The Playwrights and Players: Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona

Flashcards covering the history, major figures, and theatrical styles associated with the Serpent Players, Athol Fugard, and South African political theater.

Athol Fugard

A white South African playwright born on $11$ June $1932$ who worked as a court clerk and founded multi-racial theater works including The Serpent Players, passing away on $8$ March $2025$.

John Kani

A South African actor and playwright born on $30$ August $1943$ who joined The Serpent Players in $1965$ and won a Tony for Best Actor in $1974$.

Winston Ntshona

An actor born on $6$ October $1941$ who collaborated with Fugard and Kani on plays like The Island and went on to film roles such as Julius Limbani in The Wild Geese.

The Serpent Players

A group of black actors andworker players from New Brighton founded in $1963$ who developed plays under security police surveillance and performed in venues including zoo snake pits.

Workshop theatre

A collaborative and participatory playmaking process involving improvisation, research, and selection by a group rather than a single individual playwright.

Sizwe Bansi Is Dead

A play created in $1972$ as a collaboration between Kani, Fugard, and Ntshona that addresses the apartheid regime's restrictive pass laws.

The Island

A $1973$ play set in an unnamed prison on Robben Island that emphasizes mime and gesture and is based on true reports from prisoners.

The Coat

A $1966$ production that initiated the movement of making plays without an identifiable author through improvisation and social documentation.

Robben Island

A small maximum-security prison located $10\,km$ off the coast of Cape Town where political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela were held.

Hodoshe Span

The alternative title for The Island, where the word Hodoshe is slang for a prison work gang.

Protest Theatre

A theater form defined by Zakes Mda as a 'theatre of complaint' that addresses the oppressor and appeals to their conscience regarding social ills.

Theatre of Resistance

A theatrical form addressing the oppressed with the aim of mobilizing them for action through agitprop.

Agitprop

Short for agitating propaganda, this form of theatre attempts to propagate a message and incite action from the oppressed to change their situation.

Poor theatre

A technique developed by Grotowski involving minimalist sets and props, significantly influencing the Serpent Players' style and production of The Island.

Grotowski

A Polish experimental theatre director whose conception of theater emphasized action and gesture over a playwright's written text.

New Brighton

The township in Port Elizabeth where The Serpent Players originated and where actor John Kani was born.

Market theatre laboratory

An institution established in $1989/1990$ by Kani and Barney Simon to provide training to young people with poor educational backgrounds or lack of funds.

Nothing but the truth

John Kani's $2002$ debut as a sole playwright, which deals with rifts between black South Africans who stayed in the country and those in exile.

Order of the Ikamanga in Silver

An award given by the South African government to Kani and Ntshona for their contributions to theater and the struggle for a non-racial democracy.

Antigone

An Ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles used as a parallel to the lives of prisoners on Robben Island and the ending scene of The Island.