Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon’s Woza Albert! is back by popular demand. Showing on The Fringe stage at the Joburg Theatre from 1 June until 17, the play remains one of the most exciting examples of satirical anti-apartheid theatre, demonstrating innovation and creativity during an important period of theatre in South Africa.
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The play stars Segomotso Modise and Hamilton Dlamini who play the roles of various black South Africans – a vendor, barber, domestic worker, manual labourer and soldier – receiving the news that Christ (Morena) has arrived in South Africa, where a Calvinist white elite imposes apartheid.
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The play is a political satire that imagines the second coming of Christ in apartheid-era South Africa. It looks at a wide range of characters in South Africa at the beginning of the 1980s and attacks the pass laws that prevented black people from moving freely at the time. The production uses the metaphor of Morena (Jesus) to show what would happen if he came back to South Africa during apartheid.
