Dark outsider: Three Plays

Description

Life in exile, the poet Roy Campbell, and the world of a boys’ boarding school are the three topics explored in this, the first collection of the work of one of South Africa’s leading playwrights, Anthony Akerman. A Man out of the Country is community in Amsterdam — a community of which Akerman was a part. The play dramatizes the conflicts arising from the existential and political issues that confronted those people who left during the apartheid years.Dark Outsider, which won the 1993 SACPAC Drama Prize and earned its author the 1995/96 Vita Playwright of the Year Award, deals with the Campbell’s tempestuous marriage. The centerpiece of the play is the love affair between the bisexual Mary Campbell and Vita Sackville-West, and the lasting effect this had on Campbell’s attitudes and creativity.Old Boys, which won the 1996/97 Vita Award for Best Script, explores the dynamics of male interaction in the rarefied atmosphere of an exclusive single-sex boarding school. It also examines the way in which the past lives on — albeit filtered through selective memory — in the lives of old boys.