Two preview screenings in Stellenbosch during Woordfees 2023 will offer audiences a first look at a groundbreaking Shakespeare film project. Speak Me A Speech, the new film from Cape Town’s CineSouth Studios, produced in association with Wits University’s Tsikinya-Chaka Centre, is still in production, with shooting scheduled to continue to end 2024. The preview created by Speak Me A Speech director Victor van Aswegen for Woordfees from material filmed for the project to date gives a foretaste of the film.
The festival screenings are a rare opportunity for the public to get an early look into a forthcoming feature-length work still in production and meet the people behind the project. The Woordfees preview screenings, sponsored by EasyEquities, start at 2pm on Tuesday 10 and Friday 13 October in the Neelsie Cinema on the Stellenbosch campus, and are followed by Q&A with the director and producers Chris Thurman and Victor van Aswegen.
“With this project,” says van Aswegen, “We are bringing to life an astonishing 28 Shakespeare characters in 10 South African languages through 35 iconic monologues. But more than that: we are also presenting these characters reimagined as inhabitants of the modern-day world, speaking to us in a natural, colloquial, conversational style as contemporaries. And what they’re articulating are timeless human concerns. Transplanted to new and strikingly different contexts, these performances highlight multiple fresh nuances and variations on the familiar. But underlying all variety of history, culture, language and place, what shines through is a sense of hard unvarying human fundamentals being laid bare – movingly, pitch-perfectly, enlighteningly.”
The preview film screened at Woordfees features performances by celebrated actors Anelisa Phewa, Royston Stoffels, Chantal Stanfield and Buhle Ngaba, bringing to life in isiZulu, Afrikaans and Setswana four Shakespeare characters: Thomas More, John Falstaff, Mistress Page and Portia from the plays Sir Thomas More, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV Part II and Julius Caesar – the first time these characters, created by Shakespeare over four centuries ago, have been realised and presented on film in these languages. While the performance in Setswana draws from the near-century-old classic translation by Sol Plaatje dating from the 1930s, the other translations were created for the film – the isiZulu by actor Anelisa Phewa and the Afrikaans by director van Aswegen.
The Speak Me A Speech preview screenings at Woordfees are made possible by EasyEquities and supported by Business and Arts South Africa (BASA).
The five monologues in the preview film (Falstaff gets two) were selected for the wide range of topics, situations and emotions they cover. Old-age mischief-making for love and money, indignation at the receipt of an unwanted advance, and eloquent words on the manifold merits of sherry give us Shakespeare in light-hearted mode – in Afrikaans. A shift of tone takes us into the life and mind of a Setswana-speaking woman trapped in an unhappy marriage, and finally to an impassioned speech delivered by a Zulu leader to a violent, xenophobic mob.
As in the full-length film, the monologues in South African languages are punctuated by reflection in English on some of the material – in this case an extended sequence in which Anelisa Phewa shares some of the thinking underpinning his work on the translation and performance of the powerful speech by Thomas More.
All monologues filmed for the project are made publicly available on the web platform www.speak-me-a-speech.com, with user-selectable subtitle options (Shakespeare, the South African language being spoken, and the translation into contemporary English of the spoken language), and texts.