From Doornfontein to Broadway: Black Hamlet Travels to America

Abstract This article, based on archival research, discusses the discovery, origins, and genesis of a lost play by the Hollywood scriptwriter John Bright, written in collaboration with Wulf Sachs and derived from the latter’s famous psycho- documentary Black Hamlet (1937). The playscript was discovered by the author in 2018 in the Library of Congress. The article investigates its origins, speculates as to how it was that its two progenitors came to collaborate, and pieces together a history of the project from the papers of Leah Salisbury, the New York theatrical agent who handled the property. The play embodies an effort in the late 1940s by two white writers to intervene in the American civil rights movement from a southern African perspective by dramatising an even more catastrophic betrayal of justice in Africa, the ancestral “homeland” of Black Americans. Reasons why Bright’s play never made it to a Broadway stage, and how the script came to lodge unnoticed in the Library of Congress, are presented and analysed.