A collection of playscripts and texts that give an English-reading audience access to key plays as well as less well-known and previously untranslated works - a superb resource for scholars and theatre practitioners. This volume makes available some of the most influential, imaginative and exciting plays to come out of East and West Africa from the 1970s to the present day. Deliberately excluding playscripts by the regions' two best known playwrights, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whose work was profiled in African Theatre 13 the editors have selected plays, some well-known and some less widely available, that represent the diversity and richness of thesetwo very different African regions. The playscripts include a new translation from Amharic, as well as the English version of a play originally written in French, making more theatre from some of Africa's multitude of languages accessible to an English-reading audience. Each script is accompanied by an essay from an expert on the work, the playwright, and the context in which the play was produced, so that the volume will be of maximum use to both researchers and students of African theatre. Volume Editors: MARTIN BANHAM & JANE PLASTOW Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama, University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick

These stories explore childhood, adolescence and adulthood experiences. A leopard visits the village, and a boy wakes to 'hairy company' and prays for a better death. The arrival of a newcomer, in Muzungu's Pupu, exposes filial rivalry that upsets family balance. Greeting relatives, about two children sent to deliver fish to a relative, explores childhood fears in the children's encounter with Bokilo, the mortuary attendant, lepers, and ghosts. In Charming Namukati, Siambi and Tabuley improvise shortcuts to maturity, so as to charm new girls in the village. Themes of family and manhood as a performance are furthered in The Birthmark. Namacheke asks her son, "What has love got to do with marriage?" And Maya in Maya the Man abandons his wife Anyango, intending to prove that he's still a man but the outcome is just as dramatic as it turns out for Ouma, when he gambles with a girlfriend of his deceased friend On the Last day. Patrick Mangeni wa'Ndeda, currently completing a PhD (Applied Theatre) at Griffith University, Australia - where he also teaches courses in Scriptwriting - is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre (Makerere University, Uganda) and a Community Theatre facilitator. He was a poet in residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany in 1996, Chairperson of the Uganda Writer's Association and a Guest Poet for the 2003 Queensland (Australia) Poetry Festival. His plays, Operation Mulungusi & The Prince won the National Book Trust of Uganda Award (NABOTU) in 2000 and were nominated for the Uganda Literature Prize 2001. He has written a children's novel, The Great Temptation. A poet and performance critic, he is completing a collection: The Second Coming and Other Poems.