“Doing their own thane”: the critical reception of Umabatha, welcome Msomi’s Zulu Macbeth
Abstract
Peter Daubeny, founder-director of the World Theatre Season (WTS), selected Umabatha to open the ninth season at the Aldwych theatre on 3 April 1972. A prominent South African journalist envisaged the opening as “unquestionably the most dramatic happening in the history of South African theatre” (Reinhardt). The response was, for the WTS, unprecedented: every performance in the three-week run received a standing ovation, and box-office returns broke the record set by Peter Brook’s 1970 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“Umabatha a sell-out”). Daubeny described the production as “the greatest hit of all [his] years of bringing exotic theatre to London” (qtd. in Baneshik).Downloads
Published
1999-01-01
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Copyright (c) 1999 Mervyn McMurtry
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.