"Woza Albert!" is based on one dazzlingly simple idea - that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ should take place in present-day South Africa. This brilliant two-man show from the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, took the Edinburgh Festival then London by storm in September 1982, playing to standing ovations every night. It was also seen in Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia and twice on BBC TV.

'A satire played with devastating energy in a brilliantly witty staging.' "Guardian"
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'The most politically potent show ever staged in South Africa.' "Observer"

This edition contains a new introduction by Yvette Hutchison

A collection of four plays by one of South Africa's leading playwrights and directors, Barney Simon, co-founder of Johannesburg's internationally famous Market Theatre. Themes explored in the plays include life among Johannesburg's vagrants, and a glimpse into the lives of the city's rent-boys.

A fast-paced romp through apartheid-era South Africa that exemplifies the creative human capacity to overcome seemingly omnipotent enemies and overwhelming odds. The picaresque hero of this novel, Duggie, is a dispossessed black street kid turned con man. Duggie's response to being confined to the lowest level of South Africa's oppressive and humiliating racial hierarchy is to one-up its absurdity with his own glib logic and preposterous schemes. Duggie's story, as one critic puts it, offers "an encyclopedic catalogue of rip-offs, swindles, and hoaxes" that regularly land him in jail and rely on his white targets' refusal to admit a black man is capable of outsmarting them. Duggie exploits South Africa's bureaucratic pass laws and leverages his artificial leg every chance he gets. As "a worthless embarrassment to the authorities and a bad example to the convicts," Duggie even manages to get himself thrown out of jail. From Duggie's Depression-era childhood in urban Johannesburg to World War II and the rise of the white supremacist apartheid regime to his final, bitter triumph, Boetie's narrative celebrates humanity's relentless drive to survive at any cost. This new edition of Boetie's out-of-print classic features a recently discovered photograph of the author, an introduction replete with previously unpublished research, numerous annotations, and is accompanied by Lionel Abrahams' haunting poem, "Soweto Funeral," composed after attending Boetie's interment, all of which render the text accessible to a new generation of readers.

Woza Albert! is one of the most popular and influential plays to have come out of the South African cultural struggle of the 1980s and a central work in the canon of South African theatre. Working with the idea of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ taking place in apartheid South Africa, the playwrights improvised a brilliant two-man show consisting of 26 vignettes, commenting on and satirising life under the apartheid regime. The play has become one of the most anthologized and produced South African plays both in South Africa, and internationally and is studied widely in schools as well as universities. This Student Edition contains a commentary and notes by Temple Hauptfleisch, Emeritus Professor at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. METHUEN DRAMA STUDENT EDITIONS are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. A well as the complete text of the play itself, this volume contains: * A contextualised chronology of the play and the playwrights' lives and works * an introductory discussion of the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the play was originally conceived and created * a succinct overview of the creation processes followed and subsequent performance history of the piece * an analysis of, and commentary on, some of the major themes and specific issues addressed by the text * a bibliography of suggested primary and secondary materials.

The only current anthology to survey the rich variety of contemporary African drama The plays included in this volume are: Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka; Anowa by Ama Ata Aidoo; The Chattering and the Song by Femi Osofisan; The Rise and Shine of Comrade Fiasco by Andrew Whaley; Woza Albert! by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon; and The Other War by Alemseged Tesfai.Contemporary African Drama brings together some of the best writers writing from an African viewpoint today.