The distinguished South African–born British playwright David Lan is a unique theatrical triple threat. He began life as an anthropologist but turned to the stage to demonstrate how clashing historical and spiritual forces shape collective identity.
In Sergeant Ola and His Followers, for instance, a Black colonial Rhodesian enforcer during the 1970s war of liberation comes up against a rural village’s magical ancestral belief in cargo cults; in The End of the Earth, set in the Canadian Northwest at the end of the 19th century, capitalist colonial forces disrupt the Native American potlatch where wealth is ritually re-distributed.
