Roberto Amato

(1943-2006) Lecturer , actor and director, and legal journalist. Born in Johannesburg and schooled at Marist Brothers, he studied politics and English literature at the then University of Natal and as a Rhodes Scholar also studied at Oxford University. Until the 1970s, Amato worked in his family's Johannesburg textile business. In 1970 became a co-founder (with Skhala Xinwa) of Imitha Players of East London, for whom he directed i.a. local adaptations of Oedipus Rex (1971), Moliére’s The Miser (1975), Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers, and work by Sartre. Later moved to Cape Town and worked at The Space Theatre. He directed Matsemela Manaka’s Egoli and (along with Makwedini Mtsaka) Fatima Dike’s The Sacrifice of Kreli. He acted in Female Transport and his own play, The Mind Mirror. At this time he also founded the influential literary magazine, Speak, which unfortunately only existed for a few issues. He took over The Space when Brian Astbury left for London in 1980 and – with Moira Fine - ran it as The People’s Space. For them he directed work such as Sam Shepard’s Cowboy Mouth, David Hare’s Fanshen and Chris Barnard’s Die Rebellie van Lafras Verwey. In 198* directed a successful new version of The Road to Mecca for the Baxter Theatre Company (??*), with Lida Meiring as “Helen Martins”. In the 1980’s he turned to the world of academia, teaching English literature and theatre studies at the University of Natal, University of Cape Town, and Rhodes University in Grahamstown, though retaining his interest in theatre, but by the 1990s he moved to Cape Town to get involved in what he called "community politics", especially community policing. In 2000 he returned to Johannesburg to become a legal columnist for The Sunday Independent. He died tragically in a motor accident in 2006. He was married to Hildur Amato and they had three children Ben, Bianca, and Carlos. (See also Bianca Amato).

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