Overview

Theatre is not part of our vocabulary : Sipho Sepamla's provocation in 1981, the year of famous anti-apartheid play Woza Albert!, prompts the response, yes indeed, it is. A Century of South African Theatre demonstrates the impact of theatre and other performances-pageants, concerts, sketches, workshops, and performance art-over the last hundred years. Its coverage includes African responses to pro-British pageants celebrating white Union in 1910, such as the Emancipation Centenary of the abolition of British colonial slavery in 1934 organized by Griffiths Motsieloa and HIE Dhlomo, through anti-apartheid testimonial theatre by Athol Fugard, Maishe Maponya, Gcina Mhlophe, and many others, right up to the present dramatization of state capture, inequality and state violence in today's unevenly democratic society, where government has promised much but delivered little. Building on Loren Kruger's personal observations of forty years as well as her published research, A Century of South African Theatre provides theoretical coordinates from institution to public sphere to syncretism in performance in order to highlight South Africa's changing engagement with the world from the days of Empire, through the apartheid era to the multi-lateral and multi-lingual networks of the 21st century. The final chapters use the Constitution's injunction to improve wellbeing as a prompt to examine the dramaturgy of new problems, especially AIDS and domestic violence, as well as the better known performances in and around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kruger critically evaluates internationally known theatre makers, including the signature collaborations between animator/designer William Kentridge, and Handspring Puppet Company, and highlights the local and transnational impact of major post-apartheid companies such as Magnet Theatre.

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[Loren Kruger's] detailed discussions of colonial-era pageants, the theatre of Afrikaner nationalism and Black Consciousness, as well as the diverse experiments of contemporary dramatists responding to HIV-AIDS, gender violence, state corruption, and the massacre of miners at Marikana, make A Century of South African Theatre essential reading. Going beyond the local, Kruger insightfully places South African theatre within a transnational frame, tracing influences ranging from the European avant-garde to African American popular stage shows. -- Mark Sanders, Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University, USA Kruger performs the impossible. Her book provides a panoptic view of a sprawling, unwieldy and fascinating subject but there are no short cuts or bland generalisations. Instead, she moves astutely across the shifting terrain and multiple maps of theatre in South Africa, marking the tensions and contradictions of overlapping languages, cultures and authorities...Certainly, in its compelling and erudite coverage of a difficult theatrical century this is a volume not to be missed. * Liz Gunner, Visiting Research Professor LanCSAL, School of Languages, University of Johannesburg, South Africa * This book has done justice to the history of South African theatre and more specifically the history of performance and playwriting by African and women theatre makers. While Kruger gives the colonial/apartheid theatre its place and context in history, she deliberately foregrounds the subaltern. As an analyst, Kruger is privileged to have a working knowledge of isiZulu, which she uses to her advantage to view plays, collect data and make informed opinions on African performances. She straddles both the insider and outsider positions making her historical account balanced. This book is an excellent resource for all drama/theatre/performance departments offering an academic major in (South) African theatre or any cultural analyst with an interest in theatre studies. * Samuel Ravengai, Associate Professor, Head of the Wits School of the Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa * Loren Kruger has made an enormous contribution to the scholarly study of South African theatre, not only in reflecting us to ourselves, but also in placing us within the context of a world theatre. She repeatedly reveals her mastery of the rigorous tools of analysis in tracking and mining rich seams of cultural activity which she is able to filter into potent, tightly packed categories. * South African Theatre Journal * The views as expressed in this book should undoubtedly be taken seriously in any (re)evaluation of the role played by theatre and performance over the course of the past 100 years. * Critical Stages *

Loren Kruger's grasp of the history of South African theatre is unparalleled. The agility with which she moves between politics, institutions, and discussion of texts and performances is impressive. Her detailed discussions of colonial-era pageants, the theatre of Afrikaner nationalism and Black Consciousness, as well as the diverse experiments of contemporary dramatists responding to HIV-AIDS, gender violence, state corruption, and the massacre of miners at Marikana, make A Century of South African Theatre essential reading. Going beyond the local, Kruger insightfully places South African theatre within a transnational frame, tracing influences ranging from the European avant-garde to African American popular stage shows. -- Mark Sanders, Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University, USA Kruger performs the impossible. Her book provides a panoptic view of a sprawling, unwieldy and fascinating subject but there are no short cuts or bland generalisations. Instead, she moves astutely across the shifting terrain and multiple maps of theatre in South Africa, marking the tensions and contradictions of overlapping languages, cultures and authorities. Kruger is emphatic that theatre is not made only on the stage, or marked space of performance, but also in the public arena of pageants, centenary celebrations and exhibitions. Set in the early decades of the last century, these were performances of power and elision. Each enacted a particular view of dominance and attainment that had little if any place for the country's indigenous peoples. How these enactments were challenged through different modes of theatre, built on a fast-urbanising African culture that could recall its own pasts, and produce ideas of a contrasting or virtual public sphere, forms a substantial strand of the first part book. Original and provocative, this section is highly Informative, as well as sweeping in its coverage. Kruger's book is thick with the kind of fine detail and knowledge rarely held together in a single publication. What this means for the reader is that s/he can grasp the complexity of theatre history across the century. As Kruger takes us through the dense body of theatrical output she picks up emergent dissident themes within a cultural tradition such as Afrikaans. In the African body of theatre she points to language shifts and innovations, to the cultural interweaving and the challenges to state authority all of which theatre groups, artists and writers or collaborative improvisers engaged in. English itself, as a language of theatre, becomes a terrain of exploration and innovation as the century moves on into the challenging decades of state repression by the ruling National Party. In the latter part of the book, Kruger traces the importance in late apartheid and after, of a single institution such as the Market Theatre in down town Johannesburg. At the same time, she points to the importance of audiences in shaping South Africa's varied theatre traditions. Tensions between what activist writers believed audiences ought to like, and what they did like, came to the fore in the African townships. The energy of African theatre had as one of its roots the tradition of performance as entertainment. This, as Kruger points, was an inheritance from early African-American performing groups imparting a concert/theatre culture where education and entertainment went hand in hand. Skillfully, Kruger pulls this strand through the later chapters of the book when she points to the influence of Gibson Kente, artist, teacher and entrepreneur, who combined music and melodrama, highlighting the sorrows of black urban life and largely skirting around direct political engagement. Like the early African-American entertainers, Kente travelled the country, in his case performing largely in dusty township halls in urban and peri-urban/rural areas. This robust tradition of theatrical enjoyment came up against more somber resistance theatre and in the most powerful instances, the two forces combined. Kruger cites the much-performed play Woza Albert by Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema as the prime example of this merging of theatrical energies. This volume highlights other difficult inheritances, one of which is the formidably masculinist cast of much so-called theatre of the Struggle, where women as figures of authority, resistance or role models are largely absent. As Kruger moves the volume into the post-1994 democratic era, she points out how new theatre movements and artists have redressed the gendered images of nationalism and resistance, and used the established mode of testimonial theatre in new ways. Writing past the arc of resistance theatre Kruger points to new kinds of theatrical dissidence where dramatists such as Zakes Mda throw up the possibilities of state corruption and rotten leadership, and outline the plight of the migrant poor. Here too, though, audience views matter. Certainly, in its compelling and erudite coverage of a difficult theatrical century this is a volume not to be missed. * Liz Gunner, Visiting Research Professor LanCSAL, School of Languages, University of Johannesburg, South Africa * Loren Kruger approaches the writing of this beautiful book from the perspective of a theatre and performance historian. Although part of her background is in comparative literature, her approach is not entirely a literary analysis of play texts. For a book that covers over fifty plays spanning slightly over a hundred years, an exclusively literary analysis would be impossible. There is an interesting articulation of socio-historical theory with performance reconstruction and analysis. Her approach in South African theatre historiography is unique. Kruger uses a discursive approach organised around particular themes like pageants, the African dramatic movement, anti-apartheid theatre, Afrikaner theatre, theatre of determination, theatre of testimony, post-apartheid theatre and trends in contemporary South African theatre. As a lover and researcher of South African theatre, Kruger partly relies on her personal memories of the performances she witnessed in situ, her expansive reading of South African plays (some of which are residual play texts that record a prior performance) and performance reconstruction. With the latter method, she relies on meta-commentary based on stage photos, media reports of performances, yearbooks, almanacs, theatre reviews, posters, interviews and other archival sources. Kruger references these sources in her interrogation of South African theatre. Her endeavour is to reconstitute lost performances until they appear to her vividly in her imagination based on the available evidence. Kruger's discursive analysis begins first by dating the performances where that evidence exists and then provides a socio-historical context of the theatre event, which is followed by a brief critique of the play text/performance. Plays and performances serve as reference points in her historical account rather than exclusive objects of study. Her competences are glaring. She loathes the exclusion or silencing of women and Africans in stories that valorise white male heroism. Her perspective does not change in her critique of black solidarity theatre and anti-apartheid theatre where black women play a secondary role to black men. She is quick to expose these inequalities. Since Loren Kruger covers a significant number of plays and performances, more than one would find in a book that does a comparative analysis, she does not carry out a detailed analysis of each play or performance or even a semiotic study of such sources. Rather she does a panoramic dissection of these objects of study from a very high altitude to see and cover as much ground as is possible. If needs be, she lowers her altitude to ferret details of particular performances, for example in the last two chapters. Her approach is performance reconstruction and analysis underpinned by socio-historical theory to deliver a plausible account of the history of South African theatre in the last one hundred years. In this endeavour, Kruger has been remarkably successful. Previous historical accounts of South African theatre have tended to concentrate on the creative output of particular theatres like the Baxter Theatre (Barrow and Williams-Short 1987), the Market Theatre or particular theatre companies and their repertoire, like the Magnet Theatre (Lewis and Krueger 2016). Other scholars on the same subject have tended to focus on struggle theatre deploying the radical paradigm (Kavanagh 1985) or understanding South African theatre as a system of interlocking processes in the last fifty years of the 20th century (Hauptfleisch 1997). The most recent historical accounts are rather collections (see Homann and Maufort 2015) by different scholars concentrating on just post-apartheid South African theatre. A book of a comparable length by David Coplan (2007) only delves on the creative output of black theatre artists and musicians living in the urban locations and townships and excludes other racial categories. A century of South African Theatre is the first book to record performances of all South Africans; white, Africans, Indians and coloured and more importantly women theatre makers right from 1910 to the present moment. The book is not a mere disinterested chronicling of performance events from 1910 to the present. It raises a number of cogent arguments around the expanded field of performance that includes large-scale performances of pageants to commemorate particular landmark South African events. These include the 1910 Union pageant, the 1934 Emancipation Centenary Celebrations, the 1936 Johannesburg Golden Jubilee, the 1938 re-enactment of the Great Trek, the post-1948 Tercentenary of Jan Van Riebeeck's landing at the Cape and the 1994 Mandela Inauguration. White South Africans attempted to perform the nation in the manner they wanted it to be remembered and perpetuate it in the future. The past was re-enacted with players who acted as surrogates for absent agents. In recording these performances, Loren Kruger notices a number of problematic issues. In this surrogation, either colonial players wrote off Africans from history or they presented them as buffoons with no agency. There was selective amnesia where, for example, the 1910 Union pageant avoided the Anglo-Boer war for political expediency. The performances denied white women agency and they played mute maidens as the pageants projected white males as heroes. A second strand of the book is the projection of South African theatre as a site of struggle. The struggles were many and different players waged them at different times. The decolonial discourse is not a new narrative, but is old as South African theatre. Theatre became a site of struggle on the issue of decolonisation. Some Africans sought decolonisation through what Loren Kruger calls re-traditionalization like the Mthethwa Brothers. Other Africans, dubbed 'New Africans' sought decolonization or selfhood through syncretism. When the National Party came to power in 1948 theatre became a site of struggle to contain and curtail Anglicization and replacing them with Afrikanerization. In response, Kruger examines the manner Africans, Indians and Coloureds used theatre to build solidarity against apartheid and to affirm their selfhood through theatre of determination. Kruger delineates what she calls testimonial theatre and how anti-apartheid creatives used it to recruit supporters and to build sympathy for the oppressed. After 1994, there were various trends in South African theatre expertly covered in Hauptfleisch (1997) and Van Herden (2011). Loren Kruger chooses to focus on how the forms developed in testimonial theatre were repurposed to dramatize gender violence that had been eclipsed by the masculine anti-apartheid activism. This becomes a struggle of a gendered type. In fact, in all the above descriptions of struggles, Kruger's womanist voice is loud. She bemoans the absence of women's voices in early African theatre, the emasculation of women's agency in most pageants and the projection of women as idle or incapacitated in the male struggles against apartheid. Where the evidence is clear, Kruger has amplified the voice of women by covering a significantly high number of plays written by women in this book. Nicely weaved in all the eight chapters is the conviction and demonstration that South African theatre and performance right from its early days of contact with the empire has the distinctive character of its national and transnational influences which Kruger has called syncretism. The 'New Africans' like Herbert Dhlomo created syncretic theatre, which he called izibongelo. The same could be said about the Black Consciousness Movement, testimonial theatre and post-apartheid theatre which combined African forms like storytelling, ritual theatre, ceremonies, social drama, song and dance with European theatre reformers/innovators like Brecht, Grotowski, Artaud, Brook and the American musical. This book demonstrates this interweaving of cultures. Loren Kruger first conceptualized A Century of South African Theatre as The Drama of South Africa: Plays, pageants and publics since 1910 and published with Routledge in 1999. This current edition is a massive improvement of the Routledge edition. It abandons the narrow term, drama, and deploys its broader and decolonial cousin, theatre, which allows Kruger to discuss enactments like pageants without fear of contradiction. All chapters add relevant plays and performances that have occurred beyond 1999 to the original account to bring the book up to date and sometimes leading to different conclusions from earlier ones. This book is a one-stop shop where most theatre commodities produced in the last one hundred years are available, contextualised, themed and theorised. In the new book, Kruger has discarded the old chapter headings and replaced them with new ones to reflect the new content. When writing of the old book ended in 1999, South African theatre had not yet developed distinct trends that could be theorised with certainty. In this new book, Kruger looks back with a perceptive eye to underscore the new formations that have emerged in South African theatre. Kruger has therefore added two new chapters to capture these moments and has selected a number of plays and performances as reference points to support some remarkably interesting observations she makes about politics and its iteration in the fictive world of theatre. This book has done justice to the history of South African theatre and more specifically the history of performance and playwriting by African and women theatre makers. While Kruger gives the colonial/apartheid theatre its place and context in history, she deliberately foregrounds the subaltern. As an analyst, Kruger is privileged to have a working knowledge of isiZulu, which she uses to her advantage to view plays, collect data and make informed opinions on African performances. She straddles both the insider and outsider positions making her historical account balanced. This book is an excellent resource for all drama/theatre/performance departments offering an academic major in (South) African theatre or any cultural analyst with an interest in theatre studies. Sources Barrow, Brian and Williams-Short, Yvonne. Eds. 1987. The Baxter story 1977-1987: Theatre alive! Cape Town: University of Cape Town. Coplan, David B. 2007. In Township Tonight: Three centuries of South African black city music and theatre. Johannesburg: Jacana Homann, Greg and Maufort, Marc. Eds. 2015. Theatre, drama and performance in post-apartheid South Africa. New York: P.I.E Peter Lang. Kavanagh, Robert. 1985. Theatre and cultural struggle in South Africa. London: Zed Books. Kruger, Loren. 1999. The drama of South Africa: Plays, pageants and publics since 1910. New York: Routledge Lewis, Megan and Krueger, Anton. Eds. 2016. Three decades of making space: Magnet Theatre. Pretoria: UNISA Press * Samuel Ravengai, Associate Professor, Head of the Wits School of the Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa *

[Loren Kruger's] detailed discussions of colonial-era pageants, the theatre of Afrikaner nationalism and Black Consciousness, as well as the diverse experiments of contemporary dramatists responding to HIV-AIDS, gender violence, state corruption, and the massacre of miners at Marikana, make A Century of South African Theatre essential reading. Going beyond the local, Kruger insightfully places South African theatre within a transnational frame, tracing influences ranging from the European avant-garde to African American popular stage shows. -- Mark Sanders, Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University, USA Kruger performs the impossible. Her book provides a panoptic view of a sprawling, unwieldy and fascinating subject but there are no short cuts or bland generalisations. Instead, she moves astutely across the shifting terrain and multiple maps of theatre in South Africa, marking the tensions and contradictions of overlapping languages, cultures and authorities...Certainly, in its compelling and erudite coverage of a difficult theatrical century this is a volume not to be missed. * Liz Gunner, Visiting Research Professor LanCSAL, School of Languages, University of Johannesburg, South Africa * This book has done justice to the history of South African theatre and more specifically the history of performance and playwriting by African and women theatre makers. While Kruger gives the colonial/apartheid theatre its place and context in history, she deliberately foregrounds the subaltern. As an analyst, Kruger is privileged to have a working knowledge of isiZulu, which she uses to her advantage to view plays, collect data and make informed opinions on African performances. She straddles both the insider and outsider positions making her historical account balanced. This book is an excellent resource for all drama/theatre/performance departments offering an academic major in (South) African theatre or any cultural analyst with an interest in theatre studies. * Samuel Ravengai, Associate Professor, Head of the Wits School of the Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa * Loren Kruger has made an enormous contribution to the scholarly study of South African theatre, not only in reflecting us to ourselves, but also in placing us within the context of a world theatre. She repeatedly reveals her mastery of the rigorous tools of analysis in tracking and mining rich seams of cultural activity which she is able to filter into potent, tightly packed categories. * South African Theatre Journal *

Loren Kruger's grasp of the history of South African theatre is unparalleled. The agility with which she moves between politics, institutions, and discussion of texts and performances is impressive. Her detailed discussions of colonial-era pageants, the theatre of Afrikaner nationalism and Black Consciousness, as well as the diverse experiments of contemporary dramatists responding to HIV-AIDS, gender violence, state corruption, and the massacre of miners at Marikana, make A Century of South African Theatre essential reading. Going beyond the local, Kruger insightfully places South African theatre within a transnational frame, tracing influences ranging from the European avant-garde to African American popular stage shows. -- Mark Sanders, Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University, USA

Author Information

Loren Kruger is a graduate of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Cornell University, USA and is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, Theatre and Performance Studies and African Studies at the University of Chicago, USA.

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