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SCORCHED

EARTH

SCORCHED EARTH (1989/English)

Scorched Earth is strictly protected by copyright.

Applications for performance rights, both professional and amateur, should be addressed to:

PD Uys Productions

productions@evita.co.za

But please read the play with pleasure.

Download the text of Scorched Earth

Set on an estate, ironically named World's End, the plot has it that the government will expropriate the property which has been in the same family since the time of the early English settlers' arrival in the province (of Natal). As a scenario prophesying decadent disintegration at a family level, brought about by enforced reform, as well as corruption, the play has frightening implications.

– Garalt MacLiam, The Star, 3 April 1989

Neither Tennessee Williams nor Arthur Miller could devise a more fecund and dramatically exploitable family situation and the device of using a TV crew who arrives to film the last days of this vanishing era is crisp and ingenious.

– Barry Ronge,  Sunday Times, 9 April 1989

Scorched Earth goes some way to confronting in the medium of a realistic play about a Natal WASP family who once supported the Nationalists and now find their birthright being given to a bantustan. The play represents a major transition in Uys towards maturity as a playwright. The range of styles in the dialogue and the adult complexity of the situation are utterly absorbing.

– Robert Greig,  Business Day, 5 April 1989

Pieter-Dirk Uys has a dependable knack for immediacy. Scorched Earth is the latest in a long line of plays and revues that reflect this darting, magpie talent ... humour is the weapon he wields most skilfully ... one of our most prolific playwrights.

– Charlotte Bauer,  Weekly Mail, 7 April 1989

Pieter-Dirk Uys's latest is a major opus concerning dispossession, displacement and corruption in high places. There is some remarkably fine writing.

– Raeford Daniel, The Citizen, 1 April 1989