Stephen Gray

GRAY, Stephen (1941-) Immensely influential academic, literary historian, theatre reviewer, poet, novelist and playwright. Studied GRAY, Stephen (1941-) Immensely influential academic, literary historian, theatre reviewer, poet, novelist and playwright. Studied at ****, at ****, thereafter at Cambridge. He also did creative writing course with Kurt Vonegutt and others at the University of Ohio?***. Returned to South Africa to become a lecturer and later professor of English at the Rand Afrikaans University. Gray followed in the footsteps of Guy Butler, to play an enormously influential role in establishing South African literature as a legitimate and exciting field of study and endeavour. He has been especially important as an obsessive literary archeologist, digging up unknown or little known facts and features of the South African literary landscape and has been a stalwart supporter of NELM and other archives and research centres. Besides writing numerous academic studies on South African literature (his Southern African Literature: An Introduction - 1979 - being a seminal work at the time) and on a variety of writers (including important studies on Athol Fugard), he inspired young academics and writers and edited a wide range of anthologies of poetry, prose and plays. A prominent and prolific anthologist, Gray has also been responsible for rediscovering a number of long forgotten works and authors. Notable among these have been his discovery and publication of a number of unpublished plays in collections such as Theatre One (1978), Theatre Two (1981), Modern Stage Directions (with David Schalkwyk (1984) and The Market Theatre Plays (198*), as well as his resurrection of the fortunes of the actor, director and playwright Stephen Black, whose works he edited and published in 1979, and the English work of C. Louis Leipoldt. Along with being a dramatic and literary advisor to numerous publishers, journals and theatre companies, he has also been more directly involved in theatre. His work in theatre encompassed a period as performer for the Footlights ??**at Cambridge ***, which he brought to South Africa in 19**, and later as reader of poetry in venues such as the Black Sun in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. His play Cold Stone Jug, based on the Herman Charles Bosman diaries was produced by the Market Theatre in 19**, as was his popular one-woman show Schreiner: A One Woman play (19**). **

GRAY, Stephen. The Market and Baxter Theatre staged his Cold Stone Jug, based on the book by H.C.Bosman, and directed by Barney Simon in 1981. His Schreiner: A One Woman play starring Elize Cawood and directed by Lucille Gillwald was staged at the Laager in August 1983.

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