Randlords and Rotgut

Randlords and Rotgut is a play by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company (JATC).

The second play done by the JATC, and its first with an integrated cast, it opened the second South African History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1978. Based on a like-named paper by Charles van Onselen and utilizing Brechtian techniques, the play offers an exposé of the hypocrisy of mining capitalists who profited from the sale of liquor to the workers while denouncing drunkenness.

Revived at the University of the Witwatersrand/JATC(*?) in 1989 by Malcolm Purkey, with women in some of the male roles.

First published in Theatre Two, edited by Stephen Gray, 1981. Republished in the collection At the Junction: Four Plays by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company by Wits University Press, Johannesburg in 1995.

[Kruger 1999: 96;

JATC, 1995: At the Junction (University of the Witwatersrand Press).

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