Fools, Bells and the Habit of Eating: Three Satires - Softcover

Mda, Zakes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1868143775 ISBN 13: 9781868143771

Publisher: Wits University Press, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1868143775
• ISBN 13: 9781868143771
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184