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Performance and Politics in Process: Practices of Representation in South African Theatre1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Ian Steadman
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Extract

In many studies of South African theatre, critical scholarship has elucidated the ways in which playwrights have dramatized their views of oppression and struggle under apartheid. As political change in the country in the 1990s determines new developments in cultural expression, theatre in many quarters finds itself no longer thematically bound to the unambiguous morality which characterized anti-apartheid theatre in the 1970s and 1980s. The issues, and the forms and methods used to construct interpretations of the issues in the theatre, appear increasingly more complex in the 1990s. In academic commentary on South African theatre, a moral outrage shared with theatre practitioners against a repugnant social system has frequently blunted critical faculties. Gayatri Spivak warns us that in the writing of history we need to “look at [our] own subjective investment in the narrative that is being produced.“ There is, in South African theatre studies, a great deal of room for critical vigilance when considering “theatre against apartheid.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , November 1992 , pp. 188 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1992

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References

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