It's Shakespeare Schools Festival time again!

The thirteenth Shakespeare Schools Festival South Africa (SSFSA) is taking place in cities around the country over the course of 2023. Its longest season yet is about to commence in Cape Town, at the District Six Homecoming Centre’s Star Theatre. 38 young ensembles will perform their 30-minute productions between the 8th and 27th of May.

Listen to SSFSA founder and ceo, kseniya filinova-bruton, with cape talk’s pippa hudson

This year’s theme is Unplugged and Illuminated in 2023! The learners have been given free rein over their pared-back productions. “We love how casts turn a play on its head and ‘own’ it, always thinking out of the box!" says the festival’s Managing Director Blythe Stuart-Linger. “Imaginations run wild and young people innovate wonderfully with their own props, costumes, sets and interpretations. Participants come out of the festival experience with improved ‘soft skills’ and feeling empowered to walk into their exams more confidently!”

Throughout the preparation process, the SSFSA team is also on hand to assist with scripts, acting and directing tips. Various educational programs are held in the lead-up to the event to benefit educators, learner-directors and casts. Festival founder and CEO Kseniya Filinova-Bruton describes the SSFSA as “a catalyst for youth empowerment”: “Over more than a decade we have developed a non-competitive, fully inclusive environment where school-going youth can build confidence, improve on life skills and have their voices heard, acknowledged, encouraged, challenged and respected.” A number of productions in recent years have been performed in translation (into isiZulu, isiXhosa and Afrikaans).

The SSFSA is Africa's largest Shakespeare festival. The numbers are impressive! Since 2009, across four provinces (Western Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape), approximately 30,000 audience members have watched nearly 600 productions performed by some 12,500 learners. The festival has also supported almost 700 teachers in their development as drama and performing arts directors, and has worked with 80 guest, student and volunteer directors. 

SSFSA 2023 is open for registration to prospective participants in Durban, George and Johannesburg. Visit www.ssfsa.co.za for more information. 

Booking for the Cape Town event is through Quicket. Tickets cost R110 and performances start at 19:30.

"Shakespeare Grounded" and a Birthday Lecture

April is not the cruellest month in South Africa - after all, it is full of public holidays! Although perhaps some Shakespeare ZA readers (teachers marking at home? actors missing their audiences?) would agree with TS Eliot ...

Either way, April brings a happy annual event: the Shakespeare Birthday Lecture, hosted by the Makhanda Branch of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa. The 2023 lecture will be delivered by Marguerite de Waal.

And this year, the month of April brings more good news: Buhle Ngaba’s popular “Shakespeare Grounded” programme has been relaunched!

The 2023 Shakespeare Birthday Lecture will take place at Amazwi Museum of South African Literature in Makhanda on Tuesday 11 April at 18:00.

Dr Marguerite de Waal (University of Pretoria) will deliver the lecture on the topic:

“‘I knew her, Horatio’: Performing Legacies in Hamlet 2021”.

Update (6 June 2023):

De Waal’s lecture can now be viewed on the #lockdownshakespeare YouTube channel

(Photographer: Marguerite van Eeden)

AND Shakespeare ZA is glad to share some news from Buhle Ngaba, who played Ophelia in (and was also associate director of) Neil Coppen’s “live-online-reading” of Hamlet in 2021. Buhle writes:

“Friends, South Africans and countrymen! I’ve recently returned from completing an arts residency in Basel, Switzerland, which included facilitating narrative workshops at schools. I’m back in Cape Town and offering my Shakespeare Grounded workshops (previously received with much enthusiasm at the Shakespeare Schools Festival, Vienna Festival, AFDA and the University of Cape Town). Please get in touch if you would like Shakespeare Grounded at your school!”

These workshops adopt a practical approach to making Shakespeare’s plays accessible to young South Africans. Students are guided through:

  • a basic (re)introduction to Shakespeare

  • narrative building and world making

  • adaptations, alternative forms and structure.

Email For more information
Visit buhlengaba.com

Schools: don’t miss out! More Hamlets, an Othello and a Tempest ...

If Shakespeare is only a book in a classroom, the experience can be very dull indeed ... Fortunately for learners and teachers in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape, there are numerous opportunities in the weeks and months ahead to encounter Shakespeare’s plays as they were intended - live and on stage!

Hamlet is a prominent presence on South African stages at the moment - and it’s only partly because the play is widely prescribed as a school setwork. Theatre makers love getting to grips with this iconic work.

Cape Town audiences have been spoiled for choice recently, with Janni Younge’s production (featured in our previous post) at the Baxter Theatre running at the same time as Fred Abrahamse and Marcel Meyer’s new version at the Artscape Theatre.

This Hamlet, featuring A&M Productions’ distinctive design, costume and lighting aesthetic, stars Matthew Baldwin, Lungi Lallie, Tailyn Ramsamy, Thinus Viljoen, Marcel Meyer and Nkosinathi Mazwai. It closes on 11 March.

Thinktheatre, marking 20 years of its touring production of Othello and 12 years of its Hamlet, is staging this powerful pairing (directed by Clare Mortimer) at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre in Durban until 17 March. The cost is R100 per learner and the programme of performances can be found here, or email doreen@thinktheatre.co.za for bookings.

In May, the Thinktheatre cast and crew will travel to Johannesburg to present Othello and Hamlet at the UJ Arts Centre. To whet the appetite, here are some images from previous productions!

The National Children’s Theatre recently announced a production of The Tempest, directed by Lucy Wylde Ferreira (above), running from 8 May until 2 June. The show will open at the NCT’s outdoor theatre in Parktown, Johannesburg, and then will travel to schools around Gauteng.

Bookings: cindy@nctheatresa.org.za

And finally: if you’re in Cape Town, a new travelling Hamlet could be coming soon to a school near you!

After the success of its touring Macbeth last year, Educasions has added this Hamlet to its repertoire and will be giving “command performances” at schools on Thursday mornings from April onwards.

The cost is R60 per learner (minimum 100 learners), which includes a Q&A session after each performance and a resource pack.

Bookings: educasions@gmail.com

HAMLET at the Baxter

Janni Younge’s innovative adaptation of Hamlet combines puppetry and physical theatre to tell the story of the Prince of Denmark in a new and distinctive way. After a work-in-progress staging at Cape Town’s Maynardville Open Air Theatre in March 2022, the production was launched at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda in June. Following a successful run at the Chicago International Puppet Festival in January, it has now returned to Cape Town, where it will be at the Baxter Theatre from 22 February to 11 March.

The ensemble cast consists of Mongi Mtombeni and Siyamthanda Sinani (Hamlet), Timothy Redpath (Claudius), Roshina Ratnam (Gertrude), Samkelo Zihlangu, Tshiamo Moretlwe and Beviol Swartz. Directed and designed by Younge, with Ratman as assistant director, this Hamlet features lighting design by Lize-Marie van Rooyen and sound design and original music by Daniel Eppel.

It is billed as an “intense, high-energy production”: “The poetry and emotional weight of Shakespeare’s words are echoed in the scale and energy of the puppets. Non-verbal, evocative and ‘visually immersive’ figures blend and reconfigure themselves as characters grapple with the depths of passion and grief. Hamlet’s internal struggles play visibly in the puppetry, as each puppet is a ‘physical being’ supported by the ‘emotional being’ of the performers.”

Booking is through Webtickets online or at Pick n Pay stores. Ticket prices are R120 for the preview and R150 throughout with an Early Bird Special of R120 for the first week.

A Maynardville Midsummer Night's Dream

Capetonians are celebrating the return of the Maynardville Open Air Theatre Festival after a three-year hiatus. VR Theatrical’s six-week programme of classical music, ballet, opera and - you guessed it - Shakespeare has brought a venerable arts venue back to life. The main feature, a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opens in February.

The Festival launched earlier this month with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra performing Mendelssohn’s overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then it was the turn of Cape Town Opera, with their double-bill of Songs of Shakespeare and Spirituals.

Now the cast of an innovative new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starring Chi Mhende and Mark Elderkin, takes to the stage. Director Geoff Hyland is well-known to Maynardville audiences, having previously directed Macbeth (2004), Twelfth Night (2006 and 2017), As You Like It (2009) and Richard III (2019).

The festival will close in the first week of March with Cape Town City Ballet’s SummerSnow - a programme of two works “contrasting the heat of summer with performances inspired by sharp, icy winter themes”.*

*A little Shakespeare ZA footnote: do you know about the interesting - and largely forgotten - early history of ballet at Maynardville, which laid the groundwork for the venue’s much-vaunted Shakespearean tradition? Check out Shakespeare in Southern Africa volume 34 to learn more in an article by Sheila Chisholm and Temple Hauptflesich.

If you’re in Cape Town in February, support South African theatre and make sure you get to Maynardville!

Tickets are available from Quicket.