Fools, Bells and the Habit of Eating: Mother of All Eating, You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall?, the Bells of Amersfoort

Cupidity, corruption and conciliation are the themes of the three plays in this collection from one of South Africa’s leading playwrights and novelists. The Mother of all Eating, a one-hander, with its central character a corrupt Lesotho official, is a grinding satire on materialism in which the protagonist gets his come-uppance. You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall? is an unbridled study in grotesquerie, reflecting a belief, traceable throughout Mda’s work, that government by those who inherit a revolution is almost inevitably, in the first decade or two, hi-jacked by the smart operators. The Bells of Amersfoort, with its graphic portrayal of the isolation imposed by exile, picks up on the themes of the other two plays, but adds to them the concept of ‘healing’, both of the soul and of the land, in a lyrical work which holds out more hope than do its companions in this volume. The plays are introduced by Rob Amato, who directed much of Mda’s earlier work.