A collection of six plays by South Africa’s leading playwright and actor featuring works written between 1984 and 1993.

" . . . a solid addition to international drama." —Library Journal Going beyond the parameters of conventional literary drama, these seven new plays express life issues in post-apartheid South Africa—Islamic fundamentalism, women's rights, ecology, Afrikaans culture and the new multi-racial life of the inner city. While theater rooted in the anti-apartheid movement was rich and vibrant, it was also singleminded in focus, obscuring the diversity of South African culture now brought to life in these works.

South Africa has a uniquely rich and diverse theatre tradition which has responded energetically to the country's remarkable transition, helping to define the challenges and contradictions of this young democracy. This volume considers the variety of theatre forms, and the work of the major playwrights and theatre makers producing work in democratic South Africa. It offers an overview of theatre pioneers and theatre forms in Part One, before concentrating on the work of individual playwrights in Part Two. Through its wide-ranging survey of indigenous drama written predominantly in the English language and the analysis of more than 100 plays, a detailed account is provided of post-apartheid South African theatre and its engagement with the country's recent history. Part One offers six overview chapters on South African theatre pioneers and theatre forms. These include consideration of the work of artists such as Barney Simon, Mbongeni Ngema, Phyllis Klotz; the collaborations of William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company; the work of Magnet Theatre, and of physical and popular community theatre forms. Part Two features chapters on twelve major playwrights, including Athol Fugard, Reza de Wet, Lara Foot, Zakes Mda, Yaël Farber, Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom, Mike van Graan and Brett Bailey. It includes a survey of emerging playwrights and significant plays, and the book closes with an interview with Aubrey Sekhabi, the Artistic Director of the South African State Theatre in Pretoria. Written by a team of over twenty leading international scholars, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre is a unique resource that will be invaluable to students and scholars from a range of different disciplines, as well as theatre practitioners.

Part three of a three texts compiled during the years of change in South Africa, charts the impact of Apartheid and the cultural boycott on performance, and examining the role of women in theatre. Part three focuses on gender and sexuality and features the text of "So What's New".

In the years that followed the end of apartheid, South African theatre was characterized by a remarkable productivity, which resulted in a process of constant aesthetic reinvention. After 1994, the “protest” theatre template of the apartheid years morphed into a wealth of diverse forms of stage idioms, detectable in the works of Greg Homann, Mike van Graan, Craig Higginson, Lara Foot, Omphile Molusi, Nadia Davids, Magnet Theatre, Rehane Abrahams, Amy Jephta, and Reza de Wet, to cite only a few prominent examples. Marc and Jessica Maufort’s multivocal edited volume documents some of the various ways in which the “rainbow” nation has forged these innovative stage idioms. This book’s underlying assumption is that creolization reflects the processes of identity renegotiation in contemporary South Africa and their multi-faceted theatrical representations. Contributors: Veronica Baxter, Marcia Blumberg, Vicki Briault Manus, Petrus du Preez, Paula Fourie, Craig Higginson, Greg Homann, Jessica Maufort, Marc Maufort, Omphile Molusi, Jessica Murray, Jill Planche, Ksenia Robbe, Mathilde Rogez, Chris Thurman, Mike van Graan, and Ralph Yarrow.

From the outset, South Africa's history has been marked by division and conflict along racial and ethnic lines. From 1948 until 1994, this division was formalized in the National Party's policy of apartheid. Because apartheid intruded on every aspect of private and public life, South African literature was preoccupied with the politics of race and social engineering. Since the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990, South Africa has been a new nation-in-the-making, inspired by a nonracial idealism yet beset by poverty and violence. South African writers have responded in various ways to Njabulo Ndebele's call to "rediscover the ordinary." The result has been a kaleidoscope of texts in which evolving cultural forms and modes of identity are rearticulated and explored. An invaluable guide for general readers as well as scholars of African literary history, this comprehensive text celebrates the multiple traditions and exciting future of the South African voice. Although the South African Constitution of 1994 recognizes no fewer than eleven official languages, English has remained the country's literary lingua franca. This book offers a narrative overview of South African literary production in English from 1945 to the postapartheid present. An introduction identifies the most interesting and noteworthy writing from the period. Alphabetical entries provide accurate and objective information on genres and writers. An appendix lists essential authors published before 1945.

This second collection, complementing ASNEL Papers 9.1, covers a similar range of writers, topics, themes and issues, all focusing on present-day transcultural issues and their historical antecedents: TOPICS TREATED Preparing for post-apartheid in South African fiction; Maori culture and the New Historicism; Danish-New Zealand acculturation; linguistic approaches to 'void'; women's overcoming in Southern African writing; new post-apartheid approaches to literary studies; Afrikanerdom; postmodern psychoanalytic interpretations of Indian religion and identity; transcultural identity in the encounter with London: Malaysian, Nigerian, Pakistani; hypertextual postmodernism; fictionalized multiculturalism and female madness in Australian fiction; myopia and double vision in colonial Australia; Native-American fiction and poetry; Chinese-Canadian and Japanese-Canadian multiculturalism; the postcolonial city; African-American identity and postcolonial Africa; Johannesburg as locus of literary and dramatic creativity; theatre before and after apartheid; the black experience in England. WRITERS DISCUSSED Lalithambika Antherjanam; Ayi Kwei Armah; J.M. Coetzee; Tsitsi Dangarembga; Helen Darville; Lauris Edmond; Buchi Emecheta; Yvonne du Fresne; Hiromi Goto; Patricia Grace; Rodney Hall; Joy Harjo; Bessie Head; Gordon Henry Jr.; Christopher Hope; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Hanif Kureishi; Keri Hulme, Lee Kok Liang; Bill Manhire; Zakes Mda; Mike Nicol; Michael Ondaatje; Alan Paton; Ravinder Randhawa; Wendy Rose; Salman Rushdie; Sipho Sepamla; Atima Srivastava; Meera Syal; Marlene van Niekerk; Yvonne Vera; Fred Wah CRITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS BY Ken Arvidson; Thomas Bruckner; David Callahan; Eleonora Chiavetta; Marc Colavincenzo; Gordon Collier; John Douthwaite; Dorothy Driver; Claudia Duppe; Robert Fraser; Anne Fuchs; John Gamgee; D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke; Konrad Gross; Bernd Herzogenrath; Susanne Hilf; Clara A.B. Joseph; Jaroslav Ku nir; Chantal Kwast-Greff; M.Z. Malaba; Sigrun Meinig; Michael Meyer; Mike Nicol; Obododimma Oha; Vincent O'Sullivan; Judith Dell Panny; Mike Petry; Jochen Petzold; Norbert H. Platz; Malcolm Purkey; Stephanie Ravillon; Anne Holden Ronning; Richard Samin; Cecile Sandten; Nicole Schroder; Joseph Swann; Andre Viola; Christine Vogt-William; Bernard Wilson; Janet Wilson; Brian Worsfold. CREATIVE WRITING BY Katherine Gallagher; Peter Goldsworthy; Syd Harrex; Mike Nicol THE EDITORS: Geoffrey V. Davis and Peter H. Marsden teach at the Rhenish-Westphalian Technical University, Aachen; Benedicte Ledent and Marc Delrez teach at the University of Liege.