In Memoriam: Priscilla Hall

Priscilla Hall of Grahamstown

1939 – 2017

Priscilla Hall, who has died aged 78 in the city where she lived her entire adult life, was a wise, vivid and humane presence who will be sorely missed by the many, many who loved her. Her combination of civic commitment and irrepressible enthusiasm made her a dynamic contributor to the social, political and cultural spheres of this town – including the Shakespeare Society.

From the days of its founding by their close friend and colleague Guy Butler, Priscilla and her husband Ron were leading spirits in the Shakespeare Society. Together with a few friends they also founded the Shakespeare Reading Group, an off-shoot whose independence and informal character Priscilla jealously guarded. She herself always read her roles with wisdom and care, and she had high expectations of her fellow cast members, whom she firmly urged to rehearse their parts!

Priscilla had a genius for the incisive word, the telling protest, the creative response. She was also a person of warmth and great empathy, but above all moral honesty and courage. These are not all qualities required in the Shakespeare Society, but as a reader, writer and life-long student, Priscilla would have been the first to say that – to the extent that she would acknowledge these qualities in herself – her relationship with Shakespeare deepened them within her. Her life-long marriage to a truly sensitive Shakespeare scholar also did its bit!

Priscilla was an effervescent combination of the delightful Rosalind, the irreverent Fallstaff and the searingly intelligent Hamlet – a wonderful presence to be in.

LYNETTE PATERSON

Chair: SSoSA Grahamstown

Voilà! Viola and Olivia Upstaged by Malvolia

Guest writers for the Shakespeare ZA blog, Carole Godfrey and Adriaan Venter, review National Theatre Live's recent production of Twelfth Night.

Tamsin Greig in National Theatre Live's Twelfth Night. Photo credit: Marc Brenner

Simon Godwin’s production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night opens with a devastating scene of shipwreck. The twins Viola (Tamara Lawrance) and Sebastian (Daniel Ezra) clutch at each other’s hands through the railings until they are eventually torn away from one another, and the stage itself splits in two (credit for this clever design goes to the stage designer, Soutra Gilmour). From this point until the final scene of the play, each twin believes the other dead. The stage continues to divide and revolve throughout the rest of the performance, showing how the broken relationship between the two grieving siblings is the catalyst for the multitude of confusions that abound throughout the rest of the drama.

However, those who know the play will not be surprised to hear that the action soon returns to a more comedic bent. And quite a bend it is, with Tamsin Greig playing a gender-swapped Malvolia (Malvolio in the original) who gets the audience laughing with her take on this Puritan narcissist. Another favourite of ours and the rest of the audience was Daniel Rigby as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, whose adorable stupidity and entertaining dance moves (which we are still attempting, unsuccessfully, to emulate) kept us chuckling until well after the play’s end.

One criticism of the production is that there are perhaps too many chuckles and not enough tears. The play itself ends with the sound of the clown, Feste (Doon Mackichan), singing the refrain ‘the rain it happens every day’, but when the curtains closed, most of the audience were still crying with laughter. In the beginning of the play the Lady Olivia (Phoebe Fox) is supposedly grieving for her recently deceased brother. This grief is clearly exaggerated a bit to keep her unwelcome suitors at bay. Yet when Olivia meets a potential mate whom she is actually attracted to, Cesario (who is actually Viola dressed up as a man), this grief dissolves so quickly that one might question whether Olivia ever cared for her brother at all. These are not the only instances of fickle affection in the play. At the end of the play, another major character, Duke Orsino (Oliver Chris), swiftly drops his supposedly deep devotion to Olivia in order to marry Viola, at the moment of discovering that Viola is really a lady and not Cesario, the young page. Olivia accepts Sebastian as a husband, despite having been desperately in love with Cesario/Viola moments before. The fact that Sebastian looks like Cesario seems to be enough to satisfy her. Many of the characters seem to exist in a happy whirlwind of shallow devotion which can easily be transferred.

A notable exception is Greig’s Malvolia. After a scene of cruel (but hilarious) deception, she is fooled into believing that her mistress has a romantic interest in her. She blooms at this unexpected news and screams ‘I AM HAPPY!’ while her face splits into a painfully awkward grimace, her best attempt at a smile. As funny as this moment is, it is also a tender scene that shows the awakening of a Sapphic love that is unfortunately doomed. Other reviews of the production have sometimes complained that the lengths to which Malvolia goes to woo her mistress stretch the limits of plausibility (and yes, the rotating nipple tassels might have been a bit much), but the achingly sincere exuberance that Greig brings to the role left us convinced that an individual so repressed might very well be gulled into behaving the fool when she is shown the love she has not dared let herself hope for.

The deception exercised on Malvolia is made all the more terrible by the fact that the modern audience can empathise so well with Greig’s portrayal. In Malvolia, the off-putting pride and condescension of Malvolio become necessary defence mechanisms against those who would mock Malvolia for her unconventional sexuality. One can also empathise with Malvolia’s dislike for Sir Toby Belch (Tim McMullan), a man born with all the privilege of high class and heterosexuality, and who has no idea how difficult life for Malvolia may be and never pauses his revels and cruel jokes long enough to think about it.

At the end of the production, Viola and Sebastian are reunited, the various misunderstandings of the play are resolved, and the brokenness caused by the shipwreck appears to have been healed. However, one might wonder if the ending of this production deliberately questions the play’s alternative title, ‘What You Will’. Few of the characters seem to get what they really want, and the audience do not necessarily get what they want either. We would certainly have liked Olivia and Viola, who have by far the most convincing chemistry in the production, to end up together. We were also rooting for Antonio (Adam Best), who serves Sebastian loyally and is clearly besotted with him, to win his young friend’s heart. Instead, Viola ends up with the rather uninteresting Duke Orsino, while Olivia marries Sebastian.

The character with the most dissatisfying and troubling ending is undoubtedly Malvolia. The production ends with the image of her sobbing on the split steps of the shipwreck. Malvolio is usually portrayed as a character who is opposed to everyone else’s happiness. However, in this adaptation Malvolia is far more the victim of malice than a malevolent character herself. This final image of a woman broken because she dared to allow herself to love leads us to question whether Olivia and Viola are in fact more deserving of having their love returned. Are these two characters’ fates happier simply due to society’s willingness to approve of their choices? Though Malvolia does not win Olivia’s affections, her character tugs at our heartstrings much more than those of the traditional heroines.

Dread pleasures: Reviewing National Theatre Live's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Shakespeare ZA is delighted to welcome guest blogger Christiaan Naudé, a Master of Arts English literature student and assistant English lecturer at the University of Pretoria, who reviews National Theatre Live's production of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

The set design for the opening act of David Leveaux’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead suggests at once some sort of purgatorial rehearsal room and airport departure hall: a solitary ladder is placed downstage against a capacious background of painted-cloudscape panels extending some distance upstage. This sense of scale, created by Anna Fleischle and co., perfectly stages Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s reflections on their comically contingent identities as they await their cues in the narrative gaps around and within Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  

Daniel Radcliffe plays a sheepish Rosencrantz whose ingenuous puzzlement and bouts of lugubriousness are balanced throughout by an affability that makes for an endearing stage presence. Radcliffe’s muted performance is buoyed by the nervous energy of Joshua McGuire’s Guildenstern who, in a more effusive manner, though with marginally less range than one would have liked, Socratically questions the inscrutable stage directions of existence. Both players, however, dextrously deliver Stoppard’s brisk rhetorical fencing, maintaining expert comic teamwork throughout.

A magnetic David Haig commands all attention in his appearance as The Player, a vagabond-troubadour and exploitation-thespian who evokes both an existentialist Falstaff and a louche theatre manager from Dagenham (and it is appropriate that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern should be upstaged even in their own play). Haig, along with his dubious troupe of actors, are compelling, especially during their staging of The Murder of Gonzago, the famously wooden play-within-a-play in Hamlet. Here, they turn the dumb-show of Gonzago into a scandalous pantomime resembling Pyramus and Thisby from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The bemused duo continues to invite mirth and pathos as they become embroiled in Hamlet’s whirlwind of events, in which Wil Johnson’s Claudius hurries through his lines while Marianne Oldham’s Gertrude looks on sternly, William Chubb’s Polonius sneers, Helena Wilson’s Ophelia flits about briefly, and the elusive Hamlet, played by Luke Mullins as a gaunt, overgrown prepschool boy, scoffs at Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s entreaties. Even the final dramatic monologue by Theo Ogundipe’s Horatio becomes drowned out by the jazzy strains from The Player’s troupe. While these performances delight, their stage-time feels somewhat rushed, though this pacing serves to bring about the gyre of confusion that the two protagonists find themselves in (in this play, after all, it becomes difficult to distinguish the act from the acting).

McGuire and Radcliffe’s performance succeeds in conveying the fallible human consciousnesses simultaneously at the centre and on the margins of the action of the play; their exchanges succeed in creating a kind of incandescence that bounds the shadows looming at the corners of the stage.

Experiencing Think Theatre’s Othello: a production for South African students

Think Theatre, a production company which stages set-works (including prescribed Shakespeare plays) for South African school students has, over the last few months, upheld its firmly established reputation, taking on the monumental task of performing Hamlet and Othello to thousands of learners all over the country. Last week, two new members of the Shakespeare ZA team, Marguerite de Waal and Kirsten Dey, attended the last performance of the company’s highly-acclaimed production of Othello at the Brooklyn Theatre in Pretoria.

As students, amateur scholars and teachers of Shakespeare in South Africa, we have found ourselves in a contentious field of study and interest. Considering the stir caused by the latest controversy as to Shakespeare’s place on the curriculum at South African high schools, we were enthusiastic and somewhat apprehensive upon venturing out of the University grounds on a week day at noon to see Think Theatre’s production of Othello – looking forward to engaging with Shakespeare performed as opposed to read, but apprehensive about the way the rest of the audience would respond to the play. Would their perception of the bard be tainted before they had had a chance to experience his work performed?

As we arrived at Brooklyn theatre and found ourselves surrounded by hundreds of high school students, we realised that we, along with the bustling, bubbling group, found ourselves excited at the prospect of escaping our various personal realities. Once we were escorted to the back of the theatre and took our seats, the lights dimmed, narrowing to a single spotlight on the director of Think Theatre’s Othello and Hamlet, Claire Mortimer. She addressed the students (us included – one is always a student of Shakespeare’s!) with sass and grace, welcoming us to her home – the theatre – and told us that we were about to engage with the work of the master of the human condition, encouraging us to receive the play in that light. Her introduction framed the experience of watching the play not as an escape from reality, but rather as a journey into its depths. One is confronted with the ultimate, charismatic, psychopathic villain in Iago; the weak and dupe-able minion in Roderigo; the naïve and earnest beloved in Desdemona; the intensely human, idealistic, flawed hero in Othello. And thus, one is reminded of the various faces of human character and the ways in which it responds to its varying contexts.

Mortimer was already in the costume she would wear as Emilia, identified herself as an actor in the play and engaged with the audience in a way that was personal, which further dispelled the illusion that what would appear before us was a world and reality unlike and apart from our own. Thus, as the lights refocused on the confabulating Iago and Roderigo in the first scene of the play, we were left to perceive them not as isolated entities but as representations of aspects of our own character.

This post is designed as more of a reflection on the production than a review of it. To this end, we have each identified three factors of the performance which we felt were particularly effective or interesting within the context of a Shakespearean play staged for South African learners:

Marguerite:

Ø  The actors’ awareness of and responsiveness to their audience was commendable. As I chatted to Claire Mortimer after the show, she enthused about the reactions of the students, drawing the connection between the ‘groundlings’ of Shakespeare’s day and the clear involvement of the students in the play as it is performed to them in 2017. The kind of cold-blooded reverence sometimes expected of audiences (as evidence of their right to such high-brow pursuits as playgoing) would only serve to entrench a view of Shakespeare and Shakespearean theatre as a distant, elitist, and monolithic institution. The Think Theatre team avoided any such error: the actors in this were able to read and respond to the reactions of their audience, and the audience was given space to respond to the actors.

Ø  A good example of this positive actor-audience dynamic which deserves a special mention is the character of Iago, portrayed by Chris van Rensburg. Iago’s numerous monologues verge on dialogues with the audience: spectators are given fairly direct access to his scheming thoughts, and are almost always aware of how he will steer the plot onwards. Van Rensburg uses this opportunity to elicit reactions from the audience, in a skilful performance which seems to understand that the more the audience can be brought to react to the character, the greater their emotional investment will be in the final outcome for him and the victims of his villainous machinations. Iago is a demanding role, and Van Rensburg manages to make the character as fascinating as he is detestable: one student went so far as to run to the foot of the stage to applaud him as the actors took a bow at the end.

Ø  Lastly, I think the treatment of the text, especially in terms of pacing, was done well. It is quite possible for a production of a Shakespeare play to run for three hours or longer: too long for an average spectator (never mind a distractible school student) to remain focused. Think Theatre’s Othello managed to make any shortening of the play quite unnoticeable and keep the running time to less than two and a half hours, all while maintaining a steady pace which kept the performance moving forward without losing essential depth or detail. The production therefore encapsulated the elements of the play necessary to a matriculant’s study of it, and it did so without compromising on an engaged, high-quality performance.   

Kirsten:

Ø  Cara Roberts is a fascinatingly human Desdemona alongside the engaging Nhlakanipho Manqele as Othello. I can imagine that it would be difficult to portray Desdemona, a character who is viewed as a spiritual envoy and metonymically comes to represent perfection itself when she is simply a young woman, perhaps still a girl, who is naïve, headstrong and who certainly experiences desire. As such, Desdemonas may be inclined to teeter on the edge of angelic melodrama. Roberts, however, has the fraught, captivating energy necessary to make the character human and believable. This could be one of the reasons the audience reacted to her with such vigorous applause: they could identify with her. Similarly, Manqele is also able to avoid the temptation of portraying Othello as a one-sided, demonic counterpart to Desdemona’s potentially beatific character. Rather, Manqele ensures that Othello is relatable and human in his anguish – thus enabling the audience to retain sympathy for him as a complex character, which is essential in provoking the necessary cathartic response to his violent, jealous madness.

Ø  The set is simple, the stage fairly bare, and little is made of references which might contextualise the play, heightening the sense that the narrative of Othello could take place in any milieu. Furthermore, the actors do not foreground Shakespeare’s English in a way that distances the audience from the characters but rather engage with the dialogue in a naturalistic manner. Hence, the production appears to be focused on the timelessness of the narrative, which is important when most of the members of a South African student audience are approaching the play as second language speakers, which is certainly a significant barrier. As such, it is important to portray the play as a text which while requiring effort is, in essence, accessible.

Ø  The final aspect of Think Theatre’s Othello to which I want to draw attention is the reaction of the audience to the production. About half way through Othello, I realised that I was watching two performances: that of the actors on the stage before me and that of the students engaging with the play. I came to be as fascinated by the one as I was by the other – perhaps because I am no longer just a student myself, but a teacher too. I like to know what makes the minds with which I work tick. Students from various schools, various backgrounds, were on the edge of their seats, clicking their tongues at the devious Iago, gasping in horror at Othello’s self-destruction, cringing at Desdemona’s naïve pursuit of Cassio’s defence in the face of Othello’s increasing suspicion, and quietly covering their mouths as Othello strangled Desdemona in their bed. And when the actors emerged from the wings to bow for the audience, they were met by an uproar of applause, indicating, perhaps, that the relevance of a playwright who has been perceived as outdated, colonial and abstruse may lie in the fact that his work is fundamentally relatable in its attempts to explore, understand and problematise what it means to be human.

After the show, the students from each school headed back to their respective buses in the wintry afternoon sunlight. Many had travelled quite a way to get there, and it was time for the long journey back. We sat down in the now-empty theatre restaurant to reflect on the show over a cup of coffee with Mortimer and her colleague, Margie Coppen – the company’s publicist and booking agent.

As we discussed the logistics of a travelling production such as theirs, the size and scale of their undertaking became increasingly evident. When staged at set venues in Gauteng, for example, both Othello and Hamlet were performed every weekday. In KwaZulu-Natal, the plays were performed in a variety of venues, to a total of more than 22 000 students. The tour is wide-reaching, and wildly differing staging spaces and access to resources come with the territory. The entire crew’s adaptability to their varying environments attests to their practised skill as well as their determination to reach as many learners from as many backgrounds as possible.

This determination seems to be driven by a deep understanding of the necessity of experiencing the plays in performance, especially for students studying Shakespeare’s texts at a high school level in a context where performances (and experiences) of Shakespeare outside of schools are highly localised. Performance is essential to the understanding of dramatic form. Plays can be studied and enjoyed through reading, certainly, but without an awareness of the purpose and character of different forms of literary expression, too much of the richness of a text might be lost. This poses a massive challenge in the South African context: if dramatic texts such as (but not limited to) Shakespeare’s are to be studied effectively, then students must have access not only to static knowledge about such texts, but also to experiences of them as artworks designed for interpretation and immediacy through performance.

Reflecting on Think Theatre’s achievements, two things become clear. Firstly, there are talented, passionate theatre-makers who are able to respond to an essential need in the education of South African learners. Secondly, this need has not been met fully yet: much more support is needed for projects such as Think Theatre, which provide professional, consistent, and mobile productions of plays for school students.

The SA Shakespeare media roadshow: Fiddling while Rome burns?

A few weeks ago, there was another brief kerfuffle over Shakespeare's place on the curriculum at South African high schools. Shakespeare scholar, editor of the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa and occasional troublemaker, Chris Thurman, was asked to weigh in on the matter. In this post he shares both his pleasure and his discomfort at tackling the topic of Shakespeare-in-schools when, to put it mildly, South Africans had more urgent fish to fry.  

On a Monday morning, towards the end of March, my phone rang. It was Stephen Grootes, host of the Midday Report on sister radio stations 702 and Cape Talk. I’ve been on Stephen’s show a few times before, talking about writers and artists in a five-minute segment he allocates at the end of his hour to news that isn’t quite “hard news”. As a journalist Stephen is always half a step ahead of the news cycle and – because I’m usually at least a few steps behind – I know that when he calls me in the morning, a famous author has died overnight, or a new painting of the presidential penis is doing the rounds on social media, and I’d better do some research and develop an opinion on the matter because he wants me to share it with his listeners in a few hours’ time.

On this occasion, however, I was already prepared. Like Stephen, I had read an article in the Business Day announcing: “Shakespeare may be taken out of classroom”. It followed a comment by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga regarding “decolonisation” and curriculum review. In reply to a parliamentary question from the DA, Motshekga had affirmed vaguely that “the consideration of the works of Shakespeare is an aspect of the overall literature review process targeted for 2020”.

For people in my line of work, talk about decolonising Shakespeare is neither scary nor new (one of the first blog posts on ShakespeareZA was an account by Lliane Loots of the “Decolonising Shakespeare” colloquium held in Durban last October, papers from which will be published in a special issue of the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa later this year). But the prospect of Shakespeare’s removal from the high school curriculum evidently struck a collective national nerve. For the next two weeks, as Jacob Zuma did his best to torpedo the South African economy and entrench his position as looter-in-chief of the public purse – and as the country’s citizens vented their anger at state capture – I was asked again and again for comment on the Bard (a moniker I don’t particularly like, by the way, but that’s a blog for another day).    

If I’d known that I would subsequently have many more opportunities to talk about the Shakespeare-in-schools issue, I wouldn’t have tried to fit so much into a few minutes on the Midday Report. But I didn’t know, so I did try, which meant that I spoke very fast – as I usually do when a topic enthuses me – too fast, apparently, for the behind-the-scenes team at 702, who introduced their podcast of the discussion by affirming that “Prof Chris Thurman of the English department at Wits University says William Shakespeare no longer has relevance for South African children.” As you can imagine, this would be a rather controversial (not to mention hypocritical) position for the president of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa to adopt.

What I actually said, in response to Stephen’s opening question, “Does Shakespeare still have relevance for South African children today?”, was that “The short answer, the easy answer, might be no...” I then went on to give a slightly longer, less easy answer! It was a refrain I’d be repeating, with variations, over the fortnight to come:

- teaching Shakespeare at university, as I do, is very different to teaching him at high school

- studying Shakespeare can be an invigorating and inspiring experience if teachers have the requisite knowledge and skills, and schools have the resources to give their learners access to the plays in performance

- translation of Shakespeare’s plays into South African languages has been a limited success but needs to be pursued more rigorously, both for the classroom and the stage (and screen)

- high school learners can encounter Shakespeare outside of the formal curriculum (for example through the Shakespeare Schools Festival)

- Shakespeare’s work can shine a light on South Africa’s past and present, and vice-versa, but we have to avoid easy recourse to cliché terms like “universal genius” in understanding Shakespeare’s global presence – he is connected, whether we like it or not, to a centuries-long colonial process in countries like SA; and he is linked to debates about the role of the English language in this country, as well as English cultural and linguistic imperialism.

(A different version of these points can be found at The Conversation, after that fine platform’s education editor, Natasha Joseph, sent me some questions to answer. Undoubtedly, Natasha also came up with the best headline on the subject, “Shakespeare in South African schools: to die, to sleep – or perchance to dream?”)

There was more of the same on Cape Talk’s Breakfast with Kieno Kammies the next day, as Kieno quizzed Motshekga’s spokesperson, Troy Martens, along with me. On this occasion I found myself referring to “pearl-clutching” in describing the response of shock and horror that some people have to the claim that Shakespeare does not automatically merit special treatment and need not get priority ahead of other authors. It seems a useful image to convey an unnecessary over-reaction. If “pearl-clutching” implies a certain demographic, however, it is inadequate. As I was reminded when listeners phoned in during a longer interview with Rowena Baird on SAfm (a really enjoyable discussion, of which unfortunately there is no record), Shakespeare’s most ardent fans – like his most strident detractors – come from all categories of age, race, class and gender.

By this stage, word of Shakespeare’s impending exit from SA’s classrooms (Shaxit?) had spread to the UK – where there is, of course, a strong investment in Shakespeare’s global status. A student at the University of Warwick, writing in campus publication The Boar, fretted over a (much-misquoted) professor, one Chris Thurman, who appeared to be an advocate of “excising Shakespeare’s work from the curriculum altogether”. Luckily, when the BBC picked up on the story, I could position myself between the PRO and ANTI Shakespeare camps – because I am not in the business of proselytising, but I am interested in the reasons that learners leave high school with such strongly divergent views on Shakespeare. And my fellow interviewee, Charlotte Scott of Goldsmith’s college, made it clear that an enthusiastic awareness of what Shakespeare can mean and do and be for learners is not at odds with (and in fact should be informed by) an equal awareness of the difficulties that Shakespeare presents.

It was fortunate that, between all this talk about talking about Shakespeare, I had the opportunity to travel to the University of Pretoria to see DCoriolanus – a devised student production (conceived and directed by Myer Taub) that, as the title suggests, was crucially concerned with what “Decolonising Shakespeare” might mean for and in performance. I wrote about the experience of watching DCoriolanus in my weekly Business Day dispatch. What I didn’t mention in the column was that I joined a panel discussion after the show in which a few of the panelists – myself included – expressed disquiet about my compromised place as a white male English professor presuming to hold forth about decolonisation.     

To complete the circle, I ended up back at 702. This time it was for The Literature Corner with Eusebius McKaiser and a more leisurely conversation, not just about Shakespeare in schools but about Shakespeare in SA more generally. This gave me the chance to do my “Shakespeare and the ANC” bit again, making the case that understanding the shifting attitudes towards Shakespeare of prominent members of the ruling party (from Sol Plaatje to Thabo Mbeki, perhaps via Nelson Mandela on Robben Island) can give us tremendous insight into the organisation’s contradictions and, indeed, into our current moment of crisis under Jacob Zuma. This is basically a synopsis of a seminar elective I’m teaching to a group of Wits University second years, but sharing it seemed apposite because I knew that there were more urgent conversations to have. My overwhelming sense, from my first interview with Stephen Grootes, was that we were taking up time on the airways that could better be allocated to the country’s BIG PROBLEMS (both acute and chronic). There are, of course, various responses that might allay such anxieties. One is that media consumers don’t only want to listen to, watch or read about Zuma, even though his cabal represents a clear and present danger to South Africa’s democracy. Another is that it would be rather arrogant to assume, if I was on TV or radio talking about the reasons behind the president’s proclivity for firing competent finance ministers, that my opinions might have any influence on the matter. I would have done better to join a protest march.

Instead, something better happened in the discussion with Eusebius. My fellow guest, Deborah Seddon of Rhodes University, rightly shifted the focus to the South African secondary education system more broadly. She warned of the risk that Minister Motshekga and others in government may choose the low-hanging fruit of paying lip service to decolonisation rather than fixing schools and the material conditions under which most learning takes place (or doesn’t take place) in this country. Talking to Eusebius and Deborah about the failings of our school system, I was reminded again that discussing Shakespeare’s place on the curriculum – and the wider topic of his history in SA – is not at odds with discussing economic inequality, or racism and sexism, or poor policies, or bad appointments, or skewed spending priorities.

Shakespeare is so embedded in education in SA that he is, whether we like it or not, part of the problem. But the good news is that – if we can find more nuanced ways of talking about him, of studying and translating and performing his plays – he may also be part of the solution.