Glasshouse

Glasshouse is play by Fatima Dike

The original text

A semi-autobiographical piece about a white girl and a black girl who grow up in the same household, but different worlds, examining the knots that entangle human relationships in South Africa.

Translations and adaptations

In 1995 Dike revised the play during her tenure as writer-in-residence at the Open University. According to Tamsen Wolff (Theatre Journal 49.1 (1997) 60-61) "The revised play jumps backward and forward in time, from the 1950s to the release of Nelson Mandela, following the lives of Phumla Hlophe, a black South African (played by Dike) and Linda Black, a white South African (played by Libby Anson). Phumla's mother and father work as the maid and chauffeur in the Black household, and the two girls are raised as sisters. They struggle variously with the whims and deaths of their parents, the student revolts in Soweto and Cape Town, and with each other."

Performance history in South Africa

1979: Directed and lit by Brian Astbury at The Space (Cape Town), with a cast that consisted of Fatima Dike and Leonie Hofmeyr. Design by Bee Berman, the stage management by Arthur Benjamin and Denise Newman.

1979: The production opened at La Mama Theatre in New York later in the same year.

1996: The revised play, directed by Fatima Dike, was performed at the Open University, London on 30 August, produced by Southern Arts, the Open University, the Arts Council, and MADCAP.

Sources

Astbury 1979.

Wolff, 1997

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