West End Of London Research Articles

The Gaiety Girl and the Matinee Idol: Constructing Celebrity, Glamour and Sexuality in the West End of London, 1890–1914

AbstractThis study examines the role that musical comedy on stage played in shaping popular culture in the long Edwardian period (1890–1914). It is based around two iconic theatrical types of the period: the Gaiety Girl and the matinee idol. Historians have underestimated their importance and what they represented. These two are decoded as a way of understanding the development of a culture based upon glamour, celebrity, fashion, display and public forms of sexuality which started to break with Victorianism. It looks in particular at the musical comedies produced by the West End impresario George Edwardes and explores their links to the developing fashion and beauty industries of the period.

Digging deep: design and construction of The Londoner hotel

Located in the heart of London's West End, The Londoner is a major new hotel on the world-renowned Leicester Square. The development is situated on a constrained site, bounded on all sides by roads. Planning restrictions limited the height of the building, leading to the development having one of the deepest habitable-grade basements in the world. The basement extends to over 30m deep, with six levels, meaning nearly half of the building's floor area is located below ground. This article provides an overview of the key design and construction considerations associated with building such a deep basement within the heart of London.

Six by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss

Reviewed by: Sixby Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss Horacio Sierra SIX. By Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. Directed by Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage. Brooks Atkinson Theatre, New York City. October 9, 2021. In a theatrical landscape regularly awash with jukebox musicals that cull the catalogs of big-name pop artists such as ABBA, Alanis Morrissette, Gloria Estefan, the Go-Gos, and more, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss's Sixarrived on Broadway with an original score of radio-friendly hooks, TikTok-ready dance moves, and a racially diverse cast of tabloid-worthy divas that gave legitimate pop stars a run for their money. The musical's selling point is that its supersonic score takes inspiration from King Henry VIII's six wives as much as it does the pop sirens of the last twenty years. This dynamic combination gave the audience the chance to veer from silently thanking their high school history teachers for giving them the ability to laugh at puns about the Protestant Reformation to priding themselves for recognizing choreography indebted to Beyoncé's "Formation." By amalgamating the academic humor of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)with the rhetoric of superficial third-wave feminist pop stars, Sixcreated a frothy but provocative musical that offered bespoke narratives for sixteenth-century women whose travails are all the more relevant in the #MeToo era. Whether on London's West End or the various cruise ships where Sixwas staged before it debuted on Broadway, its creators proved that they found a formula that caters to an audience of pop music–loving millennials and Generation Zers who, in a post-Madonna cultural landscape, are liable to see Catherine of Aragon, Gloria Steinem, and Selena Gomez as equals in the feminist canon. Like a Black Pink music video, Six's plot was threadbare but straightforward enough: the women form a girl group and each one is competing to become the sextet's lead singer. The sole criterion for becoming the leader is winning the audience's applause by proving they suffered the most during their marriage to King Henry VIII. The competition format is more akin to the messy politics of twenty-first-century reality TV shows that pit women against one another rather than the sororal communities portrayed in actual early modern literary works such as Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies(1405), María de Zayas's Desenagños amorosos(1647), and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure(1688). The show's earnest though superficial take on feminist discourse attempts to mirror Zayas's work wherein a safe space is created for women to be candid about the ways in which men belittle, deceive, and murder them without repercussions in a patriarchal society. Six's opening number, "Ex-Wives," encapsulates how the show borrows from the historical lore of England, Broadway, and pop music. Each character is given a verse to flesh out the details of the dreary-but-catchy refrain of "divorced, beheaded, died / divorced, beheaded, survived" à la the imprisoned women of Chicagoin "Cell Block Tango." But unlike the "merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail," these women were unable to exact revenge on their husband. Catherine of Aragon's (Adrianna Hicks) stature as a regal Queen Bee was solidified with its keen homage to Beyoncé at her peak with the fist-pumping "No Way." But more could have been made of how Earth-shattering her divorce was. As the daughter of Europe's most powerful royals, Spain's Catholic monarchs Fernando and Isabel, Catherine was a queen among queens. Her fierce devotion to the Roman Catholic Church and twenty-four-year marriage to the king proved her as a loyal steward of traditional monarchies. Henry's divorce from Catherine ensured that England, Europe, and the world would never be the same as the Reformation ushered in religious wars, geopolitical standoffs, and a refreshing stream of liberal intellectual discourse. Anne Boleyn, played by the addictively charming Andrea Macasaet, garnered hearty laughter every [End Page 77]time she reminded the other wives and audience about the horrors of being beheaded. Lily Allenesque lines such as "The rules were so outdated / Us two wanted...

Lessons on the Resource-Based View and Generic Competitive Strategies From Kinky Boots: The Musical

Kinky Boots: The Musical is a filmed version of the London West End production that tells the story of the unlikely collaboration between Charlie Price, inheritor of a struggling family business, and Lola, a high-energy and creative drag performer, who together radically change Price & Son’s focus from men’s dress shoes to fetish footwear. The musical lends itself well to use in strategic management and organizational behavior courses as a video case or source of video clips. This article explains how strategic management instructors may use the film to discuss sustainable competitive advantage through the resource-based view and generic competitive strategies, while organizational behavior instructors may use the film to illustrate concepts such as managerial roles, diversity, conflict management, and more.

Rohan McWilliam, London's West End: Creating the Pleasure District, 1800–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. xiv + 369pp. 43 illustrations, 4 maps £30.00 hbk.

Rohan McWilliam, London's West End: Creating the Pleasure District, 1800–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. xiv + 369pp. 43 illustrations, 4 maps £30.00 hbk.

The Magazine-Programme and the Broadbrow Sophisticate: Britain's Interwar Theatre Culture

This article makes a significant contribution to modernist studies by including interwar theatre in the lively critical conversations around popular modernism, middlebrow culture, celebrity, and magazines. It examines The Magazine-Programme, a popular publication sold in London's West End between the wars. Its position at the intersection of the social, economic, and cultural registers of the theatre world reveals the transformative power of this period's theatre culture and its importance to modernism. Based on an examination of hundreds of these programs in various archives, it discusses how The Magazine-Programme created and promoted a new image of the modern theatre-goer and, by extension, a new image of modern selfhood: the Broadbrow Sophisticate.

London's West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920. By Catherine Hindson. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016; pp. viii + 245, 4 illustrations. $65 paper, $65 e-book.

London's West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920. By Catherine Hindson. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016; pp. viii + 245, 4 illustrations. $65 paper, $65 e-book.

Measuring sentiment in real estate – a comparison study

PurposeIn mainstream economics and finance literature, market sentiment is considered “irrational”. This leads to significant challenges in capturing the effect of sentiment on economic relationships. Real estate is even more complex due to the fact that the sector exhibits several market inefficiencies. The purpose of this paper is to explore the literature and present a simple test for the potential of using three different sentiment indicators to improve a basic cap rate model. The authors establish the case using commercial real estate (CRE) data for London West End.Design/methodology/approachThe three indicators differ in their underlying source and method. The authors used orthogonalisation and principal component analysis for a macroeconomic sentiment indicator. Furthermore, online search volume data have been used to mirror the market sentiment for the London West End market. Finally, textual analysis based on word lists has been applied to corpus of market reports.FindingsThe results indicate considerable improvement in the authors’ ability to capture the effect of sentiment. Furthermore, the consideration of a human factor leads to improvement in the basic yield model.Practical implicationsThe methods suggest that sentiment extracted from more forward-looking sources, such as online searches, could be a significant information gain for investors, lenders or other market participants. The additional information could be used to adjust their behaviour within the market.Originality/valueTo the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that applies textual analysis to market reports for the CRE market in the UK.

Has computational creativity successfully made it “Beyond the Fence” in musical theatre?

ABSTRACTA significant test for software is to task it with replicating human performance, as done recently with creative software and the commercial project Beyond the Fence (undertaken for a television documentary Computer Says Show). The remit of this project was to use computer software as much as possible to produce “the world's first computer-generated musical”. Several creative systems were used to generate this musical, which was performed in London's West End in 2016. This paper considers the challenge of evaluating this project. Current computational creativity evaluation methods are ill-suited to evaluating projects that involve creative input from multiple systems and people. Following recent inspiration within computational creativity research from interaction design, here the DECIDE evaluation framework is applied to evaluate the Beyond the Fence project. Evaluation finds that the project was reasonably successful at achieving the task of using computational generation to produce a credible musical. Lessons have been learned for future computational creativity projects though, particularly for affording creative software more agency and enabling software to interact with other creative partners. Upon reflection, the DECIDE framework emerges as a useful evaluation “checklist” (if not a tangible operational methodology) for evaluating multiple creative systems participating in a creative task.

Directing Observership: Learning through Observation—In the Rehearsal Room with Tony Award–winning Director Kathleen Marshall

Directing Observership:Learning through Observation—In the Rehearsal Room with Tony Award–winning Director Kathleen Marshall Anne Healy (bio) The creative work of artists developed in the rehearsal room is sacred—a collective theatre/music/dance hive-mind coming together to create theatre. The creative space must be carefully protected so that artists remain free to experiment, explore, fail, and triumph without fear of judgment. With these ideas in mind, I hope to share with you some of my observations from the rehearsal room of the musical My Paris that was in development by Goodspeed Musicals during the summer of 2015. This journey began more than five years before when I received emails and flyers from Good-speed Musicals in East Haddam, Connecticut, advertising an "Observership Opportunity," where an early career director could join the Goodspeed team for a show and "learn while observing." From my early days in New York City auditioning for and performing in musicals during the late 1980s through the 1990s, I knew what a transformative learning experience the rehearsal room could be, especially with a creative team and performers who were working at the highest level of the industry. But my personal experience in commercial theatre to date only afforded the opportunity given a professional actor in the rehearsal space. So, as a relatively new stage director (since 2004), I longed for the opportunity to observe and learn from an accomplished, respected, and established director. With such an experience, could I expand my directing skills? Develop my ability to express a play or musical visually, aurally, physically, and technically? Could I learn what skills and attributes an established director possessed that makes that director effective? And finally, was I modeling effectively to my students, according to current processes relevant in the commercial theatre arena? Those questions and others compelled me to apply for the Goodspeed Musicals Observership Program. Thus I found myself in mid-life, as an early to mid-career director, in the quiet village of East Haddam on a morning in late June 2015 for "Bagelrama," the opening breakfast ceremony launching development rehearsals for a new musical about Toulouse-Lautrec titled My Paris. It Takes a Village—and a Dream Team Assembled on that first morning were the entire Goodspeed Musicals' executive and production staff, apprentices, interns, and even some volunteer staff. Also in attendance were the creative team, production staff/apprentices/interns specifically in residence for the production. The large rehearsal room was filled to capacity. The My Paris musical theatre "dream team" boasted Tony Award–winning director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall, a libretto by Tony-, Emmy-, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Alfred Uhry, music by award-winning Armenian French singer-songwriter and author of London's West End version Lautrec Charles Aznavour, English lyrics and arrangements by Tony Award–winning composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown, and music supervision and orchestration by David Chase, who most recently music directed television's The Sound of Music Live! This impressive team was joined by a cast of fourteen high-profile Broadway performers (fig. 1). [End Page 231] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Goodspeed Musicals My Paris creative team: Alfred Uhry and Kathleen Marshall (front) with David Gardos and David Chase (back). (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.) The prospect of an observership with Marshall was both exciting and daunting. Before my arrival I read multiple articles regarding her directing style and philosophy in an effort to educate myself on her work as a director, since my observership did not involve direct interaction with the director or production—only a seat in the room. Through my research I learned that she came to directing through the world of choreography, beginning as an assistant to her brother, Rob Marshall, in such shows as Kiss of a Spider Woman and She Loves Me, both in 1993. In several written and video interviews Marshall talked about the importance of mentoring through assistantships and observerships. In Victoria Myers's Women and Hollywood blog she asks Marshall, "what's something you think people can do to improve gender parity in theatre?" To which her interlocutor responded, "I think that one of our responsibilities as women working in theatre...

Making New Theatre Together: The First Writers' Group at the Royal Court Theatre and Its Legacy within the Young Writers' Programme

Making New Theatre TogetherThe First Writers' Group at the Royal Court Theatre and Its Legacy within the Young Writers' Programme Nicholas Holden (bio) The reconstruction of the Royal Court between 1996 and 2000 saw the theatre relocated to the heart of London's West End. The Court's delayed return to Sloane Square, along with the arrival of Ian Rickson as the theatre's new artistic director (1998–2006), allowed for a period of reflection and adjustment as the theatre approached the new millennium. Under Stephen Daldry's leadership (1992–1998), the Royal Court enjoyed one of the most successful periods in its history, with new plays by exciting young playwrights such as Sarah Kane, Joe Penhall, Mark Ravenhill, and Rebecca Prichard all contributing to what was hailed as the "renaissance of new writing."1 Through Rickson's appointment, the Royal Court returned to Sloane Square with new intentions that rejected the "stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap" 1990s paradigm, which saw around fifty new plays produced for short runs in the Court's Theatre Upstairs between 1994 and 1997. Rickson's administration replaced it with a more considered culture of growth and development for new playwrights at the theatre.2 The rebranding of the Court's long-standing Young Peoples' Theatre as the Young Writers' Programme (YWP) and the subsequent relocation of that initiative to a building adjacent to the Royal Court known as the Site proved to be an early sign of Rickson's aspirations for a more unified theatre. Launched in 1998, the Young Writers' Programme sought to focus the Court's work with young people on playwriting, and this implemented what Catherine Love calls a "culture of development" that, importantly, aligned with the Court's identity as a writers' theatre.3 In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Young Writers' [End Page 248] Programme provided the foundation to the careers of playwrights such as Lucy Prebble, Duncan Macmillan, Polly Stenham, and Mike Bartlett, and those writers, in turn, featured regularly on the stages of the Royal Court and in British theatre more widely. The inception of the Young Writers' Programme, therefore, went on to provide an unsurpassed model of success for the Court that has since proved invaluable to the theatre's production of new plays by new writers. The achievements of the writers who have emerged out of the Royal Court's Young Writers' Programme can be measured through the production of their plays in the United Kingdom, the United States, and across Europe. In addition, the work of the Court's International department, headed by Elyse Dodgson, has ensured that the theatre's work with writers has become a truly international endeavor. But in spite of the YWP's significant accomplishments in its fourteen-year history, academic engagement within this area of the Court remains limited. Indeed, it is only Love's 2015 article that has looked to bring some much-needed focus and scholarly analysis to what she describes as the "overwhelmingly successful" structure of the Royal Court's Young Writers' Programme.4 But the YWP is not the Royal Court's first attempt to provide an infrastructure that would offer support for a new generation of playwrights at the theatre. Such ambitions can be traced back to 1958, two years after the English Stage Company first began its residency of the Royal Court, where a writers' group was first established by George Devine in an attempt to further relationships between the Royal Court and a number of aspiring young playwrights of the time. In contrast to the Young Writers' Programme, whose history, as I have noted above, is in the early stages of academic analysis, the purpose, practice, and impact of the first Writers' Group at the Royal Court can be largely comprehended from the recollections of that time in the autobiographies of the group's members and through many of the publications on the history of the Royal Court.5 It is the purpose of this article, therefore, to revisit what should be regarded as the first attempt to bring a new generation of young playwrights to the Royal Court, through the Writers' Group in 1958, and...

Machine made musical [musical theatre

The world's first musical created by a machine premiered at the Arts Theatre in London's West End. Beyond the Fence is conceived and crafted by computer and modelled on a statistical study of the recipe for a hit musical success. Given that it has been authored by carefully-honed technology rather than an imperfect and flawed human, it is predicted to sell out. Beyond the Fence has its origins in an experiment that sought to adapt computer programs already used in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and apply them to searching for the formula for a brand-new musical theatre sensation.

First Person Singular: Building the road as we travel

After completing a law degree at the University of Birmingham when I was 20 and not really knowing what I wanted to do, except that it was not law, I became an English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher accidentally through signing up as a volunteer with the British United Nations Association (BUNA), roughly equivalent to the US Peace Corps. Instead of being dispatched to assist starving people through a remote third-world community development project, as I had naively expected, I was sent on a fast-paced, two-week English as a second language (ESL) teacher-training course at a well-known private language school, International House, on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of London's West End. Then came a one-week BUNA ‘orientation’ course in the suburbs. A hundred-plus neophyte volunteers were lectured on how to deliver a baby, how to deal with snake bites, how to remove leeches using gasoline or matches (but not both), the importance of taking anti-malaria pills daily without fail (pills subsequently found to be 100% ineffective), and how to avoid schistosomiasis (snail fever). On the last day, I was informed that, contrary to what I had first been told, I would not after all be going to Afghanistan, but to Peru. A week later, I arrived in Lima, a bustling Latin-American metropolis with no shortage of mid-wives, no malaria, no snakes, no snails and not a leech in sight. In the face of pervasive poverty, corruption, violence, and illiteracy, I had been sent several thousand miles, with absolutely no understanding of how people learn languages and minimal understanding of how to teach them, to provide free English classes for the relatively wealthy, mostly middle-class faculty and students in the Faculty of Law of Peru's leading university, the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.

Keeping staff in step.

BRIAN MCENTEGGART, clinical practice facilitator (CPF) for emergency care at University College Hospital, London, recently plastered the broken foot of an Irish dancer in Michael Flatley's Lord of the Dance show in London's West End.

The Victorian provincial department store: a category too many?

The phrase ‘department store’ was barely used in Victorian Britain. Contemporaries were aware of very large shops selling a wide variety of goods and might term them ‘emporia’, ‘bazaars’ or ‘monster shops’. A very small number of shops, particularly in the West End of London, were perceived as exceptional. For the most part, however, shops that historians have called ‘department stores’ because of their later, twentieth-century characteristics, were not seen as qualitatively different from other large clothing or household goods shops. This article argues the case for being more aware of contemporary perceptions and less concerned about looking for exceptional origins among shops generally classed as provincial department stores in nineteenth-century England. It considers the origins and early development of five such shops in the North Midlands and Northern England, including the extent to which they acquired foundation myths. It concludes that our understanding of nineteenth-century retail history would be enriched by paying less attention to when or whether such shops became department stores and more to the ways in which they sought to meet the needs of contemporary customers and to secure their place in the wider retail landscape.

The Scars of the Ghetto

<div class="ed-auth-intro">The article that appears below is reprinted from the February 1965 issue of <span class="no-italics">Monthly Review</span>. Despite her small body of work and short life, Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) is considered one of the great African-American dramatists of the twentieth century. Her play <span class="no-italics">A Raisin in the Sun</span> (1959) is required reading, and performed regularly, in high schools and colleges nationwide, as well as on Broadway and London's West End. Hansberry's association with the left, and especially with <span class="no-italics">Monthly Review</span>, began in her teenage years. When she moved to New York, she became good friends with Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy. In spring 1964, although terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, she left her hospital bed to speak at a benefit for Monthly Review Press; her speech appeared posthumously as the article below.</div><p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-1" title="Vol. 67, No. 1: May 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Entertainment Centers and the Quest for Transformation in the Periphery

The core of the entertainment industry in almost every urban area across the globe is by historical evolution or deliberate public policy lodged in the city center. Times Square in New York and the West End of London are the most iconic of these centers, but entertainment has evolved into new sports arena formats such as Amsterdam ArenA and L.A. Live. Some of these centers develop in the core of cities, yet others evolve on the periphery of a center city. In this quest for transformation, we ask, can contemporary entertainment-oriented transformative projects create “place” and are some locations better suited for such projects? In this paper, we explain how concentrated entertainment centers develop in the United States through the interplay of public policy and market economics, we present a typology for organizing different entertainment clusters, and through a case study of L.A. Live! we demonstrate how Los Angeles created an entertainment district from scratch on the downtown periphery. We argue that these projects can deliver on the promise of transformation with the right conditions and resources nurtured by local planning cultures and favorable markets. We further suggest that the downtown periphery in central cities is well suited for such entertinament-driven intiatives. The dispersal or concentration of entertainment brings nuance to the “urban periphery” conversation where the periphery is not distinct or separate from the urban; rather, the idea of “urban peripheries” encapsulates those places that fall “within” and “outside” traditional conceptions of the urban boundary.

Elsa Lanchester and Bohemian London in the Early Twentieth Century

Elsa Lanchester (1902–86) is best known today as a character actress in Hollywood, who played the title role in the Bride of Frankenstein. Less well known is her remarkable early life in Britain where she participated in the avant-garde through dance, theatre, film and other forms of performance. This article explores Lanchester's world before her marriage to the actor Charles Laughton in 1929 to investigate aspects of bohemian culture in the early twentieth century. It focuses on Lanchester's artistic nightclub, the Cave of Harmony, on the edges of London's West End. Bohemianism, modern dance and musical comedy opened up new identities and spaces for female self-exploration.

New insecurities, new form, new identity – national identity and raciologies in Eightpence a Mile (1913)

Focusing on the revue 8d a Mile (1913), this study looks at how London West End revue constituted a particular response to mounting social, political and cultural insecurities over Britain’s status and position at the beginning of the twentieth century. Just as musical comedy had in many ways reflected Britain at its zenith, revue by comparison captured a feeling of decline. In revue’s shapeless and haphazard version of modernity, anxieties about degeneration and the condition and character of modern England became deeply problematized, providing a cultural expression of a fragile and changing social and political order.

Fugard, Kani, Ntshona's The Island : Antigone as South African Drama

Fugard, Kani, Ntshona's The Island:Antigone as South African Drama Robert Gordon (bio) Despite the many features that ground Antigone in the particular political ideology of fifth-century Athens, Sophocles' Antigone has "spoken more to the modern imagination than any other Greek tragedy except perhaps his Oedipus the King."1 It may not therefore seem surprising that of all Greek plays Antigone is the most often revived, revised, or rewritten for performance in African and Caribbean countries.2 Clearly the play exposes the nexus of the personal and the political as a fault line, calling into question the conventional verity that places loyalty to the state above family relationships and private conscience.3 The Island represents a new intercultural approach to writing South African performance, finding common ground between indigenous African modes of storytelling and ritual performance and European approaches to postdramatic performance in a hybrid theater piece that inscribes Sophocles' text within a South African context. In 1973 the three leading members of Port Elizabeth's multiracial Serpent Players created a revolutionary piece of theater that, together with Sizwe Banzi is Dead (1972), ushered in a new era of South African political protest theater and constituted a new paradigm for postcolonial South African performance. By working together to Africanize the narrative content of Sophocles' tragedy as a subversive tribute to Nelson Mandela's endurance of what had then been a nine-year incarceration on Robben Island, the writers defied apartheid laws that prohibited blacks and whites from collaborating as theater artists; while by showing two black political prisoners playing the roles of Antigone and Creon as representatives, respectively, of the ANC martyrs and their apartheid oppressors, they exploded the conventions of the well-made drama that [End Page 379] had previously colonized the theatrical imagination of black and white South African writers. The radical deconstruction of the Greek text made the play an overt symbol of the liberation movement, while the subtle and spare deployment of African storytelling conventions decolonized South African drama, providing a new form of "protest" theater that influenced South African dramatists for over thirty years. Throughout the twentieth-century South African drama had been dominated by an English model of the well-made play whose late-Victorian form propagated British imperialist values in the colonies. Afrikaans theater was lively but, between1948 and 1992, proscribed by the hegemony of National Party race ideology. The growth of English-language theater was stunted by a colonial subservience to the home culture typical of settler societies. British actors regularly toured South Africa in Shakespeare and modern plays, and local English-language productions slavishly mimicked dated styles of acting, production, and writing that were once considered appropriate for the Old Vic and London's West End, but which stunted the development of indigenous forms of performance and writing.4 South Africa's first major black playwright, the Zulu writer Herbert Dhlomo (1903-1956), had written a series of plays in English based on the lives of the Zulu chiefs Dingane, Ceteswayo, Moshoeshwe, and the tribal prophet Mtsikane. But as adventurous as Dhlomo's plays were in their time they were also to a large extent constricted by the paradigm of the "well-made" West End play. In the fifties, English-language South African playwrights did make sporadic attempts to tackle local subjects, but their plays tended to be straitjacketed by the forms of West End drama5 and could not compete with the more ambitious development of prose fiction in works such as Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country (1947) and Nadine Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953),6 both reflecting the injustice of race discrimination immediately before and after the advent of apartheid. Perhaps the most innovative uses of theater forms were made by the musical King Kong (1959) and the revue Wait a Minim (1962), but these were subject to the typical constraints of commercial theater, so while they attempted to be authentic and topical could hardly be expected to exemplify radical changes in theatrical convention. Having written a number of small-cast plays—The Blood Knot (1961), Hello and Goodbye (1965), People Are Living There (1968), Boesman and Lena (1969)—predicated on an Ibsenite structure...