While anti-apartheid theatre was known worldwide for dramatizing the struggle against apartheid, theatre in South Africa today is hampered by the loss of a focused movement for change and by inefficient and compromised institutions of patronage and development. Well-placed administrators and stakeholders channel limited subsidy to large institutions such as the Market and the State Theatre, whose repertoires are dominated by nostalgic revivals, while cutting-edge performance must rely on corporate or international support. Under these conditions, theatre that is innovative in seeking new audiences and functions, as well as forms, happens often outside theatres: in film and radio, in education, and as an informal legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's project of personal and national healing.

Two South African films, Oliver Schmitz's 1988 Mapantsula and Ramadan Suleman's 1997 Fools, drawing from the revolutionary fervour of Third Cinema, developed a radical consciousness against a backdrop of Anglo-Afrikaner cinema in South Africa. Set in Soweto during the 1980s, both films, in their representation of blackness, address issues of the body, identity and agency. With their anti-heroes at the centre, they explore questions of African identity by imaging the black body differently, and free it from the grip of the apartheid imaginary. Meanwhile, the white body in the films is ‘shot’ as a homogenized symbol of apartheid violence and oppression, thus ‘fixing’ white identity as a strategy for political truth claiming.

The making of culture in South Africa through different but linked forms and genres focuses on the medium of radio, and the ‘emergent genre’ of Zulu serial radio drama. Using Benedict Anderson's notion of ‘socioscape’ a link is drawn between the wide sweep of historical events and the production of culture. Beginning with the case of the musical, uMabatha [Macbeth], its performance history, and its links with serial radio drama in Zulu, this article focuses on the ways in which this, in turn was linked to the ‘performance’ of African football commentary on radio, and points to the national resonances that the act, and art, of commentating built up for both announcers and listeners. Finally, three representative radio serial plays from the 1970s are examined in relation to the ways in which they engaged with the social and political realities of the time. Through the multi-accentual nature of language and the polysemic nature of the plays themselves these plays might appear to endorse or, at least, acquiesce in the dominant apartheid ideology of the era, yet at the same time they offered resistant alternatives to it.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission has inspired several pieces of theatre that emphasize the powerful aesthetics of testimony and the challenges of an ethical response. While many of these are experimental plays with high production values and engage with Ålite liberal audiences on a metaphoric level, the theatrical space remains a comment upon, but does not merge with, everyday reality. The focus here is on three plays in which audiences are not watching an ‘other’ but are watching themselves. They are brought on a journey of healing as a community. That Spirit by Mina Nawe, Thetha Ngikhulume (‘Speak so that I may speak’) by Bongani Linda and The Victory Sonqoba Theatre Company and The Story I am About to Tell by Khulumani Support Group belong to the category of Theatre for Development (TfD). TfD most often stages intellectual debates on social and political issues affecting a particular, usually geographically defined, community. However, rather than exploring the socio-political aspects of the TRC, these plays focus on the deep emotional trauma that remains with survivors as the TRC goes about ‘healing the nation’. This article draws on the theories of social change associated with TfD, Augusto Boal's theories of theatre as therapy, psychologists’ theories of post-conflict recovery, and, theories of restorative justice to evaluate the healing potential of both the TRC and TfD.

The task of Theatre in Education (TIE) performers is examined in relation to what I have witnessed in TIE programmes in South Africa, found in reports written by students and ideas proposed by theatre theorists. The four contextual frames, which John O'Toole maintains are at work in TIE (namely neighbourhood, venue, audience availability and the world of the play), provide a workable configuration through which to examine the effects of each of these on performance. The interaction between the performers, the performance site and the audience in TIE promises the possibility of a more flexible approach to theatre. Creative opportunities arise that should be utilized, not only in TIE, by a variety of theatre-makers in South Africa.