The Classical and the Modern in Three South African Plays

Aristotle's The Poetics provides the basic template on which two thousand years of Western dramatic works are founded. Euro-African playwrights have indigenised the ancient Greeks' essential idea of mythos - plot - behind which the story hides suppressed and repressed dynamics to do with sexual, moral and racial issues breaking out symptomatically and poetically from a personal and political unconscious (in Plato and Julia Kristeva - an aesthetic chora). Peripeteia and hamartia are the reversals and the mistakes evoking a cleansing of and by terror and pity in the form of catharsis. Theatre then becomes a spiritual and religious ritual which fortifies us in a struggle for democracy, human rights and a multi-cultural integrity preserving a priori values called the categorical imperative by Kant and concern for being-in-the-world-with-the-Other by Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas and Buber amidst the corruption and chaos of post-colonial Africa.

Autorentext

Michael Picardie, M.A. (Oxon & Leic.), M.Phil.(Aberystwyth) Ph.D. (University of South Wales) was senior lecturer at the University of Botswana and lecturer at Oxford and Cardiff Universities. He is an actor, director and the author of numerous plays done in the UK, the US, Europe and Africa.