A Heritage of Violence Paradoxes of Freedom and Memory in Recent South African Play-Texts A NTON K RUEGER At This Stage N THIS ESSAY , I would like to touch on a few recent play-texts that enter into a debate about South Africa’s troubled past, and that contribute to a discussion of current struggles to be free. In particular, I would like to centre this discussion on a publication called At This Stage – Plays from Post- Apartheid South Africa (edited by Greg Homann, 2009). This anthology in- cludes four texts considered as being representative of new playwrighting in South Africa (Reach, Shwele Bawo!, Some Mothers’ Sons, and Dream of the Dog). It should be mentioned that very few plays are published in South Africa. The majority of significant productions in the countryare devised, or choreographed, as physical theatre and contemporary performance pieces. South Africa does not have a very strong tradition of publishing play-texts. One of the reasons for this is that there is a relatively small play-reading pub- lic, and the pervasiveness of the idea that plays should be seen rather than read has been supported by an emphasis on drama as performance, rather than on drama as literature. Still, there remains a place for published plays that can be re-read and, better still, re-performed. Of the plays that have been pub- lished since 1994, however, I would hazard a guess that there are not that many that could weather a re-staging. Many notable works have been published since apartheid, such as William Kentridge and Jane Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998) and Brett Bailey’s trilogy Plays of Miracle and Wonder (2003). These are wonderful keepsakes of particular productions, packaged memories of specific perfor- I