Shakespeare Schools Festival (and a bonus Macbeth)

May 3, 2022 Chris T

The Shakespeare Schools Festival South Africa (SSF-SA) is into its twelfth year! It will take place in three phases between May and September 2022. First up: the D6 Theatre (formerly the Fugard Theatre) in Cape Town, from 6-14 May.

The Festival will continue in Cape Town at the Baxter Theatre from 10-20 August. Following this, SSF-SA will run in Johannesburg at the Joburg Theatre from 6-11 September, at the Dotsure George Arts Theatre in George from 9-18 September, and at the Playhouse in Durban from 13-17 September.

Participating schools at the D6 Theatre include Parel Vallei High School, Parklands College, Fish Hoek Primary School, Wynberg Boys' Acting Association, Pioneer School for the visually impaired, Hermanus High School, Curro Century City High, South Peninsula High School, Westerford High School, Darul Arqam Islamic High School, Wynberg Boys' Junior School, Rhenish Girls' High School, Leiden Secondary School, Athlone High School, SACS High School, Vista Nova High School, Rustenburg Girls’ High and Oakley House.

. . . and there’s more!

On Friday 13 May at 10:00, theatre and arts education company Educasions will give a performance of its touring production of Macbeth, sponsored by the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Tickets can be booked through Quicket.

For the festival, schools are asked to present innovative, abridged versions of a Shakespeare play of their choice, approximately thirty minutes in duration. Casts are encouraged to re-imagine, to adapt and to ‘turn the play on its head’ by taking its themes and relating them to themselves and their peers.

Since 2009, the SSFSA has showcased over five hundred Shakespeare plays across the Western Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, working with almost eleven thousand learners from six hundred schools, and bolstering hundreds of teachers in their capacity as drama and performing arts directors.

Shakespeare in Zimbabwean Poetry

April 21, 2022 Chris T

[Updated 12 June 2022:

Dan Wylie’s lecture is now available for viewing via YouTube]

The Makhanda Branch of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa will host its annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture on Tuesday 26th April 2022.

Professor Dan Wylie will deliver the lecture, titled:

“Stepp’d in blood? Shakespeare in Zimbabwean Poetry”

***

The event will take place in the Long Room at the Highlander (10 Worcester Street, Makhanda). The lecture will begin at 18:30 and will be followed by refreshments. Donations from non-members are welcome!

RSVP here.

Hamlet is back!

April 12, 2022 Chris T

Shakespeare stage productions in South Africa have been few and far between over the past two years. But we seem to be emerging from the shadow of Covid, and as the theatre sector builds some momentum again more Shakespeare can be expected.

In March, Janni Younge’s puppetry Hamlet was a one-night-only event at the Maynardville Open-Air Theatre. Now, in the same week that Neil Coppen’s live-online-reading of Hamlet (performed in May 2021) was nominated for a Naledi Award in the category “Best Production: Virtual Online Theatre”, Shakespeare ZA is glad to be able share some news from Abrahamse & Meyer Productions about the return of their Hamlet to Artscape ... en route to Denmark!

Marcel Meyer and Lungile Lallie in *Hamlet*
(All photos: Daniel Coetzee)

The Abrahamse & Meyer production of Hamlet premiered at the 2015 National Arts Festival and has since played to rave reviews and standing ovations across Europe, South Africa and the United States of America. The production takes its inspiration from the apocryphal tale of a performance of Hamlet in 1608 by the crew of the Red Dragon, while the ship was anchored off the east coast of Africa.

This production re-imagines Shakespeare’s play within the context of this story, presenting a performance aboard the Red Dragon as a play within a play within a play, utilising a cast of six actors playing six Jacobean sailors who, in turn, play all the parts in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Later this year, the company will travel to Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, Denmark - the setting for Hamlet and also the site of the world’s oldest Shakespeare Festival (which has run continuously since 1816) - to perform at this iconic venue.

Hamlet features direction and set design by Fred Abrahamse, lighting by Faheem Bardien, costumes by Marcel Meyer and an original score by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder. Joining Meyer in the cast are original company members Matthew Baldwin [Ophelia & Guildenstern] and Jeremy Richard [Laertes & Rosencrantz], with veteran Shakespearean Michael Richard as Claudius. Completing the cast are up-and-coming actors Taylin Ramsamy [Horatio & Polonius]and Lungile Lallie [Gertrude].

The production runs at Artscape in Cape Town until 23 April. All tickets cost R80 and can be booked through Computicket or Artscape-Dial-A-Seat (+27 21 421 7695).

Shakespeare in Southern Africa volume 34

December 16, 2021 Chris T

Shakespeare in Southern Africa volume 34 has gone to print and will soon be available online!

The cover shows a series of stills from the live-online-reading of Hamlet that took place earlier this year (directed by Neil Coppen). Marguerite de Waal writes about the production in a fantastic reviews section that also covers a range of recently-published books:

- Jyotsna Singh’s Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (reviewed by Amrita Dhar)

- The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice (reviewed by Hassana Moosa)

- Eric Harber’s Shakespeare, Christianity and Italian Paganism, R. Allen Shoaf’s Lucretius, Shakespeare and the Nature of Things, and Cathryn Enis and Glyn Parry’s Shakespeare Before Shakespeare (reviewed by Tony Voss).

Volume 34 includes four research articles, on subjects ranging from the use of mixed reality digital games to teach Shakespeare in South African high schools (Gina Bloom and Lauren Bates) to the little-known “pre-history” of the Maynardville Open Air Theatre in Cape Town (Sheila Chisholm and Temple Hauptfleisch), and from Mauritian Shakespeares (Angela Ramsoondur and Sheila Wong Kong Luong) to a translation of Hamlet into Naija (Odirin Abonyi).

The volume closes with an obituary by Denise Newfield paying tribute to Shakespeare scholar Martin Orkin, and in his editorial Chris Thurman reflects on Orkin’s passing in revisiting the early years of the journal - first published in 1987, the same year as Orkin’s Shakespeare Against Apartheid - and the debates that have raged in its pages.

You can access Shakespeare in Southern Africa via SA Journals / Sabinet, African Journals Online (AJOL) and other scholarly databases.

SA Shakespeares in the news

September 26, 2021 Chris T

This week saw the publication of two very different articles providing insight into the diversity of South African Shakespeares.

First it was the turn of Shakespeare ZA to enjoy some limelight, with prestigious scholarly journal Shakespeare Bulletin publishing a review of our #lockdownshakespeare project by Dr Henry Bell of the University of the West of Scotland (UWS). Monologue performances by Soyiso Ndaba, Buhle Ngaba, Amanda Seome, Oarabile Ditsele, Liatile Mohale and Ashleigh Harvey get special mention. You can read all about it via Project Muse or the UWS archive.

Then Laetitia Pople of Netwerk24 wrote an article about the announcement of an exciting partnership between our friends at the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre (TCC) and Legacy Underwriting Managers (LUM). The focus is on Afrikaans Shakespeares - recuperating the old and pioneering the new!

Click on the headline below to be directed to Netwerk24.