Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewI think this is a really interesting project. The play avoids the obvious and gives a good insight into a range of personal stories, covering detainees from the ANC, the PAC and Black Consciousness (but I think it would be necessary in the introductory essay to give a clear account of the differences and relationships between them, set against the time-line of resistance to apartheid). So it offers a quite varied, significant and 'new' perspective/window on the inmates of Robben Island. And the play does give striking insights into the different groups of prisoners and how they reacted to their situation, as well as into the often ludicrously boneheaded and bureaucratic, and equally often callous and crass, behaviour of the warders and prison system. Professor Ralph Yarrow, University of East Anglia This play deals with an important and engaging topic: the lives and survival strategies of the political prisoners on Robben Island during the apartheid era (with a short reflection on the later betrayal of the ideals that governed those lives). It contains a great deal of fascinating material, based on written accounts of the experiences of prisoners and on interviews conducted by Matthew Hahn with former prisoners. The plays' "hook" is the prisoners' choosing of passages from Shakespeare's Complete Works, surreptitiously passed around the prison. Professor Derek Attridge, University of Warwick
