Anger and anguish

Meanwhile, among communities, theatre was growing as a means of expressing frustration, anger and anguish. At the Space in 1978, and later at the Market, Imfunduso was produced by the women of Crossroads, the city's sprawling informal settlement, to dramatise their predicament.

Prison was the subject of many of the plays of the seventies and eighties, among them, famously Kani, Ntshona and Fugard's The Island (for which the actors received a Tony Award), Workshop 71's workshopped Survival, Mbongeni Ngema's Asinimali.

Other works explored the plight of domestic workers (Poppie Nongena), the trauma of black policement (Bopha!), the role of black women in a South Africa racked by violence (Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodwe - You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock) detention without trial (Four Paces by Two), security police infiltration (Born in the RSA).

The trade union movement, too, made use of theatre to publicise its problems. In 1979 the Junction Avenue Theatre Company was asked to produce a short play entitled Security, to raise money in support of a strike by the Food and Canning Workers Union.

The following year, during a strike at a foundry on the East Rand, a lawyer called in to help defend some of the arrested strikers, conceived a role-play situation to try to reconstruct events. This experiment evolved, with the help of a member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, into a production entitled Ilanga Lizophumela Abasebenzi (The Sun Will Rise for the Workers) performed both to workers in factories and to a wider audience at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Other productions followed, and during the period 1983 to 1987, thirteen plays were created, many of which played in several parts of the country, one of them also being performed in England.

Mbongeni Ngema, who shot to fame with Woza Albert!, immortalised the 1976 student uprising in 1987 with his hit musical Sarafina.

On 2 February 1990, a moment of pure theatre took place in South Africa's Parliament when the country's State President F W de Klerk announced the lifting of the thirty-year-old bans on the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, and the South African Communist Party.

Nine days later Nelson Mandela walked out of Cape Town's Victor Verster Prison and the negotiations began that would lead to a democratic South Africa.