Foundational issues surrounding professional training of speech and theatre experts at universities in the RSA

Abstract

When in the course of the thirties in the English and in the sixties in the Afrikaans theatre in the RSA “an urgent need” developed, the university lecturers, to my mind, blindly assumed that there was a demand for well-trained “performing theatre artists” without investigating or researching the matter properly, and they established “drama" departments at their universities “to train actors for the profession". By choosing to follow the objectives of the independent drama schools of the English, “but at a university”, they abused the nature and the function of the university and so ultimately landed in a cul-de-sac.