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.

Koning Richard III - vertaal deur Deryck Uys

The Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa is proud to support an exciting initiative by the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre at Wits University: the launch of TCC Press and the publication of new translations of Shakespeare’s plays into Afrikaans (soon to be followed by other African languages).

Last year we posted a blog about Deryck Uys, who has achieved - in his retirement - the astonishing feat of translating all of Shakespeare’s work into Afrikaans! Now, the first title in the TCC Press series of Deryck Uys translations has been published: it is Koning Richard III, soon to be followed by Macbeth, Koning Lear and Romeo en Juliet. Copies can be ordered via the TCC Press online store.

The Deryck Uys Afrikaans Shakespeare translations are made possible by the generosity of TCC partners and sponsors, Legacy Underwriting Managers.

Deryck Uys signs a copy of his Koning Richard III, the first in the TCC Press series of Afrikaans Shakespeare translations.

TCC Director Chris Thurman (front left) with Uys and, behind them, Legacy CEO Christo Crafford.

Shakespeare in Southern Africa volume 35

Shakespeare in Southern Africa volume 35 (2022) will be published in December. We are sharing the editorial to give Shakespeare ZA readers a sneak peek at the contents!

The cover of Shakespeare in Southern Africa volume 35 features a production image from Janni Younge’s Hamlet.

Picture credit: Bronwyn Lloyd

South Africa’s theatre makers continue to operate in an embattled sector. It was hard enough before Covid-19. In 2020, the reopening of theatres was almost unimaginable; during the course of 2021, actors and audiences braved the awkward, on-off, makeshift circumstances of a halting return to live theatre. It is tempting to say that 2022 has brought something of a ‘return to normal’ – but that would be both to forget the pre-2020 precarity and to ignore the social, economic and technological shifts that have had what now seems a permanent impact on the performing arts: on artists, spaces, funding, audiences. What this means for Shakespeare in performance in South Africa remains to be seen. It must be noted, however, that there has been very little in the way of ‘new’ Shakespeare on South African stages over the past two years.

A Midsummer Ice Cream

This does not mean that there have been no new Shakespeare productions – merely that they have tended to be viewable on screens rather than stages. The cover of volume 34 (2021) of Shakespeare in Southern Africa gestured toward this with its collage of screenshots from an online Hamlet. Other filmic Shakespearean adventures include the Johannesburg Awakening Minds ensemble’s JAM at the Windybrow series (2021) and its short film A Midsummer Ice Cream (2022).

Shakespeare in Southern Africa 34

JAM at the Windybrow

The cover of the present volume gestures towards new stage prospects: it carries an image of a very different production of Hamlet, created by Janni Younge and featuring life-size puppets. An extract from this production was previewed at the Maynardville Open-Air Theatre in March 2022 before it was staged in full for a handful of performances at the National Arts Festival in June. A longer run in 2023 is eagerly anticipated – and hopefully Younge’s Hamlet will be joined by other new, innovative, widely-publicised Shakespeares.

The outline I have just offered overlooks at least one significant Covid-era South African Shakespeare: a production of Macbeth at the Joburg Theatre that benefited from a brief window between Covid waves (and concomitant lockdowns / closures) in April 2021. This multilingual Macbeth was performed by the young cast of the Joburg Theatre’s actor training programme, with Jeremiah Mntonga, Michael Mazibuko and Sarah Roberts as director-facilitators. It is very pleasing, then, that volume 35 opens with an article by Roberts reflecting on the collaborative process through which this production developed, attending to “the interplay of spoken word and non-semantic avian and animal calls” – specifically, the ways in which the cast’s playfulness in generating birdcalls during the rehearsal process “was instrumental in building performers’ confidence in transposition and spontaneous translation” of the Shakespeare text into South African languages.

In a serendipitous coincidence, while Roberts’ article was undergoing the review process, a second article was submitted that also focuses on birds in Macbeth: Anya Heise-von der Lippe’s analysis of avian imagery in Joel Coen’s recent film version. The opportunity to place these articles ‘in conversation’ with one another could not, I felt, be passed up. So it was that we initiated a new format for Shakespeare in Southern Africa, twinning articles and inviting an interlocutor to facilitate a kind of roundtable-in-print. Here I must convey my sincere thanks to Anston Bosman, who engaged extensively with these two articles and whose questions – as you will agree upon reading the “Roundtable: Macbeth and birds, on stage and screen” – elicit clarifying, complicating and gratifying answers from the authors. These are more than just prompts for further discussion; indeed, they may be considered an extension of the usual peer review process (suggesting future possibilities for hybrid ‘open’ and ‘blind’ forms of review).

[Above: images from rehearsals of the Joburg Theatre Macbeth]

The mutually-informing relationship between Shakespearean theatre and film is also a key aspect of Raphael d’Abdon’s article, which follows the Roundtable. Reassessing Carmelo Bene’s “misreadings” of Hamlet and Macbeth, d’Abdon emphasises Bene’s antagonistic response to Western theatre tradition and, in particular, his refining of idiosyncratic conceptual tools – as well as strategies or methods of performance – such as la scrittura di scena (scenic writing) and la macchina attoriale (the actorial machine). Sadly Bene remains relatively unknown outside Italy despite his celebrated oeuvre, so it is fitting that d’Abdon should place the spotlight squarely upon him. Moreover, for Shakespeare scholars, teachers and creative practitioners wishing to explore decolonial practices, d’Abdon suggests that Bene’s work is a stimulating and simpatico point of reference.

In the fourth article in this volume, Peter Titlestad returns us to the cultural, religious, political and material circumstances under which Shakespeare and his contemporaries lived, wrote and performed. Titlestad revisits Shakespeare’s literary-dramatic responses to Philip Sidney, reminding us of how Shakespeare “gave Sidney’s fruitful arguments unexpected expression” even as Sidney “gave Shakespeare fruitful irritation”. Crucially, the article also counters the conventional (mis)representation of the Puritans in scholarly and popular accounts of their connections – for better or for worse – to Shakespeare’s work. It turns out that there are no easy answers to the question, “Who were the Puritans?”

Volume 35 also carries two book reviews: Carel Nolte appraises Antjie Krog’s Afrikaans translation of Tom Lanoye’s Koningin Lear, and Linda Ritchie writes about Robin Malan’s A Sillie Shakspur Quizze. Nolte ponders the various “contributors” to (and the voices in) Krog’s palimpsestic text, recognising their collective challenge to various assumptions about how capitalism ‘works’, as well as about gender roles and linguistic propriety. Ritchie discusses the Quizze as a book that presents itself as edutainment – something for “the lounge” as well as “the classroom” – by embracing its silliness while keeping in mind its potential use to teachers and learners.

I cannot conclude this editorial without issuing my customary acknowledgements and thanks: firstly, to the reviewers and editorial advisers who ensure that Shakespeare in Southern Africa maintains rigorous scholarly standards; secondly, to Carol Leff, the secretary of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, for attending to various practical considerations in pricing, printing and distributing the journal; thirdly, and most especially, to my partner-in-publishing-crime, Liz Gowans, for her expert ministrations as typesetter and designer.