| ||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Township Plays: No-Good Friday; Nongogo; The Coat; Sizwe Bansi is Dead; The Island for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
The five plays collected here offer a unique insight into the role of theatre in a situation of oppression. They were produced in close collaboration with their original black amateur casts, drawing on their lives and everyday experiences in the townships. They range from the early apprentice work of the brash but vital Sophiatown plays, No-Good Friday and Nongogo, to the freer, more urgent, and profound New Brighton plays, including the most famous Sizwe Bansi is Dead and IThe Island, and the previously unavailable The Coat.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
A backyard in Sophiatown, late Friday afternoon. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
A backyard in Sophiatown, late Friday afternoon. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Some of these plays are written by Athol Fugard, others are the result of collaboration with actors from the Actors' Studio and The Serpent Players. He formed these companies with black actors from the townships during the apartheid era. Two of the actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, who developed and played the leading roles, share the copyright on two of these plays. Sizwe Bansi is Dead focuses on the Pass Laws: its central character, Sizwe Bansi faces the dilemma of losing his own identity by using a dead man's pass book if he is to find work and support his family. He is persuaded that he has no identity or dignity under South African law anyway: "When the white man looked at you at the Labour Bureau what did he see? A man with dignity or a bloody passbook with an NI number? ... When the white man sees you walk down the street and calls out, 'Hey, John! Come here'... to you, Sizwe Bansi... isn't that a ghost? Or when a little child calls you 'Boy'... you a man, circumcised, with a wife and four children?" The Island shows two men imprisoned on Robben Island, the infamous prison where political dissidents, including Nelson Mandela, were imprisoned. As well as dramatising a moving account of the hardships endured by prisoners, the play's two characters are preparing a performance of Sophocles' play Antigone in the prison, and the last scene shows the key moment of their production, which draws an unmistakable parallel between Antigone's situation and their own, as Antigone points out that she is guilty of following a higher, god-granted law rather than the legislated law, seeing in that a greater honour than following the laws of a tyrannical state. At the end of the play, Winston, playing Antigone, removes his costume to deliver Antigone's final lines: "Gods of our Fathers! My Land ! My Home! Time waits no longer. I go now to my living death, because I honoured those things to which honour belongs." These are fascinating, often moving plays, demonstrating the vibrancy and importance of art as a form of political protest and voice.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
