Shifting sands of the past and the present in drama of the New South Africa: Neil Coppen’s Tin Bucket Drum and Nadia Davids’ What Remains

Abstract

The experimental pedigree of South African drama of the anti-apartheid period requires no introduction. This pedigree was established during the years of anti-apartheid playwriting of the 1970s and 80s when South Africa’s iniquitous politics of race relations was put under the spotlight on local and world stages. This was achieved through the work of playwrights such as Mbongeni Ngema, Percy Mtwa, Athol Fugard and Matsemela Manaka, among others. This paper focuses on the drama of the post-apartheid era to argue that three decades after the formal end of apartheid, some of the most recent plays from South Africa have adopted themes and styles that draw from an atavistic recourse to the stylistics and experimental drama of apartheid era protest plays to address new challenges which are steeped in continuing social injustice. The paper adopts the climatic metaphor of shifting sands to analyse how post-apartheid drama simultaneously crosses and integrates aesthetic borders to create innovative and complex narratives which bring together the craft of African storytelling theatre, dance and choreography that are in turn infused with multi-media as social commentary. The paper focuses on Neil Coppen’s Tin Bucket Drum and Nadia Davids’ What Remains as examples of the continuing provenance of experimental aesthetic border crossing in the drama of South Africa today. This aesthetic border crossing deploys new forms of multimedia as decentring social critique in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper showcases how Nadia Davids and Neil Coppen use the past and the present both literally and metaphorically to craft intriguing contemporary dramas in which incident and character come together as profound metaphors of the country’s on-going struggle to reconcile a troubled past with an imagined future.