THEATRE, PLACE AND PRIVATION: STAGING SILENCE AND PRECARIOUS EXISTENCE IN LARA FOOT NEWTON’S TSHEPANG

Abstract

This article interrogates landscapes of precariousness in Lara Foot Newton’s play Tshepang. It examines how Foot Newton dramatizes the structuring of a post-apartheid theatre in which landscapes of fragility and vulnerability are augmented by strategies of silence and isolation. The different nuances of silence, its domination and ubiquity in the play underscore the materiality of trauma and dislocation in contemporary South Africa. The dramatization of corporeal vulnerability in this play animates the long lasting effects of the apartheid legacy. The playwright offers Tshepang and its complex articulation of the experiences of place and sound as a reconfiguration of post-colonial existence in South Africa. Emanating from a social and political context that is in the process of self-renewal, Tshepang scripts embodied acts that signal agency as desire for African recuperation. The article interrogates notions of memory, sound, and silence as performance, and explores how this interlinks with privation and precarious life as experienced in post-apartheid South Africa. It draws on post-colonial theory to examine how the play dramatizes visualizations of the body and the power of agency. 

Key words: African memory, silence, precarious life, post-apartheid drama