Fools, Bells and the Habit of Eating
Three Satires
Published on 1. January 2002
Book
Paperback/Softback
184 pages
978-1-86814-377-1 (ISBN)
Description
Cupidity, corruption and conciliation are the themes of the three plays in this collection from one of South Africa's leading writes.
The Mother of all Eating, a one-hander, with its central character a corrupt Lesotho official, is a grinding satire on materialism in which the protagonist gets his come-uppance.
You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall? is an unbridled study in grotesquerie, reflecting a belief, traceable throughout Mda's work, that government by those who inherit a revolution is almost inevitably, in the first decade or two, hijacked by the smart operators.
The Bells of Amersfoort, with its graphic portrayal of the isolation imposed by exile, picks up on the themes of the other two plays but adds to them the concept of 'healing', both of the soul and of the land, in a lyrical work which holds out more hope than do its companions in this volume. The plays are introduced by Rob Amato, who directed much of Mda's earlier work.
The Mother of all Eating, a one-hander, with its central character a corrupt Lesotho official, is a grinding satire on materialism in which the protagonist gets his come-uppance.
You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall? is an unbridled study in grotesquerie, reflecting a belief, traceable throughout Mda's work, that government by those who inherit a revolution is almost inevitably, in the first decade or two, hijacked by the smart operators.
The Bells of Amersfoort, with its graphic portrayal of the isolation imposed by exile, picks up on the themes of the other two plays but adds to them the concept of 'healing', both of the soul and of the land, in a lyrical work which holds out more hope than do its companions in this volume. The plays are introduced by Rob Amato, who directed much of Mda's earlier work.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Johannesburg
South Africa
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
1 black and white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
249 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-86814-377-1 (9781868143771)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Zakes Mda has published 19 books which have been translated into several languages and has won the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Sunday Times Literary Prize, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award and the American Library Association Notable Book. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio University, Director of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust in Sophiatown, Johannesburg and a Patron of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg.
Content
Introduction
The Mother of all Eating
You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall?
The Bells of Amersfoort
The Mother of all Eating
You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall?
The Bells of Amersfoort