The history and development of children's theatre in English in South Africa

D.Litt. et Phil. (English)Although children's theatre has been recognised internationally as an important twentieth-century movement, in South Africa it has tended to be an activity with little prestige, few dedicated artists, and a limited core of dramatic texts that has largely been overlooked by literary scholars. The neglect in this country of children's theatre, a formal category of legitimate theatre, and the lack of investigation of its literature, provide the motivation for this thesis. The documentation of a chronology of productions that have been presented in English in South Africa from the earliest recorded performances to the present time, established in Appendix A, suggests the shape of this study and reveals the existence of a nucleus of children's playscripts. Commentary on, and analysis of, a selected number of these illuminates the genre and its development in South Africa. The Introduction to the work describes a methodology of empirical research. It works towards a broad definition of the concept children's theatre - by examining factors that gave rise to its establishment as a world-wide phenomenon; by establishing the relationship between children's theatre and the development of the child; by placing it in the wider context of theatre generally, and drama for children specifically; and by analysing accounts of three representative productions - one from the United States, the second from Britain and the third an indigenous South African play. Parameters are drawn and set to indicate the extent of the study and the layout of the chapters. Chapter One establishes a pattern from brief outlines of the development of children's theatre in Britain and the United States. In the scheme of the work as a whole, this chapter serves as a point of reference against which the development of South African children's theatre and