Dark Outsider: Three Plays

by Anthony Akerman

Dark Three Plays

Paperback

First published August 1, 2000

Reviews

[Philisiwe Twijnstra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great dialogue. Interesting characters.

[Mervyn Koots · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few months ago I read a short story by this author - The Exile - which I thought was really good, so I went searching for more. I'm not usually into reading plays rather than prose, but these were satisfying reads. I particularly liked A Man out of the Country, which seems to me to illustrate the emotions and the perceptions behind that very same short story. I can imagine the existential loneliness of being in exile during the years of apartheid. The characters are nicely drawn and the dialogue very persuasively genuine - I suppose with the benefit of actors and a director at work.

Maybe I should read more plays, but I tend to reserve my experience of drama for the live theatre and prose for the dark nights in bed. But these are good insights into a particular kind of South African experience that I touched on only marginally. I wasn't too involved, personally, in the experiences of private school boys (as depicted in Old Boys), but I enjoyed the insights into Roy Campbell territory (in Dark Outsider), and the exile life in Amsterdam is, as I say, particularly interesting and sensitively done - as it was in the short story I mentioned (that short story, by the way, I reviewed in my review of S. Gray's 'The Penguin Book Of Contemporary South African Short Stories').