Athol Fugard and the Serpent Players: Theatre against Apartheid, by Rory Riordan

The Serpent Players were an amateur theatre group formed in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha), in the early 1960s, made up of Black workers, teachers and clerks who began making plays with Athol Fugard. Out of that partnership came some of the most important South African theatre of the apartheid years, including the work that became Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island, and members of the group were jailed, banned and harassed for it.

Rory Riordan tells the story of the group and its members, and of theatre as a form of resistance in the Eastern Cape.

Author: Rory Riordan
Publisher: Mandela University Press (distributed by African Sun Media)