The Text and Context of Post-Apartheid Afrikaans Theatre

Résumé

Afrikaans theatre occupies a curious position within the post-apartheid South African theatre landscape. Despite a limited number of Afrikaans-speaking South Africans and very little state funding for the arts, the Afrikaans theatre industry continues to survive and is most notably showcased at various Afrikaans arts festivals across the country. This context in which theatre is performed is, however, seldom taken into account in scholarship on Afrikaans theatre, despite the value that a historiographical approach to such research can add. In this article, I consider the interplay between the neoliberal platform of the arts festival and the theatre performed there, while being cognisant that historical inequality and financial pressure greatly influence which plays are included in the festival programme. To illustrate the interplay between text and context, three theatre productions that debuted at Aardklop are discussed: Pieter Fourie’s Boetman is die Bliksem in!, Marlene van Niekerk’s “Die Kortstondige Raklewe van Anastasia W.,” and Christo Davids’s “My Seuns.” The study concludes that scholarship on both the text and context of these plays can be significantly enriched if read in tandem.

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