Postcolonial Plays

An Anthology

Helen Gilbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136218248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This collection of contemporary postcolonial plays demonstrates the extraordinary vitality of a body of work that is currently influencing the shape of contemporary world theatre.
This anthology encompasses both internationally admired 'classics' and previously unpublished texts, all dealing with imperialism and its aftermath. It includes work from Canada, the Carribean, South and West Africa, Southeast Asia, India, New Zealand and Australia. A general introduction outlines major themes in postcolonial plays. Introductions to individual plays include information on authors as well as overviews of cultural contexts, major ideas and performance history.
Dramaturgical techniques in the plays draw on Western theatre as well as local performance traditions and include agit-prop dialogue, musical routines, storytelling, ritual incantation, epic narration, dance, multimedia presentation and puppetry. The plays dramatize diverse issues, such as:
*globalization
* political corruption
* race and class relations
*slavery
*gender and sexuality
*media representation
*nationalism

1  Judith Thompson

Pink

Canada

Introduction

Born in 1954 and raised in suburban Kingston, Ontario, Judith Thompson had an early introduction to theatre through her mother’s work as a director and writer. Her first stage role at age 11, followed by several others during her teens, initially appeared to predict a career as a performer, but within a year of completing actor training at the National Theatre School in Montreal, Thompson decided that she would rather write plays. Her performance work, however, has proved invaluable to her efforts as a dramatist, especially in the creation of intense and often volatile characters whose internal drives and outward habits she seems to know intimately. Such characters are drawn from all walks of life, but they are essentially ordinary people driven to the extreme edge of experience. Across a range of plays that explore crumbling relationships within families, between lovers and among friends, this facility for creating unforgettable stage figures has earned Thompson many plaudits, including Canada’s most prestigious prizes for excellence in drama, the Governor-General’s Award (1984, 1990) and the Chalmers Award (1988, 1991). Her ability to convey the dark and turbulent inner worlds of her characters through voices fashioned to the rhythms of everyday life also constitutes a major achievement in extending the reach of naturalistic dialogue, which so often limits other playwrights’ penetration of the spiritual crises that underpin human actions.

At first glance, Thompson’s short monologue, Pink, written in 1986 for the Toronto Arts Against Apartheid Benefit, may seem to have little in common with the densely allusive and often mythic works that have established her reputation as one of Canada’s most exciting contemporary dramatists. The brevity of the play, combined with its specific political focus as an antiapartheid piece, allows minimal space for the kind of complex characterisation that drives Thompson’s theatre; yet Pink delivers a poignant and evocative character portrait that gains in power by its very compact construction. Part of the play’s appeal derives from its use of the monologue as a device through which to stage in concentrated form the raw pain and contradictory emotions of its young protagonist. This is a common strategy in Thompson’s work, particularly in The Crackwalker (1980), I Am Yours (1987) and the recently premiered Perfect Pie (2000), where monologues, styled variously as dreams, reveries or confessional outbursts, often constitute the structural matrix around which other narrative fragments are juxtaposed. The result is a dramaturgical practice in which the voice takes on a particular materiality that provides an index to both personal and social worlds. As Thompson states, ‘I believe that the voice is the door to not only the soul of an individual, but the soul of a nation, and within that, the soul of a culture, a class, a community, a gender’ (1993: 658).

In Pink, a white child’s voice becomes the narrative aperture through which the brutality of the recently dismantled South African apartheid system comes into focus. Lucy’s emotional monologue to her dead Nanny, Nellie, reveals not only the poisoning of a loving adult–child relationship by government ordinance and a coercive social system but also the seemingly minor (to Lucy) yet immensely significant acts of discrimination through which the black populace is denied human rights. In the familiar tradition of the naive, unreliable narrator – often figured by children, mentally disabled people, and social or racial outcasts in Thompson’s drama – Lucy unwittingly tells the audience much more than she herself can understand. This narrative perspective is designed to implicate the adult world in Lucy’s racism as she parrots, in her own simple terms, glib theories of separate development and apparent white liberal tolerance. In the play’s climax, her outraged diatribe against Nellie thus channels a society’s racial hatred through a child’s wilful tantrum to portray with chilling effect the easy movement from cruel words to violent actions. Lucy’s subsequent penitence provides an uneasy resolution since it derives simultaneously from a childish desire to return everything to the way it was and a nascent maturity that allows her to recognise that she is somehow responsible for Nellie’s death.

Thompson has admitted in interviews to being obsessed with the figure of the child and the nature of parenting. Such plays as I Am Yours and Lion in the Streets (1990) present children as idealised innocents through whom spiritual redemption may be offered to those who have violated others or compromised their own humanity. In Pink, the child’s ‘natural’ purity – in Thompson’s terms – has been irrevocably tainted by a corrupt social system that Lucy, positioned at the cusp of puberty, must now willingly choose or reject. The breaking of the maternal bond becomes critical at this point. Nellie’s severing remark, ‘You’re not a child anymore, Lucy, you’re a white person now’, marks the child’s expulsion from the maternal dyad and her initiation into the realities of a political system to which she has been beneficiary for her entire life.

Through the nanny–child relationship sketched so deftly in Pink, Thompson examines parenting in a broader context than the merely familial. Her interest in the parent role as a social and psychological contract is taken up in the radio drama, Tornado (1987), which twins natural and surrogate mothers in order to investigate primal maternal urges. But whereas this and most of Thompson’s other plays dramatise motherhood through intensely personal perspectives, Pink maintains a more distanced view that takes account of the ways in which an oppressive political regime affects even the closest of interpersonal bonds. In the world of apartheid South Africa, as in the antebellum American South and other places where slaves nurtured the children of their oppressors, racial divisions inevitably taint other social bonds. While the play attempts to show the arbitrary construction of racial categories based on skin colour, it also conveys, through the suggestive title and recurrent motif of ‘pink’, that perceptions of colour take on their full resonances only when invested with a political reading. The pink innocence of Lucy’s cake cannot be real in a world blinkered by the racially marked categories of black and white.

Production history

Pink was first performed by Clare Coulter for the Arts Against Apartheid Benefit in Toronto in the spring of 1986.

Select bibliography

Adam, J. (1992) ‘The implicated audience: Judith Thompson’s anti-naturalism’, in R. Much (ed.) Women on the Canadian Stage: The Legacy of Hrotsvit, Winnipeg: Blizzard, 21–9.

Bessai, D. (1992) ‘Women dramatists: Sharon Pollock and Judith Thompson’, in B. King (ed.) Post-Colonial English Drama: Commonwealth Drama since 1960, New York: St Martin’s Press, 97–117.

Kareda, U. (1989) ‘Introduction’, in J. Thompson, The Other Side of the Dark: Four Plays, Toronto: Coach House, 9–13.

Nunn, R. (1989) ‘Spatial metaphor in the plays of Judith Thompson’, Theatre History in Canada 10, 1: 3–29.

Thompson, J. (1989) The Other Side of the Dark: Four Plays, Toronto: Coach House.

—— (1990) Interview, in J. Rudakoff and R. Much (eds) Fair Play: 12 Women Speak: Conversations with Canadian Playwrights, Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 87–104.

—— (1993) Author’s statement, in K. Berney (ed.) Contemporary Dramatists, 5th edn, Detroit: St James, 658.

Toles, G. (1988) ‘“Cause you’re the only one I want”: the anatomy of love in the plays of Judith Thompson’, Canadian Literature 118: 116–35.

Wachtel, E. (1991) ‘An interview with Judith Thompson’, Brick 41: 37–41.

Zimmerman, C. (1994) ‘Judith Thompson: voices in the dark’, Playwrighting Women: Female Voices in English Canada, Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 177–209.

Pink

Judith Thompson

LUCY, a 10-year-old white girl talking to her dead black nurse, Nellie, shot in a march, in her open coffin.

LUCY NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE NELLIE I want you to come back, to shampoo my hair and make a pink cake and we can sit in the back and roll mealie pap in our hands see, I told you not to go in those marches and I told you, I told you that what you guys don’t understand, what you didn’t see, is apartheid’s for YOU. IT’S FOR YOUR GUYS FEELINGS, see, like we got separate washrooms cause you like to spit, and if we said, ‘Eww yucch, don’t spit’, it would hurt your feelings and we got separate movies, cause you like to talk back to movie stars and say ‘amen’ and ‘that’s the way’ and stuff and that drives us crazy so we might tell you to shut up and then you might cry and we got separate bus stops cause you don’t like deodorant cause you say it smells worse than people and we might tell you you stink and the only thing I don’t get is how come you get paid less for the same job my Mummy says it’s because you people don’t like money anyway, you don’t like TVs and stereos and all that stuff cause what you really like to do is sing and dance. And you don’t need money to sing and dance I just … I don’t understand why you weren’t happy with us, Mummy let you eat as much sugar as you wanted, and we never said anything to you, some days, Mummy says it was up to a quarter-pound, but we know blacks like sugar so we didn’t mind, and we even let you take a silver spoon, I heard Mummy say to her friends, ‘there goes another silver spoon to Soweto’ but she never called the police … and you had your own little room back there, and we even let your husband come once in a while, and that’s against the law, Mummy and Daddy could have gone to jail for that, so how come you weren’t grateful? How come you stopped singing those Zulu songs in the morning, those pretty songs like the one that was about love and kissing, you stopped singing, and you stopped shampooing my hair, you said I could do it myself, and and your eyes, your eyes used to look at me when I was little they would look at me like they were tickling me just tickling me all the time, like I was special, but they went out, they went out like a light does and you stopped making my cakes every Tuesday, every Tuesday morning I would ask you to make me a pink cake and you would always say, ‘you ask your mummy’ and then you’d make it, but you stopped making them, you told me I was too old for pink cakes, that the pink wasn’t real, it was just food colour anyway and then, and then, you hardly ever came anymore, and when I saw you that day … when I saw you downtown with your husband and four children all … hanging off your arms, I just couldn’t stand it! I wanted to yell at your children and tell them you were mine that you were more mine than theirs because you were with me more much more so you were mine and to let go of you to get off you and I hated the way you looked without your uniform, so brown and plain, not neat and nice anymore, you looked so pretty in your uniform, so pretty, but we didn’t even mind when you didn’t want to wear it.

We didn’t mind, but you were still unhappy, and when I saw you in town looking so dusty and you didn’t even introduce me to your kids and one of them, one of them did that rude thing that ‘Amandilia’ thing that means black power I saw you slap his hand but you didn’t say anything, so you must have hated me too, I saw that you hated me too and I’d been so nice to you, I told you my nightmares and you changed my bed when I wet it and now you didn’t even like me and it wasn’t my fault it wasn’t my fault it just when I asked you why that day, you were cleaning the stove and I said Nellie why … don’t you like me anymore, and you said, ‘you’re not a child anymore, Lucy, you’re a white person now’ and it wasn’t my fault I couldn’t help it I couldn’t help yelling

SLAVE, SLAVE, DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD, SLAVE OR I SLAP YOUR BLACK FACE, I SLAP YOUR BLACK FACE AND I KICK YOUR BLACK BELLY I KICK YOUR BLACK BELLY AND KICK IT TILL IT CAVES RIGHT IN AND IT CAN’T HOLD MORE BABIES EVER AGAIN. NO MORE UGLY BLACK BABIES THAT YOU’LL … that you’ll like more than me. Even though I’m ten years old I made you die. I made you go in that march and I made you die. I know that forever. I said I was sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but you never looked at me again. You hated me. But I love you, Nellie, more than Mummy or Daddy and I want you to come back, and sing those songs, and roll mealie pap and be washing the floor in your nice uniform so I can come in and ask you to make a pink cake and your eyes will tickle me. And you will say ‘yes’.

‘Yes, I’ll make a pink cake … ’

2 Maishe Maponya

The Hungry Earth

South Africa

Introduction

When Maishe Maponya first conceived and workshopped The Hungry Earth in 1978, reactions to the play’s blatant political content, and its explicit criticism of South Africa’s apartheid regime, led him to seek legal advice. His attorney’s opinion confirmed his fears: ‘I am of the view that the play would constitute a contravention of the laws relating to racial incitement and the Publications Act and, in addition, the presentation would result in the severe harassment of both the author and the performers’ (quoted in Maponya 1995: vii). In response, Maponya cancelled the production but then, after much deliberation, he and the Bahumutsi Drama Group, which he had co-founded a year earlier, decided to perform and ‘be damned’.

Maponya, like all black South Africans, had been personally affected by the discriminatory practices of the apartheid system. Born in 1951 in Alexandra Township in Johannesburg, he was forcibly resettled, with his family, in Soweto in 1962. There, he developed an increasing interest in the political theatre that emerged in the 1970s and became actively involved in the Black Consciousness Movement. A combination of socialist and essentialist ideology, this movement owed as much to black American cultural politics as it did to third-world theories of liberation inspired by such scholars as Frantz Fanon. For the African Black Consciousness Movement, political and cultural liberation were inextricable. Black Consciousness theatre, like the poetry, prose, music and art associated wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements for play texts
• General Introduction
• 1 Judith Thompson Introduction
• 2 Maishe Maponya Introduction
• 3 Jane Taylor, with William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company Introduction
• 4 Wole Soyinka Introduction
• 5 Femi Osofisan Introduction
• 6 Ama Ata Aidoo Introduction
• 7 Derek Walcott Introduction
• 8 Sistren Theatre Collective Introduction
• 9 Girish Karnad Introduction
• 10 Manjula Padmanabhan Introduction
• 11 Kee Thuan Chye Introduction
• 12 Chin Woon Ping Introduction
• 13 Louis Nowra Introduction
• 14 Jimmy Chi and Kuckles Introduction
• 15 Briar Grace-Smith Introduction
• 16 Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl Introduction
• 17 Tomson Highway Introduction
• 18 Guillermo Verdecchia Introduction
• 19 Charabanc Theatre Company Introduction