From the Cape of Good Hope: South African Drama and Performance in the Age of Globalization

Since the official end of apartheid in 1994, almost two decades ago, theatre in South Africa has lost the prominent position it enjoyed as the site of cultural resistance to the state. Theatre in the post-apartheid era has to compete with film and television for talent as well as audience attention, and all South African cultural institutions today, as against the isolation due to boycotts against apartheid, must confront the onslaught of ready-made cultural product from overseas. Some writers have responded to this global competition by working in other genres. Veteran dramatist Zakes Mda's anti-apartheid plays, such as We Shall Sing for the Fatherland (1979) and The Hill (1980), had South African premieres even when he was still in exile and they still appear on university stages today, but Mda now writes mostly fiction, which, thanks to a visiting professorship at Ohio University, he publishes in the United States. Younger playwrights often write for television; Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom, represented here by Relativity (in the collection Armed Response) as well as Foreplay, wrote scripts for thrillers and soap opera before he gained an audience for his controversial stage plays. Others come to playwriting after directing and adapting others' work, such as Lara Foot-Newton, who adapted Mda's novel Ways of Dying (2000), before writing original drama like Reach, reprinted also in Armed Response and At This Stage.

In a cultural field in which published plays remain the exception, the appearance of several anthologies of plays in recent years, headed up by New South African Plays, provides a welcome occasion to evaluate post-apartheid drama and its engagement not only with South Africa's peculiar history, but also with the country's response to transnational concerns, as befits its location at the confluence of the Atlantic and Indian oceans on the tip of Africa. Given the competition for scarce resources, it is not surprising that playwrights with access to international venues or publishers are more likely to see their work in print. Apart from At This Stage, under review here, Wits University Press's backlist is dominated by Athol Fugard, with occasional single plays that have become textbooks, such as Junction Avenue Theatre Company's durable though not so new Sophiatown (1986). Internationally, Drama for a New South Africa (1999) is a rare US volume still in print, with plays that range from Sophiatown to slightly more recent works like Brett Bailey's Ipi Zombi. Otherwise, interested readers have to dig into anthologies of plays from different locations; Beyond Bollywood and Broadway, edited by Neilesh Bose (2009, reviewed in Theatre Journal's October 2011 issue), for example, includes plays by South African cousins Ronnie and Kessie Govender. Only Oberon Press in the UK appears to be publishing new South African plays systematically, including, in addition to Reza de Wet discussed below, Theatre of Witness (2005), comprising three plays created by director Yael Farber in collaboration with black performers who drew on their own life experiences, and Molora (2008), her collaboration with the amaNgqoko Cultural Group, which provided the Xhosa translation as well as performed the chorus in her adaptations of Aeschylus's Oresteia and the Elektra plays by Sophocles and Euripides.

The plays collected in the anthologies edited by David Peimer, Greg Homann, and Charles Fourie and in the volumes by Grootboom and Greig Coetzee...