Sophiatown

by The Junction Avenue Theatre Company. An influential workshop play about the famous freehold area in Johannesburg, devised and performed by director Malcolm Purkey and the cast. Based on a true prank in which Nat Nasaka and Lewis Nkosi had advertised in Drum magazine for a Jewish girl to come and stay with them in Sophiatown. The play deals with the “what if” of this situation, and setting it in a household representative of a spectrum of township dwellers, a microcosm of the Sophiatown milieu of the 1950s as seen from the perspective of the 1980s. First written and performed at *** in 1986, the play quickly transferred to the Grahamstown Festival and the Market Theatre, and went on to a phenomenally successful run over the next number of years, winning numerous awards and touring internationally. First published as a single text in 1994, then republished with other plays in 1995.**[Kruger 1999: 96-7; JATC, 1995] Published by David Philip and also in At The Junction by Wits University Press. Also published as Sophiatown! in Drama for a New South Africa by Indiana University Press.

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