The Classical and the Modern in Three South African Plays

Aristotle's The Poetics provides the basic template on which two thousand years of Western dramatic works are founded. Euro-African playwrights have indigenised the ancient Greeks' essential idea of mythos - plot - behind which the story hides suppressed and repressed dynamics to do with sexual, moral and racial issues breaking out symptomatically and poetically from a personal and political unconscious (in Plato and Julia Kristeva - an aesthetic chora). Peripeteia and hamartia are the reversals and the mistakes evoking a cleansing of and by terror and pity in the form of catharsis. Theatre then becomes a spiritual and religious ritual which fortifies us in a struggle for democracy, human rights and a multi-cultural integrity preserving a priori values called the categorical imperative by Kant and concern for being-in-the-world-with-the-Other by Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas and Buber amidst the corruption and chaos of post-colonial Africa.