Contemporary Plays by African Women

Yvette Hutchison is a Reader in the Department of Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. She is associate editor of the South African Theatre Journal and recently co-edited African Theatre 14: Contemporary Women (James Currey, 2015). Her AHRC funded African Women Playwrights’ Network project (awpn.org, 2015-17) is using mobile app technology to create a virtual network of women theatre practitioners living in Africa with other artists, researchers and interested parties on the continent and beyond. Her research is considering the aesthetics contemporary South African women artists are using to address issues of gender and conflict.Amy Jephta is a bilingual Cape Town-based playwright and director with an MA in Theatre-making from the University of Cape Town. As a director, she was the first national recipient of the Baxter Theatre/TAAC Emerging Theatre Director’s Bursary and is an alumni of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab in New York. She has worked as a mentor to community theatre groups based in Kwazulu-Natal as part of the Twist Theatre project, has been part of the South African New Plays Writing Programme at Wits University, and has been a voice and acting lecturer at CityVarsity in Cape Town and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. As a playwright, her work has been published in South Africa, performed at the Riksteatern in Stockholm and the Bush Theatre in London (on a grant from the UK Arts Council), where she is also currently undertaking a two year international playwriting residency with the Royal Court Theatre. She currently teaches bilingual acting to theatre and performance students at the University of Cape Town and is a conference director for the 2015 Women Playwrights International Conference.

A rare treasure chest of dynamic and challenging new plays. For theatre practitioners, this book offers diverse works with opportunities for interesting staging and sharp direction. For female actors, there is a selection of strong, unique and complex lead roles … For scholars these works are a rich source of material for critical reflection and debate.

• Niqabi Ninja by Sara ShaarawiBonganyi by Sophie Kwachuh MempuhUnsettled by JC NialaSilent Voices by Adong Judith I Want To Fly by Thembelihle MoyoMbuzemi by Koleka PutumaNot That Woman by Tosin Jobi-Tume