The opening setting: a Viking-themed birthday party at a plush retirement home somewhere at the convergence of central, eastern and western Europe. The characters: three men from various diasporas with distinguished careers. Nonagenarian birthday boy Bajran from south-east Europe (‘The Balkans’, WTC) is a former chemist with a prominent Swiss pharmaceutical company; octogenarian Moon-So is a South Korean filmmaker obsessed with his unfinished documentary on dragonflies and, at 87, is the youngest of the group; and Dr Youssouf Sadio, aged 89, is a renowned Senegalese astrophysicist who awaits approval of the naming of a star he discovered before his retirement. These three men are thrown together by fate (and sufficient financial means) in a nursing facility that does not feel like ‘home’ but rather like a golden cage, expressed in the overall sentiment: ‘“How the hell did we end up here?”’ (WTC). These men present the audience with interesting paradoxes. They are both wise and infantile at the same time; as representatives of a highly accomplished group of transnational experts they look back on professional privilege and success while suffering from existential anxieties in their twilight hours. While they bicker and reluctantly bond, they gradually begin to share memories of former selves and imaginaries of their homelands. Each has a skeleton in his closet, and all suffer from private angst. Youssouf believes that he is observed in a panopticon; Moon-So is haunted by voices; and Bajran wants to be cleansed by a second, fully immersive baptism. This ceremony – into which Bajran bullies the others for reasons of solidarity rather than religious conversion – sets off a series of events which brings them closer to dealing with their deepest regrets and fears, including their fear of dying.

Few plays and performances put the (very) elderly and their concerns centre-stage, even if Miriam Bernard and Lucy Munro argue that, ‘older people feature strongly in the theatrical cultures in many countries and eras, both as performers and characters’ (2015: 61).

The first edited collection of plays by African women to come out since Kathy A. Perkins’ 2009 African Women Playwrights (University of Illinois Press), this volume is a longawaited addition to the published body of dramatic literature from the continent, written, devised and created by women. The anthology emerged out of a 2015 Women's Playwriting International Conference in Cape Town and the African Women's Playwright Network (AWPN) funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). AWPN had been set up as an online network by the editors Yvette Hutchison of the University of Warwick, and the South African playwright and director Amy Jephta, in conjunction with a digital service provider, Every1Mobile, who are committed to social change in emerging markets. With the help of a purpose-built mobile app., African women creative practitioners were enabled to connect with each other on a national and international level, showcase their work, link up with academia and the cultural industries, and thus increase their visibility. Importantly, in a move towards decolonizing methodologies, the app. and the Facebook group (which ran parallel, but eventually replaced the app. when AHRC funding ran out) have been managed as reciprocal sites between initiators and participants; work and information can be shared and developed independently or in collaboration, as need be. (For more details see https:// warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/research/impact/awpn, accessed 17 June 2019).

The seven plays published here, some in translation, came out of this initial partnership between the project team and seven playwrights hailing from Egypt (Sara Shaarawi), Nigeria (’Tosin Jobi-Tume), Zimbabwe (Thembelihle Moyo), Uganda (Adong Judith), Kenya ( J. C. Niala), South Africa (Koleka Putuma) and Cameroon (Sophia Mempuh Kwachuh). Although some already have considerable experience as theatre and film makers, script writers, poets or community activists, with a few having been published locally, their works are as yet little known in the wider world. They could have easily remained ‘literary unknowns’, to borrow a phrase from Amandina Lihamba (‘Foreword’, African Women Playwrights 2009: x), due to inadequate publishing and marketing infrastructures, limited access to theatre spaces and development funding, and other structural inequalities at the intersection of social power and material resources, including the well-known threesome of gender, class and race. It is the same old story again and again.

The fifth and to this point final film in Steven Feld's Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra series (2009-2016) documents the extraordinary art and craft of Joseph C. Abbey (addressed throughout as Ataa Abbey – ‘Mr. Abbey’), a Ghanaian puppeteer whose career spanned more than half a century until his recent passing in 2017. Abbey's remarkable work has remained largely unknown to the wider world and it is thanks to filmmakers Nii Yemo Nunu and Feld, and their colleague Nii Noi Nortey, the multi-instrumentalist and administrator of the Anyaa Arts Library outside Accra, that we can now get an impression of Abbey's puppetry treasures. While documenting the richness and complexities of individual marionettes and rod puppets, the film at the same time narrates a subjective history of Ghanaian music as seen through Abbey's, and possibly Feld's and Nortey's, eyes. This history is brought alive by Abbey's exceptional puppets and his puppetry skills and the musical backgrounds of those involved in making the film.

Beginning with Kwame Nkrumah's Independence Speech on 6 March 1957, partly re-enacted by a Nkrumah marionette, we are subsequently taken on a puppetry tour de force of selected Ghanaian artists and musical styles, but also of some in neighbouring countries and the diaspora, true to Nkrumah's own philosophy of Pan-Africanism. Abbey watched his first puppet show in 1957, at the age of 12, thus linking the birth of the Ghanaian nation to the birth (or at least ‘conception’) of an artist. The moment Nkrumah requests for ‘the band to play the national anthem’ at the end of his speech, we, as a contemporary audience, do indeed embark on the film's musical puppetry journey.

There are two main narrative strands in the film: while Abbey provides us with the story of his personal development – his apprentice years with E.A. Hanson and Saka Acquaye at the Ministry of Education and the Arts Council of Ghana, who initially taught him ‘carving, painting, stringing and performing puppets’, to his 1977 scholarship for the Jan Malik Puppet Studio in Prague, in the then Czechoslovakia – Nortey is set up as the expert, and expert performer, of Ghanaian musical history which he presents in quasichronological fashion.