Grahamstown audiences are in for a major treat this week as award-winning South African theatre legend Andrew Buckland presents two exclusive performances of Dario Fo’s highly acclaimed work Mistero Buffo.
Grahamstown audiences are in for a major treat this week as award-winning South African theatre legend Andrew Buckland presents two exclusive performances of Dario Fo’s highly acclaimed work Mistero Buffo.
The performances will be on Friday 25 February at 8pm and the next evening at 7pm at the Rhodes Main Theatre. In Mistero Buffo, first staged in 1969, this one-man epic performance combines the grotesque comedy of the Italian medieval performance traditions with razor-sharp contemporary political satire.
The play, which caused great controversy in 1977 when televised, functions as a political and cultural onslaught against the repressions of religious institutions and landowning classes throughout history, expressing them in the language of the peasantry.
Buckland presents this onslaught from a specifically South African perspective and, in so doing, accesses the universal truths of this phenomenal work of theatre. The work is sophisticated yet simple, wildly physical and extremely funny. All proceeds from these two shows will go directly to supporting and aiding bursaries for drama students.
Tickets cost R25 for members of the public and R20 for students, and are available at the Theatre Café in the Rhodes Drama Department. For further enquiries contact Robert Haxton, Rhodes University's Drama Department theatre co-ordinator on 046 603 8542 / 083 437 3459.
