At This Stage: Plays from Post-apartheid South Africa

As South Africa continues to advance towards the fulfilment of its visionary constitution, significant shifts in the mode, style, and theme of its nation’s theater have begun to take hold. The four plays in this collection, by Lara Foot Newton, Mike van Graan, Motshabi Tyelele, and Craig Higginson, offer insights into an emerging national identity. The primary themes explored in the four texts—reconciliation, matriarchy, justice, accountability, corruption, truth, memory, and violence—reflect on the challenges and questions South Africans are confronted with in their nascent democratic state. In the two essays that complement this anthology, theater director Greg Homann argues that South African theater and her playwrights have surfaced into a new period, one that signals new themes and challenges. The mode of representation has shifted and the monological form we came to both loathe and love has dissipated to match a democratic society grappling with multiple points of view.