing about the new South Africa is: what the hell do we do with Eurocentric culture? Is it of any relevance whatsoever to anybody? What’s so great about going to see Swan Lake in the Civic Theatre in Pretoria? What has it got to do with black culture? I happen to feel as a theatre practitioner that Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan has much to do with the audience’s life, especially when it is adapted to fit a culture and a moment, as in my The Good Person of Sharkville. The extravagances of European culture mean that you do not go to the Covent Garden Opera House and have any connection whatsoever with the characters who are appearing on stage—these are fictitious fairytales people like to indulge themselves with. On the other hand you have got to beware of making the stage a place for documentary realism. I don’t think that is conducive to creativity. GOODMAN: If we consider current sites where gender and race issues come together in dramatic ways— the situations of women in Czechoslovakia or Bosnia, for instance, as well as in South Africa —do you see any role for drama therapy, or for theatre as a form of cultural expression or release? SUZMAN: Yes, I think drama therapy is really important. I am a patron of a trust called Art Works in Natal, and am aware that drama therapy work is springing up all over. There are many contexts and cultures where art therapy is useful, especially for terribly traumatized children who need some way of expressing the terrible experiences in their young lives. Drama therapy and art therapy are just at the beginning of their usefulness in helping people to come to terms with the unspeakable things they have been through. But my work in directing The Good Woman and Othello in South Africa functions differently. I have directed completed works, plays which were already written when I came to them, and which take on new meaning when they are performed in South Africa today Maybe a scene from one of these plays could be used for drama therapy GOODMAN: Can a whole play have a therapeutic effect? SUZMAN: It should do—the Greeks thought it did, that a catharsis was necessary, that there is a psychological, emotional recognition that relieves pent-up tension in the audience and that there should be some expression of that. Certainly, at the end of a performance, applause is partly to do that and it’s partly a recognition that things have been said to you that deal with

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these emotions. It’s a wonderfully complex process, going to the theatre—or, both complex and simple all at once. It is vociferous—it should be. One of the great difficulties for playwrights after years of apartheid is, ‘What do we write about now?’ When the enemy is gone, how do you define yourself? GOODMAN: What would be your prophecy on theatre in South Africa? SUZMAN: I think that time has be taken—you can’t rush these things. A new set of values, a new civilization just has to grow. Playwrights need to find their tongue to speak what they wish to speak. You can draw a parallel with the Australian film industry—Australia was silent for so long, and then suddenly the Prime Minister decided to pour money into the industry to raise the profile of Australia and lo and behold all sorts of wonderful stories about their own history began to be written and filmed. It just needed the encouragement and the assurance to look at their own back yard, and tell their own stories in a way which was imaginative and metaphorical.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 2, pp. 39–50 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

A Comparative Perspective on Two Plays by South African Women Michael Picardie In this essay, Michael Picardie begins by setting up a framework for application of theoretical ideas to theatre work, drawing on discourse analysis, deconstruction, and feminist analysis of the place of self and ‘other’ in life and in writing. He argues that this is one way to situate an approach to South African playwrights today. He then takes a critical look at the work of two playwrights: Gcina Mhlophe and Fatima Dike. He applies his theoretical perspective to their work, and argues that the representation of the personal, in the context of these two black South African writers, can be deconstructed with regard to issues of ethnography, power politics, literary politics, and the politics of performance. Picardie takes a very critical view of Mhlophe’s work; his theoretical paradigm finds her work wanting. Of course, a different paradigm would find different things to value. Readers may want to read the plays discussed and make up their own minds about the relative value of these and other South African women’s writings. KEY WORDS: Critical Theory, Discourse Analysis, Ethnography, Ethnology, Deconstruction, Feminism, Gender, Gender Politics, Genocide, Hope, Language as Issue, Literary Politics, Performance, Politics, Plays by South African Women, South African Theatre, Womanism. Now, ethnology—like any science—comes about within the element of discourse. And it is primarily a European science employing traditional concepts, however much it may struggle against them. Consequently, whether he wants to or not, and this does not depend on a decision on his part – the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism the very moment when he denounces them. This necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical contigency. We ought to consider all its implications very carefully. But if no one can escape this necessity, and if no one is therefore responsible for giving in to it, however little he may do so, this does not mean that all the ways of giving in to it are of equal pertinence. The quality and fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigour with which this relation to the history of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought. […] It is a question of explicitly and systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself. —Jacques Derrida (1978, 282) I have spent the best part of five years looking at seven scripts, and a range of published theatre texts by South African women and their workshop groups, analysing these textually, and initially, also ethnographically At first I looked at how their theories of creativity related to their life-worlds. This latter

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study, the ethnographic study, included interviewing the women and relating their lives to their art by means of implicit or clearly stated theories of artistic process. But I found that the ethnographic study would have made the research unmanageable, and there was little or no conscious theorizing about dramatic art which could be rendered into a comparable form, that is, translated into a mutually compatible language which would not falsely determine the results. So, I curtailed that part of the study Nevertheless, I was that much more sensitized to the deconstructive nature of the critical process with regard to the text—the text seen as contradictory discourse— because of the abortive ethnographic study. Through that study and the process of realizing its limitations, I recognized that each writer was shut into a deconstructive system, by virtue of the idiosyncratic nature of her creative thinking and its self-generating polarities, which crossed over and yet didn’t cross over into other women’s situations. We might call this ‘the politics of uncertainty’. My analysis, even of identifiable texts, is by no means ‘scientific’ or ‘accurate’. There is no way around the fact that, as Derrida suggests in the opening quotation, every theory of aesthetics and every theoretically guided practice across ethnic boundaries is more or less ethnocentric because theory itself, and theory about theory, and theory guiding practice, is a structure. Although this structure—and the idea of structure— has lost its claim to absolute centrality, it is nothing but the essential decentred part of the colonialist’s thought (Derrida, 1978, 178–194). Theory and theatre come from the same Greek root word, meaning ‘to look upon’. All ‘looking upon’— theoretical and theatrical—is, in a sense, influenced by Greek and European thought, influenced in turn by constructions and deconstructions of language. Yet, it seems to me, this ethnocentrism should be put through a process of erasure, retaining the traces of ethnographical boundaries while struggling against the metaphysics of ethnocentrism (while the process of being and becoming an object in the world is framed within white, male, classical paradigms). Theatrical theory can be connected not only to the classical, but also to other cultural traditions—African, Asian, American, Australasian – in both content and process. If content and process are partially rooted in the Other’s historical and modernist tradition, and if these overlap with our own historical and modernist traditions, we can relate to the African playwrights as if they were, structurally, part of our own traditions; so, for instance, a British or American reader might relate to South African plays, structurally, as if they were similar to those by Aphra Behn, Lorraine Hansberry, Caryl Churchill. Africans (white Africans included), enter into the epistémè at the level of metaphysical-historical structure, as Gauls, Celts, and Britons entered into the Graeco-Roman epistémè. My project, then, is to see which African plays deconstruct positively into the Afro-Western epistémè, that part of the epistémè which is appropriate to my subjects and my own socialization in theatre theory and practice. If this is ‘ethnocentric’, at least the discourse released will have a quality and a fecundity, and a critical rigour, using Derrida’s method for resolving the crisis of an ethnocentrism which is not altogether ethnocentric. And besides, as Mudime points out in The Invention of Africa (1988), Africa always was part of the European epistémè, whether as the site of slavery and colonialism, or as part of the potential Enlightenment. And further, argues Diop, (1974) Africa was culturally part of Egypt. According to Bernal (1987) in his massive study of the African origins of civilization, Egypt, Canaan, and Greece were part of an interacting whole. Why shouldn’t African writers today be judged in traditional-classical or modern-classical terms, where there is overlap with one’s own theatre socialization? Taking the argument a little further: in various places Derrida (1977) drawing on Heidegger (1973, first published 1927) has focused attention on the deconstructive metaphysic of logos versus phone, writing versus speech, becoming-in-the-world versus being-there. James Comas (1990) has further implied that, although the content and process of African writing and African being-in-the-world may be different from those of other cultures, the differences within African writing are still to be considered, must still be subject

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to an analysis of what difference means; in this case, we might refer to deconstructive difference, a play between structure and the post-structural, between centres of presence, the de-centred, and dede-centred… and so on. Marx was demolished by Freud, Freud was demolished by Marx. Nietzsche and Heidegger were demolished by modern pragmatism and practical ethics, whilst always holding to the text as the artistic reality. The point is to be relevant and rigorous in the processes of reading and deconstructing texts and contexts which are related to each other, paradoxically (from shifting centres), consciously and unconsciously. All human theatre (everyday drama) and staged drama produce differentiations in discourse, from culture to culture. All human cultures produce or encourage the process of deconstruction through a universal logic which holds and lets loose of contradictions, even though some may be unamenable to reason rooted in magic —a bricolage in Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) terms—rather than a properly designed, theoretical and technically impossible machine. Such a machine can be ‘desiring’ and revolutionary at the same time (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977a and b). Deconstruction, with its own discourse and ideology (an ideology which goes beyond ideology, except for the last step into the epistémè) takes place in the context of creative discourse. I have taken creative discourse to mean the return of the signified as partly repressed. The effect of the return of the repressed is to change the perception of the Lacanian signifier. This is because one brings into one fused signifier/ signified, chains of related signifiers/signifieds, in a process of iconization of what was semi-conscious and unconscious, made present. Developmentally, this is the mirroring of the Other back at me, so that within myself I internalise the reflective medium of my self. This Other is uncertain and illusory in Lacan’s terms (1966, 188), but in Kristeva’s terms I am in a chora, which was all I was before I knew I was separate from my significant (M)other, before I was seduced by the joy of her and my ‘laughter into reality’ (Kristeva, 1980, 281–6). The performing arts play on this seductive illusion created by mirroring and the horror of the loss of the Other (Metz, 1982). My aesthetic criterion par excellence is the dramatically signified Other who is strong enough to subvert herself and strong enough to be subverted by rhetorical devices so that by means of irony, satire, parody, tragic blindness, and so on—that is, the play of the artistic unconscious—she stands between a vast array of the sign-networks into which she has been deconstructed. The other who never becomes an Other is blind to her own unconscious and remains literally trapped within a sign-network that is without ambiguity and therefore shallow, without depth. This is the bare outline of my theoretical framework; this is where my close reading may begin. Due to limitations of space, I can look at the work of only two playwrights/playwriting groups: Gcina Mhlophe, Thembi Mtshali, and Maralin Vanrenen; and Fatima Dike. Have You Seen Zandile? Have You Seen Zandile? by Gcina Mhlophe, Thembi Mtshali, and Maralin Vanrenen (1986/1988) can be read as a charming, ‘light’, popular characterization of the world of a black child suspended between the secure, ‘modern’, consumerist world, and the woman-oppressive rural-traditionalist world. The narrative hinges on the fact that the heroine was fostered, probably from her first years, by her ‘modern’/traditionalist grandmother. We are given no idea how old she was when she was removed from her Xhosa* mother, who was a domestic worker in Durban, called upon to go home to her husband and other children in the Transkei. When the mother returned to the Transkei, the heroine, Zandile, was placed with her beloved Zulu grandmother, called Gogo* (Zulu for ‘grandmother’), from whom she acquired the gift of story-telling. The play tells of Zandile being stolen ‘back’ by her traditionalist, rural Xhosa mother at the age of 8. This

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displacement from the home she knows is a traumatic shock to the young girl. She tries writing messages for the birds to carry her back to Gogo. That is to say, she grieves bitterly and only fantasy can save her. During adolescence, Zandile is unable to contact her precious Gogo; the spacial divide is compelling, for Zandile and her mother are in the Eastern Cape Province while Gogo remains in Natal. [See the two interviews with Mhlophe in this volume, Part 1, pp. 27–39, and 41–51, to see how closely this story relates to the author’s telling of her own life.] But the text offers room for questioning. We learn that early in her days with her mother, Zandile has already made a relationship with a primary school teacher, Miss Maduma. We can assume that Miss Maduma could write a letter to Gogo on Zandile’s behalf, saying she is alright. We are able to imply that Miss Maduma would be in a position to use such a letter to warn Gogo not to defy her son (Zandile’s father) or Zandile’s mother by trying to get Zandile back; the school teacher could relay to Gogo some of Zandile’s fear of her mother’s retaliation. Later as well, the text offers another opportunity for questioning. When Zandile is at boarding-school, safely away from the emotional blackmail of her lonely mother, she appears to be a bright adolescent, a person of strength and integrity. As such, we can assume that she could, easily enough, have gone to the post office to send a letter to Gogo, or at least to a relative or friend in a neighbouring area. But these spaces for questioning are not satisfied in the text. Zandile does not contact Gogo for many years— though she states repeatedly that she longs to do so—and in the end, we are offered a heart-rending final scene in which Gogo is already dead when Zandile finally returns, and when, by an amazing coincidence, Zandile has suddenly discovered the location of her foster-family’s street! It needs no Freud, Lacan, or Derrida come from the grave to tell us that Zandile has forgotten to do the obvious because she has repressed her guilt and fear over contacting/not-contacting Gogo for so long, or that this fear/guilt is displaced, condensed, and symbolized in the transcendent subject of the play’s climax. Reread from this perspective, the final sequence, ‘Death and Mourning.’ seems merely touching, no longer profoundly moving. The end loses power because the personal interferes with the storytelling; the coincidence which leads Zandile back is not nearly so compelling as a representation of determination to defy psychological repression, and get back to Gogo, would have been. As is often the case in charming and popular writing, the repressed is still unconscious to the subject, to all the characters and the authors. There is never a word of criticism by the authorial voice or any of the characters of good Zandile, except by her mother, who is already invalidated emotionally by her construction in the text as a kidnapper and blackmailer. Neither is there an authorial critique of the Gogo and her son, Zandile’s father, who may be seen as weak and oppressive because they have allowed the injustice of the abduction to happen. Here, what we find is a negative deconstruction. The witty tone of the writing covers up its refusal to face up to another kind of social ‘writing’: a negation of cultural stereotypes through writing. For instance, the stereotype of African men as horribly oppressive towards their mistresses and illegitimate children has begun to gain some credence as ‘real’, now that the extended African family has, in Zandile and its socially constructed reality, and also in the Lacanian Real, tended to break up. But rather than face this stereotype and its translation into reality, the play depicts Zandile’s father as glamorized, almost as a Hollywood hero, never, never, demystified. With the exception of the opening scene, one middle scene (Scene 4a) and a praise-poem near the end, the style, tone, and atmosphere of Have You Seen Zandile? have little more emotional depth than a light story in Bona, Drum, or True Love, the kind of stories occasionally quoted by Zandile and her adolescent friend Lindiwe, who mistake these popular magazines as sources of authentic information. There are exceptions to this lack of depth, of course, readable in the lack caused by unrealized depressions or unvoiced repressions in the text. The realized and voiced depressions and repressions should be listed again in more detail, so that we know from internal evidence, as between control group and experimental group, so to speak, that I make comparisons validly and appropriately.

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The exceptions (the scenes where the narrative reaches beyond surface emotion) are: the first scene, in which Zandile talks to her imaginary companion, the Other that reflects her self; the middle scene in which she acts out her rage as a school-teacher (beating up flower-pupils in her Gogo’s garden; unrepressing her rage as a twice removed/abducted foster-child and as a black girl in an authoritarian system, frightened of abduction and marital rape—her bad Other); and the praise-poem in Xhosa towards the end of the play, addressed to her good Other, a retiring teacher. As in Bona, Drum, or True Love magazines, ‘romance’, ‘fun’, ‘glamour’ and ‘drama’ are the icons into which the rest of the play, that is the buried pain and anxiety of love and loss, are displaced, condensed and symbolically revised to such an extent that they lose touch with their authentic origins. Like the institutions of which they are part, their social ‘writing’ is forgotten, repressed, and only returns to tear down the inauthentic structure of a popular play, which, I would argue, has no serious or critical sub-structure, because it is empty of the genuine feeling of hatred of the colluders and oppressors that Zandile’s trauma (and Mhlophe’s) must have involved. When it comes to analysing Zandile’s authority figures, her father and paternal grandmother, melodrama intercedes between signifier and signified (not a genuinely fecund connection). This critique is essential to my project of analysing the deconstructive aesthetic, as part of my attachment to a Leavisite (1936, 1969) ethic which seeks spiritual and artistic wholeness as well as psychoanalytic and aesthetic depth, and looks for acknowledgment of the defensive processes of the unconscious in (autobiographical) writing. The functionality of artistic wholeness would have been better achieved in this play if its purposeful rhetoric had been expressed in scene and setting, or at least in character and narrative shape (Burke, 1957–61, Brown, 1979). The signs which are immune from deconstruction—father and paternal grandmother—might, through a stronger sense of satire in the narrative—have overcome their own rhetoric, rather than remain sentimentalized or covered over by melodrama. The three scenes mentioned above deconstruct the melodramatic and sentimental in the rest of the play, but leave the reader hungry for more to hold onto. The First South African This play (1977/1979) by Fatima Dike serves two main rhetorical purposes which are perfectly well expressed in terms of the subversion of the sign. The play can be read in terms of the signified challenging the Lacanian signifier, creating depth and complexity of meaning, while wider meanings challenge the subjective power of the image. At the same time, there is a certain presence in the characterisation. The charismatic being of the characters interacts with the becoming of the narrative structure, the social ‘writing’. All Dike’s characters are vigorous stereotypes of the characters found in township life and township theatre, but are written with a dramatic vigour and subtlety similar to the best of Fugard’s township writing. Dike’s scenes are related to her settings in that the social ‘writing’ of urban deprivation is shown in her work as partly explaining the ‘presence’ of characters. At the level of rhetorical purpose, Christian values are at war with the values of hedonism and violence – but nothing is hidden in this struggle, nothing drips sentimentality. The First South African opens with an extraordinary speech by its hero/anti-hero Rooi or Zwelinzima, acting as a chorus. There is nothing of this sort—so poetic or infused with social realism—in Have You Seen Zandile?. The poetic in Zandile deconstructs itself positively because irony, caricature, and satire are based on the comic wisdom of the unconscious. That kind of poetry is too close to fairy-tale: the black girl in search of her roots and her identity; the power of the story is lost by the authorial voice intent on offending no one. This play is not the only offender; it is one of many which fall into a gap between too many anti-apartheid agitprop plays and a genuine classical black African theatre. By contrast, Dike’s

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opening chorus/prologue is grand, even noble; it reaches towards a genre of depth and power, and ‘unconsciously’ subverts itself by means of irony and parody: ZWELINZIMA God created man in his image, male and female. And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground. Man became a living soul. He carried out God’s wishes with the help of his woman. And they filled the world with their children. The Father looked at them one day and found one different. This is not from heaven, it is from hell, he said. And the child was not fit to be called by its Father’s name. Now, man fears what is to come. Man is obsessed. Fear makes man into a savage who pulls bodies apart, And bathes in their blood. He’ll come out of the bloodbath one day To find his colour has changed…to ochre. He’ll look at himself in the mirror, And see himself for what he is. He’ll turn round to find his brother looking at him, And the reflection in the mirror will be the image in front of him. He’ll put his hand in his brother’s, And they’ll both walk into the kingdom of life. Am I not a man then? —The First South African, p. 1 Ochre is the colour daubed by the Xhosa onto male initiates before their induction into the manhoodcircumcision ceremony, usually at about age 16. It was Zwelinzima who was not ‘fit to be called by his father’s (the white man’s) name’ although his mother and father loved each other. The prologue subverts the name-of-the-Father, God Himself. The text suggests that in Old Testament Afrikaner Calvinism, the ‘coloured bastard’ was seen as coming from, or destined for, hell. Fear of difference becomes an obsessive madness, and man has to dismember, literally hack to pieces, bodies from different tribes, bodies that are seen as different—not just in South Africa, but in Rwanda as well (rivalling Auchswitz, to the extent of 10, 000 murders a day). The bloodbath is a signifier subverted by a new meaning coming from related signifiers or from the signified meaning of the ochre as a purification ritual. White and black, white and coloured, black and coloured, all of these combinations mix with blood red, ‘compromise’ as it were, in the earth-red ochre. The ochre is a blend, a metaphorical resultant of the colours of blood-red, white, black, and brown, including the colour of the red KhoiKhoi* and the Bushpeople, the San*, who were the first inhabitants of Southern Africa (hence the title of the play). That his brother is seen as an earth-red ochre—the Xhosa initiate as a metaphorical blend of the races, Khoi-San— is seen as an icon in another icon, the psychological icon of the mirror: the magic re-initiation into humanity occurs through struggle, dismemberment, blood, death in agony, and re-birth in a mirror. Being is reflected objectively as well as willed subjectivity with loving reflection. It is the desire-of-the-Mother to reflect and be reflected and it is this reflection that is the

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signified of a law-of-the-new-Fathers-who-are-brothers—even if they turn into another generation of the patriarchy. The image: He’ll come out of the bloodbath one day To find his colour has changed… to ochre is also charged emotionally with realistic, necessary, yet qualified hope: hope which underlies the situation of South Africa today. But the background is the deepest writing of all. This is the background which provides the setting for the scenes which most enrich The First South African, which point to the heritage of writing and the arche-writing of hundreds of thousands of years of patriarchy and hundreds of years of colonialism. Balanced against this is the speech, the presence of Zwelinzima as an ‘heroic’ failure, an authentic, originary source of heroic failure—hence the title of the play, The First South African. No other contemporary South African theatre can rival the modest power of Dike’s achievement in constructing this basic and highly subversive metaphor: the blood-red colour of the obsessed, the earthy red ochre colour of potentially brotherly man, the hellish colourlessness of a damnatory ‘white’ God who has written the world in terms of a patriarchal, colour-pure, hierarchy. Both The First South African and Have You Seen Zandilele? are in terms of social discourse and ideology, melodramatic. Both take up the adolescent pose: ‘the whole world is against me because I’m white, coloured, black, a young man, a woman, a black woman/ Have You Seen Zandilele? does not move far beyond this level, but The First South African takes this pose and moves with it, develops and critiques it, so that the arche-writing is most interestingly subversive and deconstructive in Dike’s work. Here is another example of what I mean by deconstructive archewriting: Austin Jama, Zwelinzima’s stepfather in The First South African, meditates on his wife being summoned to the white superintendent’s office in the township to debate the issue of her baby’s colour (Dike, 1977, 3–4). In a speech loaded with ironic parody of Jama’s Christian subservience—a speech in which he implicitly compares himself to Joseph and Zwelinzima to the infant Jesus—the step-father ends his homily: Kodwa [but], I hope they don’t take Zwelinzima from us. For if they do, we will have to accept what they say. Because we are nothing, having nothing. The parody from the theatrical aesthetic signifier (the victim is ‘in parody’ if he compounds his status as victim by over-conforming to it) joins the Christian signifier of humility, and the parody is complete. The signified meaning returns from its repressed place to subvert this kind of Christianity as a signifier. What the step-father says about Africans in a township is the very opposite of the Christian teaching which Austin Jama offers as a model. When we have nothing, when we are poor, she says, we partake of the so-called kingdom of heaven on that very account; we are not nothing, we are everything. He says the opposite, but the speech is more than a crude satire. It might even be taken seriously by naïve members of a township theatre audience. Or, in a theoretical framework, we might over-read its meaning to suggest that the Christian advocacy of poverty and abnegation of self is what Austin Jama actually means: that we as Africans should become nothing and find our strength in that nothingness. Because the chains of signification and the various shades of signified meaning interact ambiguously in the author’s constantly shifting mirror of reflection, the writing becomes the equivalent of the desire-of-the-Mother, she who reflects without rejecting, who mirrors the narcissistic self to encourage the process of maturity, of growing up. In my theoretical framework, which shapes my way of reading and interacting with texts, I desire such

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writing because it reflects my own supplementarity of meaning, my own ambiguity of meaning. That desire, as Lacan asserts, is a metonymy for all desire, for desiring the whole, for Being-There and Being itself. Mhlophe et al.’s play lacks this desirous creative discourse, and so is less interesting to me. Dike’s sense of parodic irony is so acute that it can pass itself off as ‘straight realism’ and in this way, can actually replicate in a mixed naïve/sophisticated audience, the adhesion and the subversion/ambiguity between the signified and the signifier. Here, then, the concept of the ‘patriarchal’, for instance, has a complex and engaging range of meanings or readings; it refers to the stupidly oppressive rule of men, and also to the humorously justified rule of men: FIRST ELDER My son, today you are a man. With this stick protect your father’s house. With this stick, beat your mother when she forgets that she’s a woman in this house. (PUTS MONEY ON THE FLOOR NEXT TO ZWELINZIMA.) Here my boy, buy yourself tobacco. —The First South African, p. 6 Dike’s allusive, broken, cliche-ridden, then insightfully poetic style is both ‘realistic’ in terms of township English, and at times emits a classical grandeur no doubt directly influenced by ‘great works’ (i.e., note the Shakespearean ring of Dike’s line: ‘I have seen men being made’). FREDA You do not understand what your manhood is. I have seen men being made. We, the mothers of these men, know that it is a joy that leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. We understand that the boy has been buried forever. A man is born with the lusts and aggression of men. Do we go to look for a bucket of water to bring us back to sanity? No! You swallow the gall, and tighten your belt, so that when it happens again, you are ready for it. Face the enemy, don’t ever turn you back on it. That is why the parents of men never say ‘bhuti’ [respected older brother] to their sons, even when they are circumcised. That is why to us you will always be a boy, to us you’ll die a boy. (FADE) —The First South African, p. 29 Have You Seen Zandile? achieved a national and international showing and prizes, not only within South Africa but also in Edinburgh and Chicago (Mhlophe et al. 1988, 78), while The First South African remains relatively unknown outside South Africa, indeed, outside Cape Town and Johannesburg. Such strange anomalies can be put down to the complications of the time (a relative lack of awareness of feminism and gender politics in South Africa in 1977 as compared to 1986), the nature of literary politics, the play of personalities involved in performing and reviewing shows, questions of ideological correctness in—and competition within—cultural opposition movements and reactions against these, professional power and influence, the manipulations of icons by drama critics and arts editors, etc. There may also be economic factors at work. Touring a play with two actors (Zandile) is cheaper than touring with a cast of nine (The First South African), although the latter might have been directed to facilitate doubling. It is beyond the scope of this article to do more than speculate in this general way as to the reasons why one play is claimed as more popular or worthy of attention than another. Other readers and critics must corroborate the social history of these plays, must, if necessary document the struggle of values which prioritizes one politics (whether womanism or feminism or some other framework) and one play or author over another.

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References Bernal, Martin. (1987) Black Athena London: Free Association Books. Bowie, Malcolm. (1991) Lacan. London: Fontana/Collins. Brown, Janet. (1979) Feminist Drama: Definitions and Critical Analysis. London and Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press. Burke, Kenneth. (1957–61) The Philosophy of Literary Form: New York: Vintage Books. Comas, James. (1990) ‘The presence of theory/theorising the present’ Research in African Literatures. 21, 1, pp. 5–32. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix, Guattari. (1977a) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: The Viking Press. ——. (1977b) ‘Balance-sheet program for desiring machines’ Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus: From Psychoanalysis to Schizopolitics. 2, 117–35. Derrida, Jacques. (1976) Of Grammatology. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins Press. ——. (1978) ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’ in Derrida, J. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dike, Fatima. (1979) The First South African. Johannesburg: Ravan Press (Produced by Rob Amato at The Space Theatre, Cape Town in 1977.) Diop, C.A. (1974) The African Origin of Civilization. New York: L. Hill. Heidegger, Martin. (1973) Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, trans. from Sein und Zeit Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1927. Kristeva, Julia. (1980) Desire in Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. (1966) Ecrits. Paris: Seuil. Leavis, F.R. (1936) from ‘Wordsworth’ in Revaluation reprinted in Rylance, Rick (ed.) Debating Texts: A Reader in 20th century Literary Theory and Method. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, pp. 12–23. Leavis, Q.D. (1969) from ‘A fresh approach to Wuthering Heights’ in Lectures in America reprinted in Rylance, Rick (ed.) Debating Texts: A Reader in 20th century Literary Theory and Method. Keynes: Open University Press, pp. 24–30. Levi-Strauss, Claude. (1966) The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Metz, Christian. (1982) Psychoanalysis and Cinema. London: Macmillan. Mhlophe, Gcina, Thembi, Mtshali, and Maralin, Vanrenin. (1988) Have You Seen Zandile? Johannesburg: Skotaville (Produced in 1986 at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, directed by Maralin Vanrenen.) Mudimbe, V.Y. (1988) The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 2, pp. 51–59 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

‘My English Name is Patience’: Mediating the Voice of the Other in South African Theatre Today Dennis Walder Dennis Walder’s work on South African theatre includes his editing of Athol Fugard’s Township Plays, and extensive work on Fugard’s writing in the context of postcolonial criticism. In this essay, Walder investigates these areas by focusing down to a particular time: the period 1993–4, and a small range of authors, arguing that the use of language is an empowering tool, long denied to black South Africans and to women. The essay ‘gives voice’ to these issues. Its place in this journal is mediated by the essential problem, or issue which questions the legitimacy of media representations and also, ironically, academic criticism which attempts to speak for, not just about, ‘marginalized others’, in South Africa or elsewhere. Walder’s perspective on Mhlophe’s work offers a much more positively critical reading than that offered by Picardie (above, pp. 39–50), showing how critics may read and value the same texts and cultural contexts very differently. KEYWORDS: Cultural Developments in South Africa 1993–6, Gender, Media Representations, Patience (as concept and name), Performance, Politics, Rape, South African Theatre, State of Emergency, Postcolonial Theory, Women’s Status in Law, Women’s Voices. In November 1993, a nationwide series of public rallies began in South Africa, under the banner, ‘Now is your time to speak’. The idea of finding a voice to speak has seemed to many a liberating act. But, as bell hooks says, ‘To make the liberated voice, one must confront the issue of audience—we must know to whom we speak’ (1989, 15). In a country like South Africa, where audiences are perhaps more deeply fractured along race, class, gender, and language lines than in most other countries, these fractures have long been exploited by those who control cultural production and distribution, so that if the marginalized are allowed to speak, their speech all too often becomes, as bell hooks puts it, a language compatible with ‘existing ways of knowing, constructed within social frameworks that reinforce domination’ (hooks, 1989, 14–15). This is one reason why the still, small voices of protest in the theatre since the seventies have had so little lasting impact: protesting white oppression, their subject has also been determined by that oppression. And the playwrights have ended up patronized and powerless, their work disappearing, as the work of protest theatre makers such as Maishe Maponya* or Matsemela Manaka has disappeared, or, like that of their successor Mbongeni Ngema*, been disabled by turning into a Hollywood commodity such as Sarafina! But, I want to suggest, there are ways of speaking that escape the determination of the subject as object; and, as literary critics, as cultural mediators, we have a role in assisting that escape: by listening, by creating a space for others to be listened to, and by thinking beyond familiar notions of voicing the Other which, however radical in theory, in practice deny a voice to the marginalized—not by silencing them, the old

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method, but by not listening. I am going to refer briefly to the work of Athol Fugard and Gcina Mhlophe to demonstrate what I mean. Why these two? Well, as everybody knows, the dominant white group has until very recently tried to ensure, by censorship and banning, by intimidation, torture and even murder, the silencing of alternative or oppositional voices. Yet as everybody also knows, this attempted silencing has never been completely effective. Someone, somewhere, has always spoken out, has testified, has witnessed. Theatre has played a critical part in this—especially, but far from exclusively, the theatre identified with the white liberal Athol Fugard. What role does his theatre have in the future, however? And what of the other voices that have been emerging in the last decade, struggling to be heard, despite the muffling effect of a continuing hegemony? Voices such as that of Gcina Mhlophe, whose work crosses boundaries of race, class, language, genre, and gender and who, as playwright, performer, teacher, and now independent storyteller, creates her own audiences among the marginalized and disempowered. Consider the Following Story.

One hot day in August 1965, in the desolate, semi-desert Karroo* region of South Africa, an automobile containing three people, two men and a woman, was travelling along route 32, from a small town called Cradock, towards Port Elizabeth, 120 miles away on the Eastern Cape coast. About ten miles outside Cradock, the driver noticed a woman walking beside the road, with a large bundle on her head, and a shopping-bag in her hand. He stopped the car and got out to help the woman put her bundle in the trunk. It was a heavy bundle, with a zinc bath containing domestic implements and a heavy iron pot, all tied together in a blanket with a piece of twine. When the woman realized she was getting a lift, she burst into tears, then climbed inside. Once in the automobile, she began to tell her story to the woman passenger, who comforted her. The woman on the road wasn’t easy to understand, since she had a cleft palate. But her story—and I quote from the driver’s diary—‘was that she had been cleared off a farm after her husband’s death about three days previously She was walking to another farm where she had a friend. She said that she had nine children but didn’t know where they were. She thought a few of them were in Port Elizabeth.’ The driver writes: I told her to tell me when to stop. When she’d got into the car she had said she was going very far. After driving about 15 miles it became obvious she would never have reached her destination that day. We asked her about this and she said she knew it and would have slept in one of the stormwater drains… Finally, when we reached the gate where she wanted to get off I gave her the three shillings left in my pocket [and] she cried again. I put the bundle on her head; May carried the shopping-bag down an embankment to the gate and set her on her way. My last image of her is the thin, scrawny ankles between her old shoes and the edge of her old skirt, trudging away into the bush. (Benson, ed. 1983, 123–4) The woman in the car was May (or Mabel) Magada, a domestic worker and blues singer from New Brighton, the black township outside Port Elizabeth. The other passenger was theatre director Barney Simon. The driver was Athol Fugard. Fugard went on to confide in the notebook from which I have been quoting, that he would ‘never escape’ from the story of the black woman on the road. But, the question is: what did he do with it? And what was the result? The answers are part of another story.

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Fugard, Simon, and Magada were returning from the trial of Mabel’s husband, Norman Ntshinga, in Cradock. Ntshinga had been found guilty of belonging to the banned ANC* and sentenced to five years on Robben Island*. For the previous two years, Fugard had been working across the racial divide with Ntshinga, Magada, and other township amateurs performing plays from the classic, Western tradition, such as Sophocles’ Antigone. But the arrest and imprisonment of Ntshinga and other members of the group—the Serpent Players—brought about a radically new form of theatre, a collaborative, workshop theatre without written texts or identifiable authors. The aim was, in Fugard’s words, to ‘shatter white complacency and its conspiracy of silence’ (Benson, 142). This aim was embodied in a play created out of another incident in Cradock, an acting exercise called The Coat, presented before a white Port Elizabeth theatre appreciation group in defiance of humiliating rules which, for example, prevented the all-black cast from using the toilets in the theatre, and obliged them to return to New Brighton after performances. Using a Brechtian narrator and montage structure, Fugard’s play The Coat presented the effect upon a New Brighton family of the arrival of the garment handed over by its owner, as the only thing he could leave for them when sentenced to prison by the Cradock court. Their white audience was expecting a different play, Wole Soyinka’s* comedy Brother Jero, but the conditions imposed upon the performers had led them to decide, after bitter debate, to do a reading of this work instead, using pseudonyms from earlier roles to avoid trouble with the police, who were also present. The result vindicated their decision to perform, insofar as it left the audience of 150 people apparently frozen ‘in horror and fascination’. The Coat itself has not been widely available until my edition of 1993, and it has only been performed once in the last twenty-five years since the original reading. But its importance, or the importance of that event, is indicated by the fact that it led directly into the hugely influential, collaborative productions Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973), which Fugard, and two of the most talented Serpent Players, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, created out of the remembered experiences of fellow actors, friends, and relatives imprisoned on Robben Island, as a way of underwriting their demand to be heard—a demand directed first at small audiences of white liberals, and later at black or multiracial audiences at home and abroad. But, the question is: wasn’t Fugard merely continuing the mediating role he established years before with his first two plays, No-Good Friday (1958) and Nongogo (1959)—the role of offering an empowering voice to the colonized Other only simultaneously to neutralize it, by defining the terms in which that Other could be expressed? Things aren’t quite so simple. Nongogo is about an ex-mineworkers’ whore who has become a shebeen* ‘queen’ in her struggle to achieve self-respect. The eponymous character Nongogo, for instance, can be said to speak for black women struggling towards independence and self-fulfilment, a reading confirmed by Lucille Gillwald’s 1981 Market Theatre revival. Similarly, The Island can be said to express defiance through a woman’s voice, albeit a voice derived from the Western classical inheritance, when the prisoner Winston dons Antigone’s gear to challenge his imprisonment. Furthermore, the Fugard play which arose out of the same personal and historical moment as The Island in 1968 was Boesman and Lena, the climax of which has the miserable derelict Lena find the strength, despite all she’s suffered at the hands of white farmers and her ‘Coloured’ partner, to celebrate her hybridity in defiance of its systematic erasure. [See the interview with Nomhle Nkonyeni on playing Lena, above, pp. 1–4, and also the parallels to Janet Suzman’s comments on revising classics such as Mother Courage for South African theatre today, above, pp. 27–37.] But if, in a play like Boesman and Lena, it is possible to recognize the continuing potential of the theatre in a period of transition to perform the voices of the disenfranchised and dispossessed, it is equally important to notice the continuing exclusion of such voices, especially the voices of black women. If we think again of Fugard’s diary account of his meeting with the woman on the Cradock road: the woman is

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nameless, her speech is impaired, and in any case she tells her story not to him but to May Magada, who effectively mediates between her and the playwright. Fugard wants to mediate her story, and the character of Lena was, according to his diary, his first attempt to do so. But it was in The Road to Mecca (1985) which appeared no less than twenty years after the initial encounter on the Cradock road, that he tried hardest to meet the challenge of representing that black woman’s existence—and, it must be said, failed to do so. The terms of this failure indicate why his work as South Africa’s leading playwright is now being challenged, if not overtaken— for instance, by Gcina Mhlophe’s Have You Seen Zandile?, which I will come to in a moment. The Road to Mecca does register the presence of the black Other—but it is a representation which echoes the failure of the dominant English-language liberal tradition, a failure fully to acknowledge the voiceless, even as it gestures towards their presence. This tradition is represented in the play by the young white liberal Elsa Barlow, who certainly wants to admit the sufferings of the black people around her, above all the sufferings of the woman she meets on the Karroo road, walking to Cradock, more than eighty miles away This offstage encounter is referred to three times, but remains sidelined by Fugard’s focus on the central character, the lonely artist and his admitted alter ego, Miss Helen. Elsa, who has come to visit her friend Miss Helen in response to the older woman’s appeal for help in her battle against the village’s narrowminded attempts to stifle her work, has driven up from Cape Town and, as she tells Miss Helen, met on her way a black woman walking the long Karroo road, with her baby on her back: I’d already been driving for ten hours and all I wanted was to get here as fast as I could. She got in and after a few miles we started talking. Her English wasn’t very good, but when I finally got around to understanding what she was trying to tell me it added up to a good old South African story. Her husband, a farm labourer, had died recently, and no sooner had they buried him when the Baas told her to pack up and leave the farm. So there she was ... on her way to the Cradock district, where she hoped to find a few distant relatives and a place to live. (Trying to remember the woman as clearly as possible.) About my age. The baby couldn’t have been more than a few months old. All she had with her was one of those plastic shopping bags they put your groceries in at the supermarkets. I saw a pair of old slippers. She was barefoot... So I dropped her at the turn-off. Gave her what was left of my food and some money. She carried on walking and I drove here. —The Road to Mecca, pp. 19–20 This reported encounter in the play recalls both Fugard’s earlier encounter on the Cradock road, and a more recent encounter, when he asked the name of a black woman walking to Cradock, to whom he offered a lift, and she replied: ‘My English name is Patience.’ According to an interview given by the playwright after the American production of Mecca, ‘My English name is Patience’ was its first title. Fugard change the title because, in his words, the character of Patience ‘was going to emerge as a brooding dominant symbol, and that has in fact not happened’ (Honegger et al., 1984, 39). Indeed not. Marginalizing Patience, Fugard endorses the status quo while obscuring this move by smothering it in liberal guilt. And the acceptance of her English name, as we are smugly reminded in the play: Tatience is a virtue, virtue is a grace’ (Mecca, p. 17), blocks the possibility, at least partially evident in Nongogo, The Island, and Boesman and Lena, of defiance, if not affirmation, by constructing the black woman as suffering object. In the same year as the first production of Mecca, the 27-year-old journalist, poet and actress Gcina Mhlophe began finding her voice through her own diary entries, which were to become the play Have You Seen Zandile? This play was first performed by the actress herself, drawing on her limited training as an

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actress in Maishe Maponya’s Umongikazi (1983) and Barney Simon’s Born in the RSA (1985). Zandile was commissioned by Maralin Vanrenen for a Festival of Women’s Plays at the multiracial Market Theatre in Johannesburg in February 1986, during the State of Emergency*. The Festival never came off, but Vanrenen’s persistence, plus Mhlophe’s wish to come to terms with her own past in the aftermath of her mother’s death, eventually led to a performable, scripted story. This story tells of the development of a young South African’s growing self-awareness, as an eight-year-old schoolgirl who slowly realizes she is a black woman in a society which denigrates her race and gender; and who later turns herself from the object of others’ perceptions into an active subject, narrating her story and thereby affirming her identity. Like her creator, Zandile is ‘illegitimate’, and lives at first with her grandmother Gogo near Durban, where she views urban life with the questioning eye of a child. Interwoven with her voice is that of her grandmother, whose story-telling attends her throughout the first half of the play. The central action, almost the only action, is her abduction by her mother’s family to live with them in the rural Transkei, where she comes to question traditional views of women’s destiny. Abduction may seem a relatively minor event, although its effect upon the child who is wrenched from her known, caring environment into an alien place, is far from minor. And there is the added resonance that the white car which takes her away suggests the distant, white authority controlling all their lives. But more important, it seems to me, is the fact that ‘abduction’ is a journalistic euphemism common in the press then and later, for rape—an increasingly common experience of young black women, abducted by carloads of young men, usually black, to be sexually assaulted over several days, and then dumped. This in itself can be seen as an indicator of the growing violence of the country during the State of Emergency, although this has not been the usual interpretation. During the Emergency’s first two years, according to the government’s own figures, over 13,000 people, many of them children, were detained; some died in custody, many were hospitalized (Thompson, 1990, 236). So it is understandable, that a play exploring the inner world of a young woman, through monologue, mime, role play, and song, and without any overt sign of outrage or protest, should not have been favourably received by activists. Understandable, but right? Now that the Emergency has ended and apartheid dismantled, although the inherited structures of power largely remain—for example, African women are still in law ‘perpetual minors’—Zandile can be seen to challenge the very ‘illusions of identity’ upon which those structures of power rest, as Dorothy Driver suggests (in Trump, 1990, 251–2). Driver is one of several South African feminists claiming Mhlophe’s voice, although Mhlophe herself resists the claim. For her, refashioning the culture of silence in South Africa means more than allowing new voices to be heard, it means creating a medium for those voices—a process she furthers by reactivating oral, folk traditions eroded by the migrant labour system, if not also to some degree by the cultural pre-eminence of the English-speaking élite to which Driver belongs. In Zandile, Mhlophe performs herself as a child learning the traditional art of storytelling from her grandmother, and then as a teenager executing a praise poem in untranslated Xhosa for her headmaster; she thereby resists both the dominant discourses of the ruling whites, and the alternative, masculinist discourses of black protest theatre. Within the space she has created for herself, Mhlophe has become an itinerant storyteller, performing, and assisting her audiences to perform, traditional stories at schools and public gatherings, with her group Zanendaba (which means ‘bring me a story’), always in a fluid mix of languages, mainly Zulu and Xhosa (her father and her mother tongues) but also in varieties of English and even sometimes Afrikaans. This is the logical outcome of Zandile—a name which means ‘the number of girls is growing’—a play created with the aid of singer Thembi Mtshali as well as director Maralin Vanrenen, as a kind of performed narrative which may be specific to women’s storytelling. According to two American speech communication researchers, Kristin Langellier and Eric Peterson, women tend towards a form of narration they have identified as ‘spinstorying’—by which they

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mean, continuous, interwoven, non-linear storytelling, inviting identification with the everyday experience of women. As Langellier and Peterson point out, recent research on personal storytelling strongly suggests that there are ‘strategic differences’ in the kinds of stories that women and men tell, and in the ways in which those stories are told. With the added complexity in Zandile of performing in South African English, but an English the audience understands by a familiar convention to be Zulu in the first half, set in Natal, and Xhosa in the second, set in the Transkei— hence metonymically mediating the dispersed languages and cultures of the Nguni-speaking* majority in terms of a shared sense of difference. This complex linguistic fiction is brilliantly sustained by the continuous interweaving of verbal tags, formulaic expressions, poems and songs, initially in Zulu*, then in Xhosa*. In early performances before predominantly black audiences at The Market, the Nguni-speakers responded with chuckles and gasps of recognition to Zulu and Xhosa phrases, while the rest of the audience, mainly white, sat silent; and yet everyone, in Johannesburg, London, Edinburgh, and Chicago, could respond to the moment when Zandile addresses her grandmother’s flowerbeds as if she were her teacher instructing the class how to behave when the inspector visits: Ho ho ho ho! Good morning class! Good morning Miss Zandile. And what was all that noise I was hearing down the passage? [the girl says to her imaginary class, and utters their responses] But do you know what happens to naughty children? The white car will come for you and you won’t even know it’s coming. It’s going to be standing there and it will be too late to run. Nobody can hear you scream because its engine makes such a loud noise. They’re going to take out your eyes and take you to a far away place and nobody’s going to see you ever again… And what is that I’m hearing…is that the white car? Ho ho ho ho! No, you are lucky this time. If it isn’t the white car and its abductors this time, it is another, more distant threat. Don’t you know what day it is today? It is the 21st of September 1966 and the inspector is coming here today. You know the inspector does not understand our language (she starts giggling) and we don’t want to embarrass him. (Puts her hand over her mouth and laughs.) He cannot say our real names so we must all use our white names in class today. Hands up those of you who don’t have white names. We’ll just have to give them to you. Wena you can be Violet… Do you know what name the inspector gave me in class today? Elsie. And I don’t even look like an Elsie! Don’t laugh! At least you are flowers. And do you know what he called Bongi? Moses! He couldn’t even tell that she is a girl. —Have You Seen Zandile?, Scene 4(a) Fugard’s inability to mediate the subjectivity of the woman on the road affiliates him with this representation of a white inspector, unconsciously reinforcing the divisions which continue, I would suggest, to score the so-called post-apartheid society. Fortunately for Fugard, perhaps, and for us, as Mhlophe mediates her self, she mediates difference, challenging all of us to learn how to listen, even to a language we do not speak.

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References Driver, Dorothy. (1990) ‘M’a-Ngoana O Tsoare Thipa ka Bohaleng—The Child’s Mother Grabs the Sharp End of the Knife: Women as Mothers, Women as Writers’, in Rendering Things Visible. Martin Trump, ed. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Fugard, Athol. (1983) Notebooks 1960–1977. ed. Mary Benson. London: Faber. ——. (1985) The Road to Mecca. London: Faber. Honegger, Gita; Patipatpaopong, Rassami; Schechter, Joel. (1984) ‘An Interview with Athol Fugard’, Theater. 16, 1, pp. 33–39. hooks, bell. (1992) Talking Back. London: Sheba Publishing. Langellier, Kristin M. and Eric E.Peterson, (1992) ‘Spinstorying: An Analysis of Women’s Storytelling’, in Performance, Culture, Identity. eds. Elizabeth C. Fine and Jean Haskell Spear. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishing. Maponya, Maishe. (1983) Umongikazi/The Nurse. London: Polyptoton. Mhlophe, Gcina, Thembi, Mtshali, and Maralin, Vanrenen. (1988) Have You Seen Zandile? Cape Town and London: Heinemann/Methuen. Thompson, Leonard. (1990) A History of South Africa. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Walder, Dennis, ed. (1993) Athol Fugard: The Township Plays. Cape Town and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 2, pp. 61–70 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Patterns of Change; Audience, Attendance, and Music at the 1994 Grahamstown Festival Dudley Pietersen The fact that the 1994 Grahamstown Festival was the first to take place in the ‘new’, democratic South Africa, provides the context for Dudley Pietersen’s comments on the increasing presence of women as writers, producers, and directors of contemporary South African plays. In this report, written immediately after the 1994 Festival (the first festival to take place after the elections), Pietersen argues that South African women’s plays are speaking out more and more, and with authority, on issues relevant to women and to the structure of a newly ‘free’ society. He also shows how both the contents and style of women’s plays are addressed and represented at the festival and in the press. In analysing the racial composition of audiences and patterns of attendance throughout the festival, Pietersen offers a valuable source and critical resource. Jazz and Reggae music shows are singled out as the only genres capable of drawing truly ‘representative’ (racially mixed) audiences. Finally, Pietersen comments on the scope and size of 1994’s festival, and implications for the representation of women’s work and black theatre work more generally. KEYWORDS: Attendance Patterns, Audience, Coloured (designation of race), Fringe Theatre, Gender, Grahamstown Festival, Hegemony, Language, Music, Performance, Politics, Rape, The Status of Women in Theatre, Women’s Issues, Women’s Voices, South African Theatre. Situating the Festival: South African Theatre and/as Carnival I will begin by situating this article. I have been a regular attendant of the Grahamstown Festival for past five years, that is, since 1989. I have always endorsed the policies of the majority ANC* Party, and thus supported an all-inclusive cultural boycott which included amongst other areas, the Grahamstown Festival. I consequently only graced the festival with my presence in 1989, but since then I have become a staunch supporter of this event. I gaze at events from the following perspective: I have always endorsed the principles of democracy. I am part of that racial group classified ‘coloured’, and my political convictions were shaped by a vicious opposition to apartheid ideology and hegemony. As I have experienced the oppressive mechanisms of apartheid, I had no difficulty in adapting to the New South Africa and, by extension, to democratize my gaze too. In other words, I look at things objectively. Here, I will analyse the 1994 Festival in some detail. The 1994 Standard Bank National Arts Festival, or the Grahamstown Festival as this event is more commonly known, celebrated the eventual arrival of the ‘New South Africa’ with exuberance and style. More than 60,000 people crammed into this charming town, a place so laid-back that temporary but

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necessary changes to the normal traffic-flow caused more confusion for the local drivers than the visitors. For ten days of cultural feasting, these masses of visitors were confronted by the daunting task of choosing from the more than seven hundred events and shows. And what variety! One could, on any one day, elect to attend events which ranged from formal lectures at the winter school, historical walking tours, jazz, reggae, ska music, drama, recitals, and cabaret, to wine tastings, craft workshops, shopping, or just browsing through the variety of exhibitions crammed into every available square metre of space in town. The organisers in 1994 were desperate for more space and venues; they even turned a portion of High Street into a kaleidoscope of colours and sounds, created by a collection of stallholders and traders who invaded a section of the pavement, the parking bays plus one lane, as well as the centre island in the same street. By the time the next festival arrives, the whole street will probably be turned into a fleamarket. Then there were the posters. From every centimetre of blank space they screamed their mute messages, willing everyone to take notice. Thousands of shapes and sizes, some glossy and professionally produced, the majority showing evidence of limited resources and shoe-string budgets. From the moment one sets foot in Grahamstown, one is struck by the enormity of it all. The claustrophobic concentration of people and vehicles in a limited space, the constant, frenetic ebb and flow of people, the posters, the beggars, the clogged traffic, all add to the atmosphere. There is nothing as intimidating as standing in one of ten queues for half an hour, consulting the festival guide with quiet, controlled panic, desperately juggling times and dates, only to have your schedule, composure and patience seriously subverted by an unexpected sell-out, cancellation, or printing error, or the computer system crashing out. Yes, the act of selecting and choosing is one of the most traumatic experiences as one’s senses reel when the variety and scope finally penetrates. As one becomes more seasoned, it becomes easier to avoid most of the loopholes, but even after five years of regular attendance, I am still intimidated by this necessary, but thoroughly painful stage of the festival. But sometimes help arrives in new and innovative forms. Over the past three years, actors and performers have been making themselves very visible outside the context of stage and theatre. This they achieve by personally advertising their shows and performances in spaces other than their advertised venues. Performers approach people in queues in the supermarket and box-offices, bars, restaurants, on the street—anywhere—and either solicit support verbally or by means of pamphlets or handbills. My decision to attend The Uitgefriekte Fractelina was the result of an impromptu deal with Toni Morkel that I would attend her show if she granted me an interview afterwards! It is quite possible that this practice has got everything to do with financial survival rather than ego- tripping, but one can never really know if one has opportunity, as I had, to observe some of these actors’ reactions to not so flattering reviews. They do however succeed in demystifying that aura of mystery and secrecy which somehow is part of their demeanour, especially those established ‘celebrities’ who are known for work in local film and television, and often supply relevant background material. The variety and diversity of shows on offer are equally daunting. One edition of the daily festival newspaper Cue, randomly chosen, lists more than 290 events, accessible through the booking office, in an eighteen hour cycle! This number excludes informal privately arranged events, outside the gamut of the official festival like bands in restaurants, informal dancing in clubs and hotels and free, open air shows. On paper, and isolated from the hype of the festival, these statistics might not look impressive, but to experience these statistic is alarming, intimidating, and energy-sapping. Even the most determined, energetic, and enthusiastic patrons eventually succumb to the general air of fatigue which settles over most of the people from day three onwards. The locals refer to this state of mind and body as the ‘Grahamstown shuffle’, characterized by a catatonic appearance, an air of listlessness, and minimal arm and leg coordination. In this state, it is not uncommon for people to doze off during the loudest of music performances

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or to sleep blissfully through plays. During a staging of My Silent Beethoven, a play which uses sign language as alternative communicative medium, a boy with a hearing deficiency fell asleep and snored loudly to the amusement of those patrons who could hear him. His mates, sitting next to him, were totally oblivious to his snoring, which added to the humour of the situation. But this is what the festival is all about; hedonism in its most extreme form. The 1994 festival was special in that it is followed so closely after our first democratic election. It would be interesting to investigate whether the principles embodied in the new democratic constitution are already finding expression in the cultural arena. The scope and diversity of the festival, however, impede the attempt to gain or relate an holistic overview, and I have thus directed my attention at theatre scripted, produced and acted by women. My other field of interest relates to the composition and texture of audiences at various shows and venues. I will consequently evaluate attendance patterns and trends at the various shows within the context of our changed and changing society. In a final section I will share some minor, though relevant, observations, which, within the context of the festival, reflect something of our changing society. Women at the Festival One of the more interesting facts which emerged during the 1994 festival, is that women seem to be playing a significantly larger part in the production, coproduction, writing, and developing of theatre. Of the approximately 110 Fringe productions, over a third were directed by women while three of the eight mainstream drama productions had women as directors. The statistics are not impressive within the framework of a democratically equal society, but are very impressive within the context of South Africa as a traditionally chauvinistic, patriarchal society. These numbers are not representative either, but are based on what was listed and performed during the festival. The absence of women in management positions—that is, the absence of women as directors, producers, and senior administrators—is obvious, not only at the 1994 festival but also in previous years (one need only browse through earlier festival programmes to prove the point). It is, consequently, difficult to draw comparisons between what has been and what is now, in terms of women’s status in the management of South African theatre. I will not attempt to do so. Instead, I will provide an overview of what was on offer. Time and financial restrictions, the constant battle against total physical exhaustion and other logistical problems, made it impossible to attend all the plays, so I must rely in some instances on reviews by other critics. I also stress that the plays under review can by no means be seen to represent the sum total of what was on offer, but they do provide a sample of some of themes which were articulated in plays by women, or which were directed and/or produced by women. Most of the plays written and directed by women addressed and exposed issues previously avoided or marginalized. Topics like sexual ambiguity, sexual humiliation and abuse, gay issues, family violence, incest, and a re-assertion of identity in a changing society, dominated plays on the Main and Fringe festival listings. It should also be noted that all the plays discussed below (i.e., those by women) were Fringe productions; this designation of women’s work as ‘marginal’ or ‘alternative’ to the mainstream is significant. Yet Fringe productions have over the years proved to be the most effective forums for experimental theatre at the festival. In a changing society, and given some of the more controversial issues which are addressed, the Fringe is perhaps the only effective forum for expression of women’s voices in South African theatre today. Natasha Reeskens directed Deathbleedsnot, which focused on the vexed, and very relevant, topic of incest. The play was described as: ‘a surreal incestuous adult drama which oversteps the bounds of humanity…’. (Cue, 9, 7, p. 3). Nunu Productions’ Aloe St, directed by Theola Taylor, focused on a young woman’s process of self discovery and her quest for knowledge in a sexually hostile and repressive society. Venus

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Flytapeze (sic) Productions’ God and Fetish Engineering, written and directed by Stacey Harding, purported to be: ‘an erotic ride through the fetish world of death and divine intoxication’ (Cue, 8, 6, 5), while Janet Buckland directed the highly allegorical Feedback: ‘an Epic tale of the struggle of foodstuff against the oppressive regime of Serius D’Earth, the frown prince of Gravity’ (Cue, 8, 5, 6). Despite this rather frivolous description, Feedback is a serious play which explores the function and influence of food in the lives of women and men. [See Marcia Blumberg’s analysis of Janine Denison’s all the Rage, a play about bulimia and the physical and sexual commodification of women, Part 3, pp. 19–35.] Equally provoking was Sjambok Productions’ controversial Shots in the Dark, directed by Melinda Ferguson and written by Bridget McCarthy. The women in this two-hander explore in a semi-erotic way many different facets of male-female and female-female relationships, in a journey which turns into a psycho-sexual nightmare. An interesting aspect of this play was the playful form of its promotional strategy: a sexually provocative poster advertised the play I was informed by the director that the poster was meant to lure more men to the play, as men would then be exposed to the criticism levelled at them by the play, through its story and its performance context. The strange-sounding Uitgefriekte Fractelina, written, directed, and performed by Toni Morkel, provided a new form of self-discovery for male viewers, as it looked at the concept of the individual from the perspective of a man whose genetic structure converts to that of a woman. In this ingenious play, Morkel portrays a middle-aged man who discovers that he is slowly assuming the characteristics of a woman. While Morkel focused on coming-out and identity in her work, Bo Petersen, directing Storm in a Teacup, investigated the very topical issue of date rape and its traumatic consequences to both victim and perpetrators. The play is also a critique of the judicial system, while This is for Keeps, also directed by Bo Petersen, dealt with marital violence and sexist conditioning in a typical South African setting. In The Witches Of Eastgate, director Kalmia Dudley-Smith took a wry look at the ‘bored housewife’ myth against a background of illicit sex, the battle ‘against the bulge’ and life beyond the shopping mall. Wasps, directed by Marlene Pieterse, centred on the mundane and boring life of a woman traffic warden, exploring her frustrations and anxieties. And to round off the offerings by and about women, veteran theatre director Mavis Taylor took charge of Fatima Dike’s So What’s New?, a play about four township women who sustain each other through the bonds of sisterhood in a world where they have been betrayed and deserted by their menfolk. [The play is published in Part 3 of this volume, pp. 55–91; also see Miki Flockemann’s interview with Dike, Part 1, pp. 17–26.] These are some of the more provocative and relevant woman-created plays at Grahamstown 1994. The issues highlighted in these plays have, of course, been presented on stage before, but not so frequently, or with such force, in earlier phases of South African theatre ‘history’. What is new is the move in South African women’s work towards reflecting on issues of relevance to women, without the restraints of male influence. This shift is significant because it provides women with a direct voice to articulate their own feelings and concerns, to give expression themselves, rather than to speak through the mouths of male playwrights, especially in negotiating situations and issues which would, previously, have trapped women as ‘victims’. The new constitution guarantees freedom of expression, this has clearly encouraged many women in South African theatre, and culture, to ‘come-out’ and speak their minds. Attendance Patterns Another interesting way to analyse the festival is to consider attendance patterns for various shows and events. It is generally accepted that the majority of festival-goers are white, middle-class, and English speaking, and that many have humanist liberal political affiliations. This fact underpins the whole argument

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that the festival is élitist, that it deliberately excludes the majority of black South Africans who are financially incapable of participating. And, lastly, the attendance patterns affect the material produced, in the sense that companies stage what will sell tickets, and what will sell tickets has, for some time, been work that has a Eurocentric bias. Some of these issues are currently being addressed through a local Arts Encounter Project, which aims at maximizing local black input into the festival (the term ‘black’ here including ‘coloured’, Indian, Muslim, and African people), in order to change the generally indifferent perception of the festival within the local community. Local newspapers set attendance figures for the 1994 at close to 60,000 people. Although the statistics of previous festivals show that the festival has grown steadily over the years, the relative peace and calm in the aftermath of the election has played a major role in luring more people to Grahamstown. Despite the significant increase in numbers, black patrons still remain in the minority. This fact is important if we look at the attendance patterns at the various shows and venues. Most of the plays and performances—from Mainsteam, Fringe, and Student production companies and individuals—were attended predominantly by whites. This pattern is present even at township venues like Recreation Hall and The Studio in Albany Road and Noluthando Hall in Joza Township. The explanation for this occurrence is reasonably simple. Most of the shows at these particular venues are pre-booked nationally and are sold out long before the festival starts. A small number of complimentary tickets are available for local sale and are distributed through schools and other community organizations, but as a rule, very few of the local population get the opportunity to attend plays at these venues. The lack of black patrons is manifest at other venues too. Two of the most popular plays at the festival, Get Hard and Shots in the Dark, despite selling out for each performance, only managed to draw a few black faces, mine included, in the shows which I attended. This pattern repeated itself at all the plays I attended, and friends and acquaintances reported similar trends at plays I could not see. There are two possible reasons for this phenomenon. The first relates to the racial composition of visitors: the fact that most white patrons attend the festival for the cultural experience, and plan their holidays to coincide with it. Having both money and time at their disposal, they can afford the fairly high admission prices, and can see more shows than those with fewer resources (i.e. than most black audience members, as resources are unequally available across racial lines). The second main reason is related: the festival was deliberately ignored by the majority of black people who disapproved of its ideological substructures. Major ideological changes within the The Festival in 1989, followed by ANC Cultural Desk’s final approval of the festival in 1990, did open the festival to a potentially large, new audience, including those (like myself) whose convictions had kept them away previously. But the opening up of the festival also highlighted the racial issue as never before. In 1990, it became very clear that the festival did not have, had never had, a regular base of black patrons—not even from the local community. This base has steadily been extended over the past four years, but the disparity is still evident in the attendance of plays. The only drama which showed a reversal of this trend at the 1994 festival was the Cape Flats Players’ offering, Dem … die Intolerance, which, in at least three instances, had a predominantly coloured audience with a spattering of white faces. This deviation is largely attributable to the medium of presentation; the language of this performance was Cape Afrikaans, a mixture of English and vernacularized Afrikaans, exclusive to the coloured people of Cape Town and difficult for the untrained ear to follow. English speaking people, with Afrikaans as a second language, or black African people for whom Afrikaans is only a third or fourth language, would have been hard pressed to follow this performance, let alone to understand the subtleties of its usage of dialect. This could explain the absence of these groups at this play. In addition, one cannot ignore the power of group identity, loyalty, and pride in achievement against many odds. In this

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context the large number of coloured people who supported the play can be construed as a mode of public expression of pride in, and acknowledgement of, what has been achieved by people of the same group. The attendance pattern at drama productions was a fair reflection of the racial ratio of visitors to the festival, with the one notable exception discussed. It would be quite safe to expect the same patterns to manifest themselves in the disciplines of dance, opera, cinema, etc. The only discipline capable of drawing truly ‘representative’ proportions of black audience members is music, and more specifically, Jazz music. The Jazz component is presented as part of the Main Festival and showcases all the participating artists and bands by way of two gala concerts on the first and last Sunday of the festival. These sell-out concerts are performed in a venue which houses over a thousand people, and the audiences for these two nights in 1994 were well balanced with representation of the various population groups, more or less equally distributed. This pattern continued at the smaller, more intimate venues where the artists and groups performed individually. I attended most of the shows, at different time slots, and each ended on a riotous note, with large sections of the audience dancing in the aisles, screaming for more. I observed similar patterns of attendance and behaviour at one venue which concentrated exclusively on Reggae music. These shows drew a mixed, young audience with a strong local flavour. This much I know from numerous conversations with young members of the local coloured community, with whom I have been in regular contact since 1990 (and with whom I stay each year). This group, or community, has indicated that the venue which features Reggae is the overwhelming favourite with locals, black and white. The popularity of this venue is a combination of a few factors. For one, it was one of the last venues to close each day (or night). It featured only popular commercial bands. It charged a set, one-off admission fee per person per night, which allowed the individual free access to come and leave as she or he pleased, while the reasonable level of the fee made it affordable to more or less everyone. Besides the Jazz Festival, many other musical forms and choices are available on the Fringe. The capacity houses drawn by international folk artist Shawn Phillips were, however, predominantly white. So too were those drawn by local white artists with diverse and divergent styles: Johannes Kerkorrel, whose mobocratic Afrikaans lyrics have irritated the authorities for many years, Laurica Rauch who sings sentimental ballads, Leslie Rae Dowling’s eclectic rock, and Jennifer Ferguson’s socially relevant lyrics, for instance. The small number of black faces at their performances is attributable to many factors of which the most important seem to centre on divergent musical tastes and backgrounds, and deep-seated black resentment of white culture. However, it is interesting and significant that the racial composition of bands which play reggae music did not influence the racial mix of the audience. This is an area deserving of further future study Reflections on Change in South African Theatre On the whole it seems that only Jazz and Reggae music possess the ability to transcend racial and cultural barriers and to draw people together, regardless of circumstances. Only time will tell whether drama performance will develop the same ability, the same breakdown of barriers, which would be essential for its survival in the altered state of play of the ‘new’ South Africa. On the fringe of the Fringe, I have noticed another new development which bears mentioning. Busking has always been part of the festival, but it seems as if members of the local community have realized the economic advantages of this form, and have begun to take advantage of it. For the first time in many years, the 1994 festival featured groups of four to five boys, between nine and twelve years old, competing with great enthusiasm and skill with more experienced and established buskers. I noticed no white boys busking, but African boys invariably harmonized traditional Xhosa, religious or semi-religious songs while the coloured boys resorted to socially relevant Afrikaans Rap music by local groups. It was amusing to note

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how their levels of enthusiasm waned as the days progressed; by late afternoon any group would only start singing if somebody approached, and would stop immediately if there were signs that their efforts would go unrewarded. These are some of my observations. To sum up is not possible, or helpful, as it seems best to leave open the door to further observation, further change. The Grahamstown Festival has taken a long time to begin to grasp the principles of true democracy, and now seems well on its way to becoming a major cultural event for all South Africans. Time will tell. References Everet, P. (1994) ‘All Star American Jazz’. Cue, July 2, npn. Hough, B. (1994) ‘Prinsloo Sizzles on the Fringe’. Cue, July 2, npn. Goldman, W. (1994) ‘Shawn Phillips says he’ll change your life.’ Cue, July 4, npn. Knox, C. (1994) ‘Washa!’ Cue, July 6, npn. Mager, B. (1994) ‘Really Cooking’. Cue, July 2, npn. Sichel, A. (1988) ‘The 1988 Grahamstown Festival’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 89–93. Sichel, A. (1989) ‘The 1989 Grahamstown Festival’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 3, 2, pp. 116–121.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 2, pp. 71–77 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Glossary of Terms, Names, Events, and Places

Compiled by Lizbeth Goodman from a variety of sources including: Bradford, Jean and William Bradford, eds. (1991, 4th edn.) A Dictionary of South African English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harber, Anton and Barbara Ludman, eds. (1995) A-Z of South African Politics. London: Penguin. Joubert, Elsa. (1985) Poppie. Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball (first published, 1978). Lipschutz, Mark R. and R.Kent Rasmusen, eds. (1989, 2nd edn.) A Dictionary of African Historical Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rake, Alan, ed. (1989) Who’s Who in Africa: leaders for the 1990s. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press. Wiseman, John A. (1991) Political Leaders in Black Africa. Aldershot: Edward Elgar.

African National Congress (ANC): a political party with mainly black membership, committed to a nonracial people’s democracy (Freedom Charter) and with close links to COSAH and the SACP. Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the ANC was renamed in 1923. Afrikaans: independent South African language, derived from Dutch; one of the ten languages of South Africa; a version of Dutch and English developed by Afrikaner (Boer) settlers; considered by many to be the ‘language of the oppressor’. Afrikaner: white colonial settler (see Boer). ag: Afrikaans interjection, roughly equivalent to ‘oh’. Amandla!: Power! Giving the black power salute and shouting ‘amandla ngawethu’ (power is ours). See also Sharpeville. amaBomvana: A Xhosa people. apartheid: ‘separateness’, used in Afrikaans politico-religious discussion since 1929. Apartheid by 1948 described a long-established status quo of discrimination but also became a focal word for the ‘new’ ideology of the National Party. aqira: traditional doctor (see also igquira, and igqwira). baasskap: Afrikaner political rule. Dominion, mastery—usually in a political sense of white supremacy. baba: a Zulu word meaning father; a term of respect. Bantu: people—also the term designating a large family of languages (including the Nguni and Sotho-Tswana sub-families). bantustans: black homeland; the term for ‘reserves’, where native African groups would be forced to relocate. Now often a derogatory term. BC: shorthand for Black Consciousness (see below). Biko, Steve: Bantu (black) political activist, founder of the BC movement, who died in detention 12 September, 1977—Biko was active in the Soweto uprising and subsequent protests, and was arrested by security police on August 18, 1977; 26 days later he was dead from massive head injuries sustained during the interrogation (see Soweto Uprising).

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Black Consciousness Movement: Movement founded by Steve Biko for promotion of awareness of rights and dignity of black people and their eventual liberation. Black Sash, the: a Women’s organization founded in 1955, to protest against violations of Civil Rights and assist victims; also sponsoring research. Boer: (1) an early Dutch Colonist of the Cape, (2) a farmer, (3) a Republican fighter in either of the Boer Wars, (4) an Afrikaner (or sometimes, any white South African), (5) slang: a prison warder or policeman. Botha, P.W.: (Pieter Willem) Prime Minister of South Africa 1978–89, an advocate of apartheid, who secured white electoral support for a new constitution which not only made him an executive president but also created ethnically distinct houses of parliament for whites, Coloured people, and Indians, with no representation for Africans. Buthelezi, Chief Mangosuthu: Zulu leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party; he said the party would not take part in the elections, but changed his mind a week before the historic event. Coconut: slang—black child attending a white school, learning mainly English. Coloured: South African of racially mixed descent. The term is now often avoided by many publications and speakers, hence ‘Coloured’ or so-called ‘Coloured’. Crossroads: a township area near Cape Town. de Klerk, F.W.: (Frederik Willem) Leader of the South African National Party from 1989; the last leader of South Africa under apartheid. Known as a conservative figure earlier in his career, he later implemented many important changes and reforms. He played a crucial role in the transition to democracy, ordering the release of Nelson Mandela and lifting the ban on the ANC and South African Communist Party. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela in 1993. de Klerk, W.A.: Afrikaans playwright, author of ‘Puritans in Africa’. Ellenbogen, Nicholas: director of Theatre for Africa. Gogo: grandmother, or more generally, venerated older female relation. Guguletu: a township near Cape Town. Hani, Chris: (Chris Martin Thembisile Hani) A leading figure in the younger generation of the ANC, and Leader of the South African Communist Party, murdered in April 1993. Head, Bessie: one of South Africa’s leading writers, born in South Africa in 1937—the child of an ‘illicit’ union between a white woman and a black man-writing from ‘exile’ in Botswana for many years. Her writing addressed political and personal issues; her story Maru has been adapted for the stage. She died at the age of 49, in Botswana in 1986. igqira: ‘witchdoctor’ who treats people for physical and psychological ailments, usually also a herbalist. igqwira: ‘witchdoctor’ who uses his power for evil purposes, such as to cast spells. Imbongi: praise singers to African chiefs whose traditional role is to chant in honour of the chief and his ancestors. Inkatha: aka Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesiswe (Organisation for Freedom of the People): a Zulu national organisation aiming at a non-racial democracy in South Africa with scope for free enterprise. Founded as a social and cultural body in 1928. interregnum: in recent South African history, the period following Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, up to the first democratic election in April 1994. Joubert, Elsa: contemporary Afrikaans writer, author of noted epic story Poppie: the real life account of the life of one black woman and her struggle to hold her family together under the oppressive laws of apartheid, in the area of the Cape Province—the book is often referred to as the South African, ‘real’, Mother Courage (see also ‘poppie’). kaffir: (1) slang: ‘nigger’: a term of contempt for a black person held to be offensive, developed from the ‘proper’ use: (2) a member of the Xhosa, Pondo or Thembu nations, regular nineteenth-century use for those speaking the Xhosa language. kaffirland: rural tribal areas. Karroo: The arid plateau or semi-desert regions of the Cape Province.

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Kente, Gibson: popular actor in South Africa, known for theatre work and also his appearances in soap operas. Khawuleza: hurry up. Khoi: The related group of languages spoken by the Khoikho including Nama (qua), Korana and Griqua. Khoikhoi: a pastoral people of South Africa and Namibia often called Hottentots (literally, men of men). KhoiSan: group of people comprising the Khoi and the San (bushmen) and their languages. lekker: (1) general term of approbation especially popular among children, with various positive connotations including: pleasant, excellent, delicious, beautiful, good, (2) slang: tipsy, merry. Mandela, Nelson (Rolihlahla): Current President of South Africa, the first black man to be elected to the post. He served 27 years in prison for his military activities with the ANC, and the campaign for his release became a focal point for the international struggle against apartheid. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with F.W. de Klerk in 1993. Mandela, Winnie: A South African politician who has frequently attracted controversy for her radical views. She was married to Nelson Mandela for over 30 years; they separated in 1992. Previously, she held the post of Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture, Science, and Technology; she was for many years-while Nelson Mandela was imprisoned—the main public voice of the ANC. Maponya, Maishe: contemporary black South African playwright, author of The Hungry Earth. Born in 1951, he and his family were forcibly removed from their home and ‘relocated’ to Soweto in 1966. He began writing in 1976, and refers to his theatre as ‘theatre of the dispossessed’. Mtwa, Percy: co-author, with Mbongeni, of the well known 1981 South African satirical play Woza Albert! Ndebele: An African people of Zulu descent now in Zimbabwe and the Transvaal. National Party: the Political party committed until recently to a policy of separate development for each major racial group, but since 1989–90 to ‘a united multi-party democratic state with a single citizenship’ and to dialogue with the ANC and other ‘liberation’ groups. Established in 1915. Ngema, Mbongeni: co-author, with Percy Mtwa, of the well known 1981 South African satirical play Woza Albert!; also the author of Asinamali! Nguni: A group of African peoples including the Ndebele, Swazi, Xhosa, and Zulus and that family of languages. PAC (Pan African Congress): African resistance body established in 1957, its policy then stated as: government of the Africans for the Africans, with everybody who owes allegiance and loyalty only to Africa and accepts the democratic rule of an African majority, being regarded as an African. Founded by Robert Sobukwe. poemdra: a performance poetry or storytelling form combining poetry, performance, and movement. poppie: colloquial: familiar mode of address when referring to a young girl, equivalent of ‘girlie’, a diminutive. Ramphele, Mamphela, Dr.: Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town and a prominent political activist. She is the widow of BC activist Steve Biko. Robben Island: Island in Table Bay, at various times a penal colony, leper colony and mental asylum and a place of detention for political prisoners. San: the people known as Bushmen; the languages of this group. shebeen: (illegal) house of liquor, pub. Sharpeville: scene of demonstration against Pass Laws on 21 March, 1960, in which 65 people were killed. Now used figuratively for any similar violent confrontation. Simon, Barney: Late artistic director and co-founder of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Smit, Bartho: emerged as a major South African playwright in the 1960s. His anti-apartheid stance was very controversial, and his influence has been profound. He became a mentor figure for a whole generation of young Afrikaans playwrights, including Reza De Wet. Soweto: acronym for the South Western Township (of Johannesburg) — now itself a city, and the scene of the first major student uprising of 1976.

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Soweto uprising: major student protest on 16 June, 1976 (now known as Soweto Day, and as National Youth Day). The protest was kindled by a government decision to enforce the use of Afrikaans as a language of medium in schools; this provided a focus for more generalised anger about apartheid oppressions of many kinds. The uprising was supported by the new Black Consciousness Movement (led by Steve Biko), and led to a series of revolts and demonstrations which lasted 18 months. (See Biko). Staffrider: person who rides illegally on the outside of suburban trains (to avoid paying the fare or to avoid theft or assault). State of Emergency: in 1984–5, racial divisions and uprisings were so extreme that a State of Emergency was declared, and the government (under P.W. Botha) banned news coverage of the violence. Tambo, Oliver: leader of the ANC in Zambia. Tsotsitaal: a polyglot language common to many of the South African townships, especially near Cape Town. Tutu, Archbishop Desmond: The Anglican archbishop of Cape Town and a strident critic of the apartheid regime. Verwoerd, Hendrik Frensch: Prime Minister of South Africa from 1955; one of the chief architects of the apartheid system, stabbed to death by a parliamentary messenger in the House of Assembly in September 1966. Verwoerd, Willhelm: Grandson of H.F., dedicated to helping to dismantle the apartheid system both socially, through political work with wife Melanie (ANC activist), and academically, through his post as Philosophy Lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch. Woza Albert!: literally ‘Arise Albert!’, a well known 1981 South African satirical play by Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema, portraying the hypothetical coming of Christ to South Africa under apartheid. Woza: imperative command: come!, rise up!, return! Xhosa: (1) a member of an African people, originally of the present Transkei, Ciskei and Eastern Cape, (2) the Nguni language of the Xhosa people is deemed to be the earliest form of Bantu speech, into which the Bible has been translated. Xosa: earlier spelling of Xhosa. Zulu: member of an African people originally of Zululand and Natal; also the language of these people.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 2, pp. 79–81 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Suggested Further Reading

Titles by contributors and related work on gender, the politics of performance and South African theatre. (also see the lists of references and works cited following each article) Adam, Heribert and Kogila Moodley. (1993) The Opening of the Apartheid Mind: Options for the New South Africa, Perspectives on Southern Africa 50. Berkeley, L.A. and London: The University of California Press. Agenda Editorial Collective, the, eds. Agenda: A Journal about Women and Gender (Durban, South Africa)—to obtain copies, contact: 29 Ecumenical Centre Trust, 20 St. Andrews St, Durban, 4001 South Africa. August, Tyrone. (1990) ‘Interview with Gcina Mhlophe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 329–335. Awkward, Michael. (1995) Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender and the Politics of Reading Chicago: Chicago University Press. Banning, Yvonne. (1990) ‘Language in the Theatre: Mediating Realities in an Audience’, in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 12–33. Black Sash, the editorial committee. (1991) SASH: Women and Gender, Vol. 34, No. 2. Black Sash, the editorial committee. (1993) SASH: Conference 1993, Vol. 36, No. 1. Blumberg, Marcia. (1991) ‘Languages of Violence: Fugard’s Boesman and Lena’ in James Redmond, ed. Violence in Drama, Cambridge University Press. Blumberg, Marcia. (1993) ‘Fragmentation and Psychosis: Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!’ in James Redmond (ed.) Madness in Drama, Cambridge University Press. Bobo, Jaqueline. (1995) Black Women as Cultural Readers, Columbia University Press. Davies, Carole Boyce. (1994) Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, Routledge. Davis, Geoffrey and Fuchs, Anne. (1996) Theatre and Change in South Africa, Vol. 12, Contemporary Theatre Studies, Harwood Academic Publishers. Flockemann, Miki. (1991) ‘Gcina Mhlophe’s Have You Seen Zandile?: English or English? The Situation of Drama in Literature and Language Departments in the Emergent Post-Apartheid South Africa’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2. Flockemann, Miki. (1992) ‘The State of South African Drama up to February 1990: the case of an(other) drama’, Pretexts, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 99–108. Fuchs, Anne. (1990) Playing the Market, Vol. 1, Contemporary Theatre Studies, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press. Goodman, Lizbeth. (1993) Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own, London: Routledge. Goodman, Lizbeth. (1994) ‘Stages Between Theory and Practice: Teaching Feminist Theatre’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 3–23. Goodman, Lizbeth, ed. (1996) Feminist Stages: Interviews with Women in Contemporary British Theatre, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press.

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Graver, David and Loren Kruger. (1989) ‘South Africa’s National Theatre: The Market or the Street?’, in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 19. Gray, Stephen. ‘The Theatre of Fatima Dike’, in The English Academy Review, Vol. 2, 1984, pp. 54–60. Gray, Stephen. (1990) ‘“Between Me and My Country”: Fugard’s My Children! My Africa! at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg’ in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 21. Gunner, Liz. (1990) ‘Introduction: Forms of Popular Culture and the Struggle for Space’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 199–206. Gunner, Liz. (1994) Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry, and Song in Southern Africa, Johannesburg: The University of Witswatersrand Press. Hauptfleisch, Temple and Ian Steadman, eds. (1984) South African Theatre: Four Plays and an Introduction, HAUM Educational Publishers. Hauptfleisch, Temple. (1989) ‘Citytalk, Theatretalk: Dialect, Dialogue and Multilingual Theatre in South Africa’ in English in Africa, Vol. 16, No. 1. Hauptfleisch, Temple. (1988) ‘From the Savoy to Soweto: The Shifting Paradigm in South African Theatre’, in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1. Hauptfleisch, Temple. (1992) ‘Post-Colonial Criticism, Performance Theory and the Evolving Forms of South African Theatre’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2. Hauptfleisch, Temple. Yolande du Preez and Yvette Hutchison. (1989) ‘A Bibliography of South African Theatre 1987– 88’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1. Hauptfleisch, Temple. (1993) ‘Crossover Theatre: New Trends in Theatremaking in South Africa’, Assaph: Studies in Theatre, No. 9. Hauptfleisch, Temple. (1995) ‘The Company you Keep: Subversive Thoughts on the Sociopolitical impact of the playwright and the performer’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. xi, No. 44. Horn, Andrew. (1986) ‘South African Theatre: Ideology and Rebellion’, African Literatures, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 211–233. International Defense Aid Fund for South Africa, eds. (1991) Women Under Apartheid, in Photographs and Text, London. Joubert, Elsa. (1980) Poppie, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball with Hodder and Stoughton. Kershaw, Baz. (1992) The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, London: Routledge. Kruger, Loren. (1991) ‘Apartheid on Display: South Africa Performs for New York’ in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2. Kruger, Loren. (1994) ‘Placing “New Africans” in the “Old” South Africa: Drama, Modernity, and Racial Identities in Johannesburg, circa 1935’, in Modernism/Modernity, Johns Hopkins, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 113–131. Larlham, Peter. (1992) ‘The Impact of the Dismantling of Apartheid on Theatre in South Africa’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2. Maponya, Maishe. (1984) ‘Interview’ (conducted by Carola Luther), in The English Academy Review, Vol. 2, pp. 19–32. Maponya, Maishe. (1995) Doing Plays for a Change: Five Works, ed. Ian Steadman, The University of Witswatersrand Press. Mathilda, Yvette, ed. (1995) Open Space, and anthology of plays including Reza de Wet’s ‘A Worm in the Bud’. Human and Rousseau. Mvula, Enoch Timpunza. (1991) ‘Strategy in Ngoni Women’s Oral Poetry’, in Critical Arts, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 1–37. Ndlova, Duma, ed. (1986) Woza Africa! An Anthology of South African Plays, with a Foreword by Wole Soyinka, George Braziller. Okpewho, Isadore. (1990) The Oral Performance in Africa Nigeria: Spectrum Books/UK: Safari Books. Orkin, Martin. (1986) ‘Body and State in Blood Knot/The Blood Knot’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1. Orkin, Martin. (1991) Drama and the South African State, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Orkin, Martin. (1992) ‘Whose Popular Theatre and Performance?’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2. Pavis, Patrice. (1992) Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, London: Routledge.

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Roberts, Diane. (1994) The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region, London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. (1991) ‘A Tale of a Few Cities: Interculturalism on the Road’ in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 28. Spink, Kathryn. (1991) Black Sash: The Beginning of a Bridge in South Africa, with a Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, London: Methuen. Steadman, Ian. (1981) ‘Alternative Performance in South Africa’ in Critical Arts: A Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1. Steadman, Ian. (1984) ‘Black South African Theatre After Nationalism’, The English Academy Review, Vol. 2, pp. 9–18. Steadman, Ian. (1984) ‘Alternative Politics, Alternative Performance: 1976 and Black South African Theatre’ in Daymond, Margaret, Jacobs, Johan, and Lenta, Margaret eds., Momentum: On Recent South African Writing, Durban: University of Natal Press. Steadman, Ian. (1988) ‘Stages in the Revolution: Black South African Theater since 1976’ in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 19, No. 1. Steadman, Ian. (1989) ‘Theatre Studies in the 1990s’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2. Steadman, Ian. (1990) ‘Towards Popular Theatre in South Africa’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2. Steadman, Ian. (1990) ‘Collective Creativity: Theatre for a Post-Apartheid Society’ in Trump (eds.), in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, Ohio University Press. Steadman, Ian. (1992) ‘The Uses of Theatre’, in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1. Steadman, Ian. (1992) ‘Performance and Politics in Process: Practices of Representation in South African Theatre’ in Theatre Survey: The Journal of the American Society for Theatre Research, Vol. 33, No. 2. Walder, Dennis. (1992) ‘Resituating Fugard: South African Drama as Witness’ in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 32, pp. 343–361. Walder, Dennis, ed. (1993) Athol Fugard: The Township Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walder, Dennis. (1993) ‘Crossing Boundaries: The Genesis of the Township Plays’ in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 39, No. 4. Young, Robert C. (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London: Routledge.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 2, p. 83 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Notes on Contributors

Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, and Chair of the Gender, Politics, Performance Research Project (one of the ongoing initiatives of the Gender in Writing and Performance Research Group) and of the Shakespeare Multimedia Research Project, for the Open University Faculty of Arts and the BBC. She is the author of Contemporary Feminist Theatres (Routledge, 1993) and editor of Feminist Stages (Harwood, 1996), Literature and Gender (Routledge, 1996), and co-editor of Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon (Routledge, 1996), and Imagining Women: Cultural Representations and Gender (Polity Press, 1992). Her next authored book, Sexuality in Performance, will be published by Routledge in 1999. Mythic Women/Real Women: Plays and Performance Pieces by Women is forthcoming from Faber and Faber in July 1999. Michael Picardie is based at the School of Dramatic Art, the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He has done an extensive research project and dissertation on Women in South African Theatre. Dudley Pietersen holds Honours degrees in both Afrikaans and English literature. He holds a full-time job as a director of a large private company, and teaches part-time in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape, Bellville, South Africa. He is currently completing a Masters dissertation, with Miki Flockemann, on South African Drama and the Apocalypse, which will be submitted for publication in the near future. Dennis Walder, a graduate of the Universities of Cape Town and Edinburgh, is Head of the Department of Literature at the Open University, where he is also Chair of the Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures Research Group. Author and editor of numerous publications on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, including nine books, he published the standard work on Athol Fugard in 1984, and is currently editing the third volume of the scholarly edition of Fugard’s plays for Oxford University Press. His next book will be Post-Colonial Literatures in English: Theory and Practice (Blackwells, 1997). He is working on a study of South African Theatre.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 2, pp. 85–88 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Index

advertising, 25 of theatre, 63, 65 affirmative action, in universities, 7 African cultures, 8, 19 Afrikaner 1, 46 Xhosa, 42–43, 46–47, 69 Zulu, 6, 42 Afrikaans language, 6, 57, 68, 69 Afrikaner culture, 1, 46 universities, 6 Albee, Edward, 27–28 all the Rage, see Denison, Janine Aloe St, 65 ANC (African National Congress), 9, 17, 53, 61 Cultural Desk, 28, 67 Women’s League, 17 Apartheid (and after), 27, 32, 37, 57, 59, 62 effects on gender and drama, 5–26 plays opposing, 46 attendance patterns, 1 at Grahamstown Festival, 61, 64, 66–69 audience(s), 1–4, 29–30, 31, 35, 36–37, 51–52, 57 at Grahamstown Festival, 61 ff. languages understood by, 8, 58, 68 London compared with Johannesburg, 33–34 naive versus sophisticated, 48 reception of Fugard, 54

Bryceland, Yvonne, 1, 3 Buckland, Janet, 65 bulimia, 65 Cape Flats Players, 67–68 Civic Theatre, the, 36 ‘classic theatre’ adaptations, on stage, 27 ff. coloured (designation of race, as opposed to black or white) people, 3, 46 at Grahamstown Festival, 61, 66, 68, 69 in Dike’s The First South African, 46–47 in Fugard’s Boesman and Lena, 54 treatment by universities, 6, 18 comedy (role in culture), 18–19, 24 Brother Jero, 54 creativity, 37, 40 cross-cultural study, 5 cultural boycott, 27, 33, 35–36 cultural developments in South Africa 1993–6, 5–26, 27– 37, 51–59 Curry, Bill, 1 dance, 11, 68 as protest, 16 D’Earth, Serius, 65 Deathbleedsnot, 65 deconstruction, 39–50 Dem …die Intolerance, 67–68 Denison, Janine, all the Rage, 65 Dike, Fatima, 1, 10, 11, 39, 42, 66 and comedy, 19 The First South African, 45–50 So What’s New?, 66 disempowerment (see also empowerment), 8, 52 domestic violence, 21 plays and performances about, 64, 65–66 Dowling, Leslie Rae, 69

Banning, Yvonne, conversations with Lizbeth Goodman, 5–26 Black Sash, the, 19 history and purpose, 20–21 Blumberg, Marcia, 65 Boesman and Lena, see Fugard, Athol Brecht, Bertolt, 7, 27 ff. Brechtian techniques in Fugard’s The Coat, 54 British context for South African plays, 40 60

INDEX

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drama therapy, 37 Dudley-Smith, Kalmia, 66

jazz, 61, 62, 68–70 Joyce, James, 35

Eastern European parallels to South African theatre, 27 ff. elitism, 66 empowerment (see also disempowerment), 51, 54 English culture, in South African universities, 6 English language, 30, 51 ff. at Grahamstown Festival, 66, 68 in South African universities, 6 township use of, 69 Equal Opportunities Project, University of Cape Town, 7

Kerkorrel, Johannes, 69

Feedback, 65 feminism, 5, 39, 49–50; Gcina Mhlophe and, 57 ferninist performance/theatre, 25 feminist theory, 39–50; not taught in universities, 10 Ferguson, Jennifer, 69 Ferguson, Melinda, 65 Flockemann, Miki, 7–3, 16, 66 Fugard, Athol, 7, 45, 51–59 Boesman and Lena, 1–4, 54–55, 56 The Island, 54 Siswe Bansi is Dead, 54 funding, arts and theatre, 7, 14–15

mainstream theatre, 64–65 Manaka, Matsemela, 52 MaNcube, Sello Maake, 34 Mandela, Nelson, 28 Mandela, Winnie, 17 Manim, Mannie, 27 Maponya, Maishe, 52, 56, 59 Market Theatre, the, 1–4, 11, 27–29, 34–35, 50, 54, 58 abandoned Festival of Women’s Plays, 56 founded, 27–28 McCarthy, Bridget, Shots in the Dark, 65, 67 media representations, 17, 18, 51 ff. of 1994 elections, 23–24 Mhlophe, Gcina, 1, 7–8, 10, 11, 19, 34, 39, 42–50, 51–52, 55–59 Have you Seen Zandile?, 8, 42–50, 55–59 Mofokeng, Jerry, 1 Morkel, Toni, The Uitgefriekte Fractelina, 63, 65 mothers, in The First South African, 46–47, 49 and Have You Seen Zandile?, 42–44, 56 Mtshali, Thembi (see also Mhlophe, Gcina: Have You Seen Zandik?), 42, 50, 57, 59 music (see also jazz, ska, reggae), at Grahamstown Festival, 61–63, 68–69; 11, 23 lack of classical tradition in South Africa, 36 musicals, 25

gay issues in theatre, 15–16,18, 65 gender, 1 ff., 5–26, 27 ff., 39 ff., 49–50, 51 ff., 61 ff. issues ignored by universities, 10, 15–16 gender politics, 9, 17, 19, 20–21, 39 ff. God and Fetish Engineering, see Harding, Stacey Goodman, Lizbeth, conversation with Janet Suzman, 27– 37 conversations with Yvonne Banning, 5–26 interview with Nomhle Nkonyeni, 1–4 introduction, 1–15 Grahamstown, Festival, 11, 61–70 Rhodes University in, 10 Harding, Stacey, God and Fetish Engineering, 65 Have you Seen Zandile?, see Mhlophe, Gcina identity, 25–26, 64, 65, 68 black, 19–20, 46, 56–57 problems of, 18 Island, the, see Fugard, Athol

Langellier, Kristin, 57–59 language(s), 8, 22, 61, 68 and power, 51–59 as issue, 39–50 in universities, 6 Shakespearean, 29–31, 36 (See also sign language) literary politics, 39 ff., 49

Ngema, Mbongeni, 52 Nkonyeni, Nomhle, 54, interviewed, 1–4 Nunu Productions, 65 oral storytelling, 14 as women’s domain, 57–58 Gcina Mhlophe and, 57–59

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INDEX

Patience, as name and concept, 51–59 patriarchy, 47 performance, 1 ff., 5 ff., 14–15, 23, 25–26, 27 ff., 30, 39 ff., 51 ff., 61 ff., 65, 69 and race, 19 traditions lost, 8 training, 10 Petersen, Bo, 65–66 Peterson, Eric, 57–59 Phillips, Shawn, 69–70 Picardie, Michael, 51 article by, 39–50 Pieterse, Marlene, 66 Pietersen, Dudley, article by, 61–70 plays by South African women (see also Dike, Fatima; Mhlophe, Gcina), 39–50, 65–67 poemdras, 1 poetry, 1,11, 29 censorship of, 9 in The First South African, 45–49 politics (see also gender politics, literary politics), 1–4, 5 ff., 25–26, 27 ff., 39 ff., 50, 51 ff., 61 ff. gender ignored in, 17 ‘politics of uncertainty’, 40 relationship to art, 35 theatrical dimension of, 16, 20–21 popular culture (see also soap operas), 13 magazines, 44 music, 68 postcolonial criticism, 51–59 power politics, 5–26, 39–50 racial considerations in performance, 1–4 racial divisions, 5 ff, 53, 61–62 at Grahamstown Festival, 67–69 in universities, 6, 9 rape, 44, 51, 57, 61 date rape, 65 Rauch, Laurica, 69 Reeskens, Natasha, 65 reggae, 61, 62, 68–69 regional arts associations (NAPAC, CAPAB, PACT and PACOFS), 14, 24 resistance, 9 Sachs, Albie, 11 sexuality, 15–16, 18 black, 31 Shakespeare, William, 7, 27–37, 49

Othello, 27–37 Shots in the Dark, see McCarthy, Bridget sign language, 63 Simon, Barney, 11, 27, 53, 56 Siswe Bansi is Dead, See Fugard, Athol Sjambok Productions, 65 ska music, 62 So What’s New?, See Dike, Fatima soap operas, 25 South African theatre, 1 ff., 5 ff., 27 ff., 39 ff., 51 ff., 61 ff. and education, 20 female characters in, 33 gay issues in, 15–16 protest theatre in, 8–9 women’s status in, 10, 25–26, 37, 64–66 Soweto, 32 uprising at, 8 Space Theatre, the, 50 Storm in a Teacup, 65 student theatre, 11, 19–21, 25 at Grahamstown Festival, 67 subversive strategies of representation, in The First South African, 45–49 Suzman, Janet, 54 conversation with Lizbeth Goodman, 27–37 taboo for women, 5, 7–8 Taylor, Mavis, 7, 66 Taylor, Theola, 65 teaching of drama at universities in South Africa, 5–26 theatre venues, funding of, 14–15 theatre venues, locations of (see also Civic Theatre, the; Market Theatre, the; Space Theatre, the), 5 ff., 7, 14–15, 19, 27 ff., 62, 67–68 themes in women’s theatre (sexual ambiguity, sexual humiliation and abuse, family violence, gay issues, incest, a re-assertion of identity in a changingsociety, rape, etc.), 25, 64–66 This is for Keeps, 65–66 Thompson, Leonard, 57, 59 township theatre, 5–26, 27 passim., 45, 53 audience in, 48 Fugard’s Township Plays, 51, 59 venues for, 67 The Uitgefriekte Fractelina, see Morkel, Toni Vanrenen, Maralin (see also Mhlophe, Gcina, Have You Seen Zandile?), 42, 50, 56–57, 59

INDEX

Venus Flytapese, 65 violence (see also domestic violence), 5, 7, 15–16, 23, 27, 31–33, 35, 45, 56–57 voter education in theatre, 5, 20–21 Walder, Dennis, 1; article by, 51–59 Wasps, 66 Western theatre traditions, on stage, 27–37, 41, 53–54 Western theatre traditions, taught in universities, 14, 19– 20 The Witches of Eastgate, 66 women as central to the home, 17–18, 19 women as playwrights (see also Dike, Fatima; Mhlophe, Gcina), 10, 11, 19, 39–50, 61 ff., 65–66 women as poets, 45–49 women as political activists, 9, 17–18, 19, 20–21, 25–26 women as teachers, 5–26 women’s experiences, 56–57, 58 women’s rights, 7, 57 women’s status in law, 51 ff., 57 women’s status in theatre, 10, 25–26, 37, 61 ff., 64–66 women’s voices, 1 ff., 51 ff., 55, 61 ff. Xhosa culture, 42–43, 69 initiation rites, 46–47 Xhosa language, 6, 44, 57–58 Zulu culture 6, 42 Zulu language, 42, 57–58

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