Occupation Playwright, Director Name Barney Simon Language English Role Writer | Nationality South African Movies City Lovers Notable works Woza Albert! | |
Born 13 April 1932 ( 1932-04-13 ) Plays Woza Albert!, Born in the RSA Awards Obie Award for Special Citations Books Pass Math: Arithmetic, Pass Math: Book II - Geometry, Manipulatives for the Middle Gr, Joburg - Sis! Similar People Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, Gcina Mhlope, Bill Flynn, Colleen Dewhurst | ||
Truth and reconciliation statement born in the rsa barney simon melanie tafila
Barney Simon (13 April 1932 – 30 June 1995, Johannesburg) was a South African writer, playwright and director.
Contents
- Truth and reconciliation statement born in the rsa barney simon melanie tafila
- Clare stopford on touched by barney simon festival at uct
- Early life
- Simon and the Market Theatre
- Literary life
- Selected plays
- References
Clare stopford on touched by barney simon festival at uct
Early life
The son of working-class Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Simon discovered a love of theatre while working under director Joan Littlewood in London in the 1950s. Returning to Johannesburg, he supported himself as an advertising copywriter while producing and directing plays. Before he opened the Market, he staged multi-racial plays anywhere he could: in warehouses and shantytowns, storefronts and back yards, including Athol Fugard's The Blood Knot (1961). Simon spent a year (1969–70) in New York City, where he introduced South African plays to an American audience and edited the journal New American Review.
Simon and the Market Theatre
In 1976 Barney Simon co-founded Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, South Africa's first multiracial cultural center and a birthplace of the country’s indigenous theater movement. Working under the racial segregation laws of apartheid without state subsidies and under constant threat of arrest for staging controversial contemporary plays performed by multiracial casts in front of multiracial audiences, Simon remained the theater’s artistic director from its opening until he died. He was the first to stage many of Athol Fugard’s plays, directed a film for the BBC of Nadine Gordimer’s story "City Lovers", and worked with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière on the French translation for the Paris production by Peter Brook of Simon’s last play, The Suit (Le Costume) (1994).
Simon was known for his method of creating and developing original plays through a workshop process of field research, improvisation and collaborative writing, sometimes with untrained actors or combinations of musicians, professional actors and people entirely new to the theater.
Literary life
Simon was active in South African literature as the editor from 1964 to 1971 of The Classic, the influential South African journal of township literature founded by Nat Nakasa in 1963. Simon edited an autobiographical novel by Dugmore Boetie, Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), for which Simon also wrote an afterword. He also published a collection of his own stories, Joburg Sis!, in 1974.
Selected plays
