Reza de Wet's channelling of the long nineteenth century on post-1994 South African stages

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis focuses on Reza de Wet's channelling of the long nineteenth century on post-1994 stages. I conceptualise her adaptation and appropriation of nineteenth-century British and European literature as well as her performance of colonial history as a theatrical séance by which she revives the past to comment on contemporary white South African cultural identity. The Gothic, which is a central element of De Wet's work, informs my conceptual lens alongside two theoretical notions engaged with nineteenth-century rewrites: the neo-Chekhovian and the neo-Victorian. I use 'neo-Chekhovian to describe De Wet's transformation of Anton Chekhov's plays, The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904) in A Russian Trilogy (Three Sisters Two, Yelena and On the Lake). I draw on specifically neo-Victorian notions such as revision and biofiction to analyse her reworking of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights (1847) into the unpublished play Heathcliff Goes Home. Lastly, I refer to theatre theorist Freddy Rokem's notion of performing history to discuss De Wet's neo-Victorian dramatisation of British colonial history in A Worm in the Bud and Two Plays: Fever and Concealment. The neo-Victorian is a relatively new field in South Africa and the theatre theoretical dimension thereof is still under-explored. My analysis of De Wet's work within this intellectual context will branch out its inquiries to contemporary South African theatre studies.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University