Product details
- ISBN 9781776148790
- Dimensions: 120 x 190mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 2024
- Publisher: Wits University Press
- Publication City/Country: ZA
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English, Zulu
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Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater is a one-woman play inspired by the true story of a woman who served as a political assassin in the build-up to South Africa's first democratic elections. Zenzile Maseko, the protagonist, is a 60-year-old grandmother living in a women's hostel in Durban. Falsely declared dead by the Department of Home Affairs, she finds herself cast into a Kafkaesque nightmare that forces her to confront her past.
Flown in on the wings of the Impundulu (the lightning bird), in Zulu folklore a shapeshifting bird associated with witchcraft and the harbinger of storms and death, Zenzile's story weaves a magical and terrifying tapestry. She draws on myth, religious symbolism and traditional beliefs as she shares the realities – at times brutal, at times forgiving – of survival in South Africa. Her story touches on what it means to live through political violence, the transition to democracy, the brutality of inequality, health epidemics like HIV/AIDS, patriarchy, and the apathetic bureaucracy of government departments.
Ultimately, Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater offers a critical and unflinching look at the eddying cycles of violence and revenge that play out across generations. Yet it is most of all a story about regeneration and redemption that speaks to both the country's haunted past and its present-day complexities.
Written with pathos and empathy, this playscript will appeal to teachers, high school learners, and tertiary students in theatre, drama and English studies.
Neil Coppen is a playwright and theatre-maker from KwaZulu-Natal. He is a co-founder of Empatheatre and was awarded the 2019 Olive Schreiner Prize for Drama for Tin Bucket Drum.
Mpume Mthombeni is an award-winning stage and film actor from Umlazi, Durban. She has performed multiple roles in theatre, radio, film and television, and first received international acclaim for her one-woman performance in Tin Bucket Drum, which toured to New York. She is a co-founder of Empatheatre.
Kira Erwin is a sociologist and Senior Researcher at the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology, South Africa.
