Selected Plays

Selected Plays is a collection of plays with a difference. It features the work of South African theatre practitioner, arts educationist, cultural activist and academic, Robert Mshengu Kavanagh, in South Africa, England, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. However, as Kavanagh himself makes clear, he did not single-handedly write a single one of them. They are all plays in which he worked with actors or other writers in a playmaking process which he led and which produced a performance which he directed. Even the directing method was socialised and democratic, with actors and sometimes visitors free to make suggestions - a form of directing which the Russian director, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, also favoured. All the plays featured in this the first volume of the Selected Plays were produced by the well-known and influential theatre organisation, Experimental Theatre Workshop '71. Founded in 1971 in Johannesburg, Workshop '71 pioneered unsegregated theatre and played an important role in the development of the theatre of the dispossessed majority. All three plays, Crossroads, uHlanga - the Reed and Survival, received enthusiastic reviews when they opened at unsegregated venues in the apartheid South Africa of the 1970s. All three plays were devised through a process of research, acting exercises, improvisations and discussion involving the director, Kavanagh, and the actors. Crossroads was a non-racial production and the cast included members of all the different racial groups. It was one of the first 'workshop theatre' productions in South Africa and possibly the first to make use of almost all the actual languages as they are spoken by South Africans, including tsotsitaal, a language created by black South Africans as a lingua franca and spoken by many urban-based intellectuals, artists and young people. The play was based on the medieval play, Everyman, and the life of a notorious Johannesburg gangster, Lefty Mthembu. It interrogates conventional morality in the context of apartheid oppression. uHlanga is a one-actor play which goes deeply into African history, culture and spiritual experience. The actor, James Mthoba, dazzled with his versatility and skills. As one reviewer wrote, he brought virtually the whole African continent onto the stage. Survival is a four man ensemble theatre piece, witty, fast-moving and also hard-hitting. Based in jail, the four actors explore through music, dance and dialogue the metaphor of prison - the prison inside and the prison outside - revealing in the process how in apartheid South Africa, for the oppressed, society was in itself a prison.