Defacing Heart of Darkness: new plays tear down Conrad's colonialist tale
In two contrasting stagings of the novel, one renders it ridiculous while the other confronts the debate head onHeart of Darkness is, to use today's parlance, problematic. More than 40 years ago, the novelist Chinua Achebe labelled its author, Joseph Conrad, "a bloody racist", admonishing a novel that reduces Africa to primitivism: "the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilisation". A couple of years later, Fra…