(Neil
Coppen. Pic by Zavier Vahed)
Wits University Press has announced that
Neil Coppen’s play, Tin Bucket Drum,
has won the English Academy of Southern Africa Olive Schreiner Prize for Drama
(2018).
The Olive Schreiner Prize for drama forms
part of a larger annual competition in creative writing of English expression,
which includes prose and poetry. The award is named after Olive Schreiner, the
South African author and activist. The award will be presented to Neil Coppen
at an event still to be announced.
The competition’s adjudication panel was unanimous
in its decision to score Tin Bucket Drum
as the winning entry for the play’s “astounding content and contribution in
breaking new ground, as well as its depth of thinking in addressing
socio-political issues in contemporary South Africa.” The adjudication panel
was also impressed by the play’s innovative use of the one-hander technique in
line with Africa’s long tradition of storytelling using multimedia in a way
that greatly enhanced the performability of the text.
Congratulating Coppen on winning the award,
Roshan Cader, commissioning editor of Wits University Press said, “It is a
prestigious award for a wonderful play and we hope it will now attract more
readers.”
In Tin
Bucket Drum, Coppen weaves together elements of magical realism, shadow
puppetry, Kabuki theatre and live percussion. Tin Bucket Drum offers a fresh twist on the traditional conventions
of African story telling. Through his lyrical script and the creative use of
lighting and sound, one woman, the Narrator, succeeds in evoking a host of
characters as this allegorical tale of oppression and liberation plays itself
out. It is a story that offers a host of lessons for many places and many
times.
Coppen is an award-winning playwright who
lives between the cities of Durban and Johannesburg where he works as a writer,
director and designer. He won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Drama in
2011 and nominated one of the 2011 Mail & Guardian’s 200 most influential
Young South Africans. His play Abnormal
Loads won the 2012 Naledi Award for Best South African Script. Other works
include Tree Boy, NewFoundLand and Animal Farm.
Ismail Mahomed, former Artistic Director of
the National Arts Festival, South Africa said about this play in 2016 when it
was performed: “Tin Town is a metaphor for our current political situation. It
could be the Zuma (…) compound, Nkandla, as much as it could be the rest of
South Africa. The Censor could be the parliamentary Bill that seeks to control
information. We, the citizens of South Africa, who have kept in office a
president with so many human weaknesses, could be the apathetic Inhabitants of
Tin Town. Could the rising young voices that are increasingly speaking out
against the status quo be Neil Coppen's young girl, Nomvula, whose passionate
heartbeat cannot be silenced? Or could Tin Town be in Zimbabwe? Or in Syria?
Israel? Pakistan? Tin Town is everywhere. It is a global village. As more
youth-driven movements across the globe make their voices heard in the
political landscape, Tin Town is a powerful and compelling reminder of the
power of young people to change the world.”
Find more info on the play here -
http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/tin-bucket-drum/
For book orders contact Corina van der
Spoel, Marketing coordinator, Wits University Press on email: corina.vanderspoel@wits.ac.za
or 011 717 8705
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