Small South African Shakespeares onscreen
Résumés
Speak Me A Speech est une plateforme en ligne de monologues filmés de Shakespeare interprétés dans les langues sud-africaines. L’auteur présente ce projet en revisitant d’autres éléments cinématographiques shakespeariens sud-africains qui peuvent être formulés de manière productive dans les termes présentés par l’appel à communications du colloque « Shakespeare in Focus », comme le fragment shakespearien ou le court métrage à petite échelle. Speak Me A Speech a été lancé en 2023 avec cinq monologues. Deux d’entre eux sont étudiés ici : Thomas More attirant l’attention sur « le cas des étrangers » (Anelisa Phewa en isiZulu) et Portia suppliant Brutus de lui faire part de ses tractations politiques (Buhle Ngaba en Setswana). Ces « petits » Shakespeare contiennent des moments – au sein du « moment » de chaque discours, extraits de la pièce dans laquelle il se produit – dans lesquels « des changements minimes dans les mots ou les détails du texte » ont le pouvoir de recadrer la manière dont les spectateurs/auditeurs interagissent avec le texte shakespearien: changements subtils qui sont culturellement, historiquement et politiquement significatifs.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
Shakespeare William, film, monologue, traduction, isiZulu, Setswana, Plaatje Sol, Afrique du SudKeywords:
Shakespeare William, film, monologue, translation, isiZulu, Setswana, Plaatje Sol, South AfricaPlan
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1. Fragments and tatters
- 1 I elaborate on this phenomenon in “From ‘English Never Loved Us’ to JAM at the Windybrow: Covid-Era (...)
- 2 The chief annual Shakespearean fixture on South Africa’s theatre calendar is the summer production (...)
1Like many scholars and artists from South Africa, I am inclined to think about my areas of academic and creative interest in “big” terms – the narratives and discourses through which we tend to interpret our country’s history and its present predicaments: Race, Reconciliation, Inequality, Injustice, Freedom. Certainly, this applies to my conceptualisation of Shakespeare in a South African context. On reading the Call For Papers for the “Shakespeare in Focus: The art of small things” conference, however, it struck me that much of my work over the last decade or so has really been concerned with “small” Shakespeares: fragments, mini-Shakespeares, bits and pieces of Shakespeare. This is a function, I would argue, of the fact that the “micro” and the marginal are frequently the forms in which Shakespeare exists in South Africa today.1 Shakespeare is a fixture in education, of course, chiefly in textual form; it/he is a common enough point of reference in popular culture and public discourse, mostly as a symbol rather than as a coherent body of work or an historical figure. Yet when it comes to stage and screen productions – that is, to the domain of performance – Shakespeare tends to be on the fringes. There are a few full-length professional stage productions each year, often connected to the single facet of school learners’ experience that is not “Shakespeare as a book”: theatre producers, directors and actors can usually be assured of an audience if they choose to perform plays that are prescribed on the national syllabus.2 When it comes to film material, until a few years ago there really was very little. I’ve been committed to addressing this dearth in my collaborations with artists, primarily with filmmaker Victor van Aswegen on Speak Me A Speech, the project I will be discussing here.
- 3 Alexa Alice Joubin and Victoria Bladen, ed., Onscreen Allusions to Shakespeare: International Films (...)
- 4 Sara Blecher in Chris Thurman, “Othello Surfing: Fragments of Shakespeare in South Africa”, in Joub (...)
2First, however, I wish to go back to 2013 and a conference organised by the late Mariangela Tempera and her colleagues at the University of Ferrara in Italy, “Shakespeare in Tatters: Referencing his works on film and television”. A number of the papers presented at that conference were later published as a collection with a slightly different emphasis in the title: Onscreen Allusions to Shakespeare.3 Tatters, however, struck me then as (and continues to be) a very useful paradigm for thinking about how Shakespeare exists in South Africa in the fragmentary, borrowed, adapted forms I described above. My own contribution was on Otelo Burning, a 2011 film about black surfers under apartheid with a story that, one could comfortably affirm without fear of contradiction, actually has very little at all to do with Othello. But the filmmakers borrowed bits and pieces of plot and theme – unjustified sexual jealousy, an “honest” friend who is actually a deceitful enemy – because they “needed a through-line, and Othello could do that”.4 This is to my knowledge the most recent South African feature-length film that has a significant Shakespearean inflection. Indeed, apart from two other versions of Othello (the filmed-for-TV iteration of the 1987 Market Theatre stage production directed by Janet Suzman, and Eubulus Timothy’s 2005 Othello: A South African Tale) and films like Minky Schlesinger’s Romeo and Juliet-inspired UGugu no Andile (from the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s suspended 2008 Shakespeare in Mzansi series), there were no other titles that might fit this description produced over the 10 or 20 years prior to Otelo Burning, and there have been none since. Everything else, really, is “small Shakespeare”.
- 5 See Gemma Kate Allred, Benjamin Broadribb and Erin Sullivan, ed., Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evoluti (...)
- 6 Henry Bell, “#lockdownshakespeare (review)”, Shakespeare Bulletin 38.3, 2020, p. 526-527.
3Consider a Covid-era initiative of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, #lockdownshakespeare, which may be seen as one manifestation of the global 2020-2021 phenomenon of “Lockdown Shakespeare”.5 The South African iteration took the form of a shared platform; theatre makers who were stuck at home recorded themselves performing a monologue, which was then uploaded to a YouTube channel. They were paid a nominal fee – a gesture towards keeping theatre and the performing arts in South Africa going under lockdown. The result was a remarkable series of monologue performances, supplemented by a handful of videos in 2023, making the current collection about 50 strong. Henry Bell, reviewing #lockdownshakespeare for Shakespeare Bulletin, makes two interesting points about the videos that are worth bearing in mind for the material I’ll be turning to shortly.6 The first is that surprisingly few actors chose to perform Shakespeare in translation into South African languages, so it is mostly an English (Anglophone) resource. The second is the tension between those performances that have an explicit visual context – whether that is in a domestic setting or, occasionally, a public space – and those that are, visually at least, context-free.
4I subsequently had the opportunity to work with a South African community theatre group called Johannesburg Awakening Minds (JAM). This group had developed a repertoire of Shakespeare monologues, including some in translation into African languages, and a set of scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream following the meta-theatrical “rude mechanicals” sub-plot – a playful, knowing choice by an ensemble of formerly indigent theatre makers who are aware that many of their audience members adopt the same gently condescending attitude towards their performances as Theseus and the wedding party do towards Peter Quince, Nick Bottom and co. The JAM ensemble, associated with homelessness, had been given a “home” at the Windybrow Arts Centre by the Market Theatre Foundation at the start of 2020. When production company How Now Brown Cow approached the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa and the recently-established Tsikinya-Chaka Centre (TCC) at the University of the Witwatersrand with a proposal to support JAM in filming their material, it made sense to take advantage of the historic Windybrow complex as a location – adding a layer of site-specific significance to each monologue in the JAM at the Windybrow series (2021) and, later, to the short film A Midsummer Ice Cream (2022). With a film crew (of two) shooting and editing to achieve higher production values, and a cast performing in a combination of interior and exterior semi-public settings, these videos differed significantly from the self-recorded and “homely” / home-made #lockdownshakespeare videos; they constituted a new departure in small South African Shakespeares on screen.
- 7 The performances by Stoffels and Stanfield are in Afrikaans (translated by Victor van Aswegen). The (...)
5These projects formed a collective prologue to the TCC and CineSouth Studios coproduction Speak Me A Speech, directed by Victor van Aswegen. This ongoing film project, it is envisaged, will result in up to 35 monologues performed in all of South Africa’s official languages (which now number twelve, including South African Sign Language). A documentary feature making use of behind-the-scenes footage and performer interviews, telling the story of a group of actors “finding their voice” – in, through and despite Shakespeare – has also been proposed. Speak Me A Speech may be seen as a language advocacy project, promoting South African languages via Shakespeare. Thus far, five monologues have been produced: Anelisa Phewa’s performance of his own isiZulu translation of the “stranger’s case” speech from Sir Thomas More; Buhle Ngaba’s Portia from Sol Plaatje’s Setswana translation of Julius Caesar; Royston Stoffels delivering two speeches by Falstaff, one his ode to sherry from 1 Henry IV and the other his scheming in The Merry Wives of Windsor; and Chantel Stanfield as Mistress Page from Merry Wives, responding to Falstaff’s proposition. For the purposes of this paper, I have chosen to focus on Ngaba’s and Phewa’s speeches.7
- 8 Société Française Shakespeare, “Shakespeare in Focus: The art of small things”, conference Call For (...)
6There are various ways in which the Speak Me A Speech monologues may be conceptualised or categorised as demonstrating “the art of small things” in accordance with the “Shakespeare in Focus” conference theme.8 Each short film is a kind of bite-sized, self-contained Shakespeare. They are small not only in terms of duration but also because they are shot on a small budget, with a small (two-person) permanent creative team and crew. For these reasons they are small in scale and scope, shot on the small stage of a small independent theatre (the Drama Factory in Somerset West, Western Cape). Although the material is beautifully filmed – Van Aswegen’s cinematography truly paints with light, shooting in 4K RAW – and is best viewed on a large cinema screen, the project partners eagerly anticipate these videos being seen on small screens, with younger viewers in particular sharing them on social media and engaging with them on their smartphones.
- 9 Ibid., n.p.
7The online home of the project is speak-me-a-speech.com, where three differently-subtitled versions of each video are available. Viewers can choose between the Shakespearean text, the language being spoken by the performer, and a modernised English version. The latter is in effect a re-translation, showing how the Shakespearean original has been adjusted, interpreted and adapted through the process of translation. I want to suggest that in paying attention to the details of these trilingual parallel texts we are able to identify how, in the terms of the “Shakespeare in Focus” conference Call For Papers, each Speak Me A Speech performance contains a moment – within the “moment” of the speech itself, lifted out of the play in which it occurs but carrying traces of the wider narrative and thematic arcs – in which “minimal changes to words or details in the text” have the potential to profoundly reframe the ways in which viewers / listeners engage with the Shakespearean material.9 In one sense, this is an inevitable function of translation, but I aim to show how in Speak Me A Speech these subtle shifts are culturally, historically and politically significant.
8It may be noted here that this significance is marked “textually” or verbally rather than visually. The first five Speak Me A Speech monologues employ a black-box framing of each speaker; they lack a “site” or visual context, with very limited use of props or costuming as markers of place and time. The cinematographic effect is striking, but there is an argument to be made in favour of locating actors and the characters they portray more explicitly. Henry Bell observes that one of the appealing features of the #lockdownshakespeare series is that, unlike stage productions trying to convey “setting” in an overdetermined or contrived fashion (attempting, say, “a verisimilitudinous representation of South Africa”), in those videos “South Africa was simply there”:
- 10 Henry Bell, “‘Difference matters’: Challenging myths of Africa-as-country in the RSC’s 2012 Julius (...)
In the case of recordings in which the performers did not obscure their background with a “neutral” curtain, the project enabled the viewers to see Shakespeare performed in the domestic settings of the performers, or their immediate vicinity and, occasionally, in an urban or rural location. The South Africa depicted in these recordings was the South Africa that existed in the moment the actor pressed record [...] there was a striking normality in the locations in which these speeches from Shakespeare’s plays were delivered.10
9Bell shows how, paradoxically, a form of intimacy or authentic communication is made possible between actor and audience when (regardless of where the video is viewed) the site-specificity of the performance and recording is evident. The cultural, historical and political significance I referred to earlier is potentially better marked, or at least alluded to, with this kind of visual framing. By contrast, in the first five Speak Me A Speech monologues, local context – the “situatedness” of the speaker – is only indicated linguistically. To the Shakespeare scholar, this becomes an invitation to pay greater attention to those “minimal changes to words or details in the text”.
2. “I shot myself in the foot”
- 11 References to Julius Caesar are taken from the New Cambridge Shakespeare Third Edition, ed. Martin (...)
10In Act 2 Scene 1 of Julius Caesar, Portia pleads with her husband Brutus to let her in on his secret dealings with Cassius and the other conspirators. This is an appeal for greater trust from her husband, but also for recognition of her potential role (as “A woman well reputed, Cato’s daughter”, 2.1.295) in Roman public life.11 In Speak Me A Speech, Buhle Ngaba portrays Portia (Pôrôtia) in Setswana, performing a monologue compiled from lines stretching across what is actually a lengthy dialogue with Brutus (Borutuse) – a compilation, you might say, of fragments.
- 12 For a sample of the available scholarship on Plaatje and Shakespeare, see Brian Willan, “‘A South A (...)
- 13 See Christopher Thurman, “Kunene and the Swan: Two approaches to Biography, History and Shakespeare (...)
- 14 For a critical reflection on the implications of the prominence of the imbokodo trope for black wom (...)
11The Setswana text comes from Sol Plaatje’s translation, published posthumously in 1937 (Plaatje probably completed the translation fifteen or more years prior to this). Unsurprisingly, given Plaatje’s stature as a political and intellectual figure in early twentieth century South Africa, his Dintshontsho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara – which followed Diphosho-phosho, his 1930 translation of The Comedy of Errors – is widely referred to in accounts of the intersection of Shakespeare with South African history.12 For Ngaba, there is an equally important personal history: when she discovered a copy of the first edition of Juliuse Kesara among her grandmother’s possessions after her death, Ngaba felt a sense of conviction that Shakespeare belonged to her – it was part of her inheritance.13 Moreover, coming from a family of women who had been involved in the struggle for freedom in South Africa, Ngaba is especially invested in the figure of the imbokodo: the woman as a “rock”, valorised in struggle histories but often silenced or marginalised by a largely patriarchal liberation movement.14 Pôrôtia thus gives expression to the complaint of black South African women who have been doubly disenfranchised, in domestic life and in the public sphere, because of their race and their gender.
- 15 The Plaatje translation does not have clearly indicated verse lines (and there is some inconsistenc (...)
12Ngaba worked with Setswana language expert and Plaatje scholar Sabata-Mpho Mokae to come to terms with Plaatje’s richly idiomatic and, as South Africans would say, “deep” (heightened or formal) Setswana. Plaatje was trying to recuperate what he saw as a disappearing form of Setswana – a loss, he felt, that accompanied the urbanisation of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. So it was, to some degree, already “dated” when he produced the translation; now, another hundred years on, a Setswana speaker would find aspects of the speech difficult to understand. Ngaba and Mokae suspected that younger Setswana viewers, in particular, would need to select the version of the video with Modern English subtitles to make full sense of it. Speak Me A Speech website users can also toggle between the texts in each language, or choose a collated trilingual version like the one below:15
- 16 References to Juliuse Kesara are taken from Dintshontsho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara, trans. Solomon Tshe (...)
PORTIA. No, my Brutus; you have some sick offence within your mind,
PȎRȎTIA. Nyaa, Borutuse wa me, ga O bobole mmele: O bobola ditlhaloganyo.
PORTIA. No, my Brutus; your sickness isn’t physical – it is of the mind.
Which, by the right and virtue of my place, I ought to know of:
Ka maemo a me, ke ne ke tshwanetse go itse bolwetse jwa Gago.
By my position in your life, I should know of your sickness.
[...]
Tell me your counsels, I will not disclose them:
Mpolela makunutu a Gago, ga nke ke a gasgasa.
Tell me your secrets, I won’t spread them.
I have made strong proof of my constancy, giving myself a voluntary wound here, in the thigh:
Ke tlhomamisitse sesupo sa maikano a me motlhang go ke ne ke itlhaba ntho ya lerumo mo lekotong.
I proved my constancy the day I got married and shot myself in the foot.
Can I bear that with patience
A nka rwala ntho mo seropeng ka pelo e telele,
Can I bear that wound with patience
And not my husband’s secrets?
ka retelelwa ke diphiri tsa monna a nnyetse?
And not be able to keep my husband’s secrets? (Julius Caesar 2.1.267-302; Juliuse Kesara pp. 38-40)16
Figure 1: Buhle Ngaba in “Within the bond of marriage”, Speak Me A Speech (dir. Victor van Aswegen), 2023, screen grab.
Accessible online at: https://speak-me-a-speech.com/monologue/portia/
13Ngaba and Mokae’s use of, and response to, the Plaatje translation results in an invigorating instance of the actor as translator-adaptor, interpreter (artistic and linguistic) and even editor. To demonstrate this, I would like to elaborate on the use of the phrase “I shot myself in the foot” as a re-translation of the Setswana “ke itlhaba ntho ya lerumo mo lekotong” into Modern English.
14The key verb is itlhaba, to stab (stabbing oneself); ntho is wound, lerumo is spear, and lekoto is foot (leoto is leg), thus the literal meaning is “I gave myself a stab wound in the foot”. Portia’s reference to wounding herself in the thigh is carried over by Plaatje to the following line, where he inserts it into the question in the original text (“Can I bear that with patience / And not keep my husband’s secrets?”): “A nka rwala ntho mo seropeng ka pelo e telele, ka retelelwa ke diphiri tsa monna a nnyetse?” Here rwala is to carry or bear, ka pelo suggests persistence or perseverance, and e telele indicates a long time; what is intriguing, however, is that the slightly more complicated syntax allows the recursion of “ntho mo seropeng”, a wound in the thigh, creating a kind of duplication following “ntho [...] mo lekotong” (a wound in the foot). Portia’s classical demonstration of stoicism merges with Pôrôtia’s tone of resignation as the common idiomatic use of tlhaba (as in “go itlhaba ngololo”, keeping quiet or suffering in silence) conveys her sense that marrying Borutuse inevitably meant withdrawing from the public sphere and accepting marginalisation in political life. Yet Ngaba’s performance also explores the multiple affective registers that might be adopted by a black woman speaking from such a position – whether an “historical” figure in Plaatje’s late-colonial era or in the apartheid period, or a person of Ngaba’s generation. The speech thus ranges in tone from the pitiful to the strident, moving between desperation and defiance.
3. (In)humanity
- 17 Quotations from Sir Thomas More are taken from a digitised version of the manuscript page with the (...)
15The text translated into isiZulu and performed by Anelisa Phewa for Speak Me A Speech, Thomas More’s “strangers’ case” monologue, may also be understood as a Shakespearean “fragment” of sorts – not a piece of a larger Shakespearean whole, but a Shakespearean piece of a larger whole. That is, if we accept the scholarly consensus that Hand D in the sole remaining manuscript version of the collaboratively authored play Sir Thomas More belongs to William Shakespeare, the speech represents Shakespeare’s (minor) contribution to a play that was not performed in his lifetime and was, for over a century afterwards, a “lost” play.17 Nevertheless, the play – or, more narrowly, this speech – has enjoyed some prominence in recent years, particularly in response to anti-immigrant rhetoric and xenophobic violence in various contexts of rising nativist populism.
- 18 Ruben Espinosa, “Shakespeare and Your Mountainish Inhumanity”, The Sundial, 16 August 2019. Online: (...)
- 19 Ruben Espinosa, Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism, London, Routledge, 2021, p. 40.
- 20 Stephen O’Neill, “Shakespeare’s Hand, or ‘the strangers’ case’: Remediating Sir Thomas More in the (...)
16As Ruben Espinosa observes, however, the dependence of this citation on Shakespeare’s perceived moral authority has had the effect of reinforcing inaccurate “white savior” narratives. Espinosa quotes the much-vaunted conclusion to the speech, “This is the strangers’ case / And this your mountainish inhumanity”, but queries the logic of its putative appeal to “universal” humanity: “I [think] of all the whites in Shakespeare whose value is set against those darker of skin. After all, it isn’t really my brown skin that makes me vulnerable – it is the workings of whiteness that imagines me as a threat because of my skin and thus threatens my very existence.”18 While More seems to give a voice to the white liberal perspective so often seen as coterminous with Shakespeare, Espinosa insists on troubling its “racist complicity”.19 Stephen O’Neill, likewise, cautions against simplistic recourse to the historical figures of More and Shakespeare, or indeed present-day actors and activists, to “remediate” the speech: “Shakespeare”, in O’Neill’s analysis, is not the individual playwright to whom we might attribute the words but instead needs to be understood to function “as a networked affective public where expressions of empathy for refugees sit alongside racist and anti-migrant sentiment [...] critical claims for Shakespeare’s freedom need to be mindful of how freedom might resonate or be experienced differently for people of color in the context of the cultural workings of whiteness.”20
17Phewa’s version disrupts this dynamic, partly because his Thomas More is explicitly a black African voice, and partly through the recognition that anti-black xenophobia occurs within Africa (in this case, South Africa). Delivered in isiZulu, even with Shakespeare’s / Hand D’s words in the subtitles, it is no longer simply an act of quotation. Referring to Ian McKellan’s recitations of the stranger’s case speech, which span some fifty years from his performance as More in the Nottingham Playhouse production in 1964 to the digital “(re)mediation” of the speech circa 2016, O’Neill points out that McKellan “comes to function through his various uses of the speech as a surrogate for Shakespeare himself”:
- 21 O’Neill, op. cit.., n.p.
Shakespeare as a thing that does not so much appear as reappear, a pre-loaded vocabulary that is embedded in culture and history. This is the quality of the quotation, its capacity to haunt [...] Coming back, appearing as a fragment of some greater text and its contexts, quotations are displacing, uncanny, and temporally jarring. Yet, they are curiously resonant too.21
18Most decisively, then, the disruption brought about in Phewa’s rendition occurs through translation – specifically, a cultural and linguistic adaptation of the Shakespearean text that gets around the now almost-platitudinous phrase “your mountainish inhumanity” while dwelling on the fundamental challenge of affirming a shared humanity across faultlines of race, nationality and language.
Figure 2: Anelisa Phewa in “The strangers’ case”, Speak Me A Speech (dir. Victor van Aswegen), 2023, screen grab.
Accessible online at: https://speak-me-a-speech.com/monologue/sir-thomas-more/
19Some of the adaptations in the speech were obviously necessary. More invites the riotous Londoners to imagine where they would go if they had to be chased out of England: “Go you to France or Flanders, / To any German province, to Spain or Portugal, / Why, you must needs be strangers”. Phewa collapses these European references into the rhetorical question, “Where will you cry – you, oh Africa?” Other adaptations, not strictly required to transplant the speech into an African context, take their cue from two of Shakespeare’s images of dehumanisation. Firstly, the strangers are (or will be) spurned “like dogs”; and secondly, they are (or will be) treated as if “God / Owed not nor made not you”.
20Phewa adjusts the animalistic imagery by introducing two forms of hunting. Initially, the “nation of such barbarous temper [...] breaking out in hideous violence” against refugees is compared to “amabhubesi ahlasela emini”, “lions that hunt during the day” (a brazen, reckless show of dominance – lions would usually hunt at night). Both the perpetrator and the victim of xenophobic violence are dehumanised in this figuration of predator and prey. Phewa follows this with another image of hunting: instead of “Whet their detested knives against your throats, / Spurn you like dogs”, we have “Nijarhwa ngemikhonto njengezilwane” (“Chasing you with spears like animals”), a syntactical arrangement that is usefully ambiguous both in isiZulu and in the English re-translation. The foreigners are hunted “like animals”, yet the xenophobes with the spears are also acting “like animals” – and they, too, may one day be in the position of the hunted rather than the hunters.
21Phewa’s reformulation of “God / Owed [owned] not nor made not you” is equally evocative. The lines in which Phewa’s Zulu More is most strident in his delivery, building rhythmically to an angry pitch, are “Engath’ anikholwa, engathi aninazihlwele, / Engathi nakhiwe ngodaka, aninaMvelinqange”: “As if you have no faith, as if you have no ancestors; / As if you were made of mud, as if you had no God.” To be treated as if you have no (Christian) faith is one thing. But in many South African cultures, to be treated as if you have no ancestors is to have your historical and cultural identity, your individual and collective personhood, entirely disavowed. Moreover, to be viewed as “made of mud” is an inversion of the Judeo-Christian creation myth – this is not the stuff of ashes to ashes, dust to dust (nor is it a nod to the primal sludge of evolution). It is, instead, a description of non-human abjection.
22In Phewa’s cultural and linguistic translation, then, we have a series of images warning that dehumanising the stranger has the effect of dehumanising the self. Ultimately, there is no need to drive this home with a direct equivalent of Shakespeare’s More’s accusatory “your mountainish inhumanity”. By contrast, Phewa’s speech ends not with the rounding condemnation (and even dismissal) spoken by the authoritative More of Hand D. Phewa’s More ends with a quiet plea. “Senilibele”, he asks – “Have you forgotten?” And in his final words he reminds his auditors (and the audience) of a common isiZulu saying, an idiom so widely recognised that many non-isiZulu-speaking South Africans are likely to know it: “izandla ziyagezana”, “hands wash one another”.
4. Small Shakespeares making a small difference
23For international audiences watching the Speak Me A Speech videos, an awareness of some of the minutiae of linguistic and cultural translation/adaptation in each speech – those “minimal changes to words or details in the text” referred to in the “Shakespeare in Focus” conference Call For Papers – can illuminate and renew a well-worn Shakespearean fragment. I want to conclude with a few comments on South African viewers of these performances.
24If izandla ziyagezana is a familiar aphorism in South Africa, it expresses a principle of mutual interpersonal obligation that is, if not universal, at least global. Every language, country, culture and tradition has an equivalent expression of – to use that overworn phrase – shared humanity. In South Africa, this is often framed by the concept of ubuntu: “I am because you are” or, in its full formulation, Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (A person is a person through other people). It is not uncommon to read or hear exceptionalist assertions that suggest the idea of ubuntu is uniquely African, or even uniquely South African. This is doubly ironic given the prevalence of anti-African xenophobia in South Africa, which was after all the spur to Phewa’s isiZulu translation of the Thomas More speech. The point I am making is that it is best to avoid grand claims: about a country, about a figure like Shakespeare, and certainly about a Shakespearean film project.
- 22 The South African Department of Basic Education announced in 2024 that, with effect from 2025, moth (...)
25Let me end, then, with a series of small claims – or rather, modest hopes. Insofar as Speak Me A Speech continues the trajectory of the other “small Shakespeares” I discussed at the start of this article, I hope that it will contribute to a slight but discernible shift in public perceptions of (or assumptions about) Shakespeare in South Africa. Certainly, it will help to show those in the country’s performing arts industry what can be done with Shakespeare. “Small” Shakespeares like Speak Me A Speech may not spur larger-scale enterprises such as full translations and adaptations of the plays by South African filmmakers. And even “small” undertakings can be resource-intensive in terms of creative labour and costs. Yet the advent of technological shortcuts like automated closed captioning and AI translation support, along with the now-established genre of the phone-filmed (#lockdownshakespeare-style) “self-taped” monologue, should encourage other performing artists to experiment with small-screen African-language Shakespeares. As overdue systemic changes in language-in-education policy and practice are finally implemented in South Africa, Shakespeare’s presence in the classroom – if he is to occupy space on the curriculum – must also surely be a multilingual one.22 This, too, will encourage performances and recordings of Shakespeare in South African languages.
26Shakespeare is bound up in South Africa’s colonial history, and has been a largely white and Anglophone presence in the country. But that is not the whole story. For over a century, there have been multilingual South African Shakespeares on page and on stage. They have been in the minority, their impact usually ephemeral, their presence often obscure; perhaps they will remain so. I am quietly confident, however, that bringing about even a small change in (some) South Africans’ expectations of how Shakespeare should “look” or “sound” – with potential ripple effects in education, in the arts sector, in politicians’ speeches, in social media – is a task worth pursuing.
Notes
1 I elaborate on this phenomenon in “From ‘English Never Loved Us’ to JAM at the Windybrow: Covid-Era Digital Shakespeares in/from South Africa”, in Digital Shakespeares from the Global South, ed. Amrita Sen, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, p. 37-55.
2 The chief annual Shakespearean fixture on South Africa’s theatre calendar is the summer production at the Maynardville Open-Air Theatre in Cape Town (recent years have seen performances of plays like Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – all regularly prescribed for high school learners). Other large-scale productions, like the Baxter Theatre’s Othello in 2024, are often co-productions with British or European theatres (and Othello was a national exam text for Grade 12 learners that year). The company that has achieved the greatest success in making Shakespeare on stage commercially sustainable is Abrahamse and Meyer Productions (their Macbeth and Hamlet regularly played to schools audiences in South Africa but also toured internationally). Others, such as Think Theatre and the National Children’s Theatre, have specifically targeted high schools by performing plays that are on the syllabus in travelling, learner-friendly productions.
3 Alexa Alice Joubin and Victoria Bladen, ed., Onscreen Allusions to Shakespeare: International Films, Television, and Theatre, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
4 Sara Blecher in Chris Thurman, “Othello Surfing: Fragments of Shakespeare in South Africa”, in Joubin and Bladen, op. cit.., p. 71.
5 See Gemma Kate Allred, Benjamin Broadribb and Erin Sullivan, ed., Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation, London, Arden/Bloomsbury, 2022.
6 Henry Bell, “#lockdownshakespeare (review)”, Shakespeare Bulletin 38.3, 2020, p. 526-527.
7 The performances by Stoffels and Stanfield are in Afrikaans (translated by Victor van Aswegen). The complicated status of Afrikaans as an “African” language is such that some background regarding historical and contemporary discourses around Afrikaans and racial identity, and their intersection with Shakespeare translation, would be required to analyse the speeches properly.
8 Société Française Shakespeare, “Shakespeare in Focus: The art of small things”, conference Call For Papers. (accessible online at: https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/7710, last accessed 30 January 2025).
9 Ibid., n.p.
10 Henry Bell, “‘Difference matters’: Challenging myths of Africa-as-country in the RSC’s 2012 Julius Caesar through the legacy of Shakespeare ZA’s #lockdownshakespeare”, Shakespeare in Southern Africa 37, 2024, p. 42.
11 References to Julius Caesar are taken from the New Cambridge Shakespeare Third Edition, ed. Martin Spevack, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
12 For a sample of the available scholarship on Plaatje and Shakespeare, see Brian Willan, “‘A South African’s Homage’ at One Hundred: Revisiting Sol Plaatje’s contribution to the Book of Homage to Shakespeare”, Shakespeare in Southern Africa 28, 2016, p. 1-19; Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876-1932, Johannesburg, Jacana, 2018; Deborah Seddon, “The Colonial Encounter and the Comedy of Errors: Solomon Plaatje’s Diphosho-phosho”, The Shakespearean International Yearbook 9: South African Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century, ed. Laurence Wright, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2009, p. 66-86; Seddon, “Shakespeare’s Orality: Solomon Plaatje’s Setswana translations”, English Studies in Africa 47.2, 2004, p. 77-79; David Schalkwyk and Lerothodi Lapula, “Sol Plaatje, William Shakespeare and the Translations of Culture”, Pretexts 9.1, 2000, p. 9-26; Ndana Ndana, “‘A white man’s Native language’: Sol Plaatje, William Shakespeare, Translation and the Setswana Orthography”, PULA: Botswana Journal of African Studies 19.2, 2005, 168-176; Ndana, “Sol Plaatje’s Shakespeare: translation and transition to modernity” (PhD thesis), University of Cape Town, 2005; Stephen Gray, “Plaatje’s Shakespeare”, English in Africa 4.1, 1977, p. 1-6; and Shole J. Shole, “Shakespeare in Setswana: An evaluation of Raditladi’s Macbeth and Plaatje’s Diphosophoso”, Shakespeare in Southern Africa 4, 1990/91, p. 51-64.
13 See Christopher Thurman, “Kunene and the Swan: Two approaches to Biography, History and Shakespeare in South African Theatre”, Recherche littéraire / Literary Research 36, 2020, p. 65-94.
14 For a critical reflection on the implications of the prominence of the imbokodo trope for black women on stage, see Balindile Ngcobo, “The Mbokodofication of Black Women: An Autoethnographic Study of Post Dramatic Stress and the ‘Strong Black Woman’ Trope” (MA dissertation), University of Cape Town, 2020.
15 The Plaatje translation does not have clearly indicated verse lines (and there is some inconsistency across different editions). As a result, a few liberties have been taken with line breaks to achieve as much parity as possible between the lineation of Shakespeare’s text, Plaatje’s Setswana translation and the Modern English re-translation.
16 References to Juliuse Kesara are taken from Dintshontsho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara, trans. Solomon Tshekiso Plaatje [1937], Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 1975.
17 Quotations from Sir Thomas More are taken from a digitised version of the manuscript page with the “strangers’ case” speech (written by Hand D) made available by the British Library.
18 Ruben Espinosa, “Shakespeare and Your Mountainish Inhumanity”, The Sundial, 16 August 2019. Online: https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/shakespeare-and-your-mountainish-inhumanity-d255474027de (consulted 30 January 2025)
19 Ruben Espinosa, Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism, London, Routledge, 2021, p. 40.
20 Stephen O’Neill, “Shakespeare’s Hand, or ‘the strangers’ case’: Remediating Sir Thomas More in the context of the Refugee Crisis”, Borrowers and Lenders 13.1, 2020 (accessible online at: https://borrowers-ojs-azsu.tdl.org/borrowers/article/view/216/429, last accessed 30 January 2025).
21 O’Neill, op. cit.., n.p.
22 The South African Department of Basic Education announced in 2024 that, with effect from 2025, mother-tongue based bilingual education (MTBBE) will be rolled out in Grade 4 and subsequently phased into higher grades.
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| Titre | Figure 1: Buhle Ngaba in “Within the bond of marriage”, Speak Me A Speech (dir. Victor van Aswegen), 2023, screen grab. |
| Crédits | Accessible online at: https://speak-me-a-speech.com/monologue/portia/ |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/revueshakespeare/docannexe/image/407/img-1.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 188k |
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| Titre | Figure 2: Anelisa Phewa in “The strangers’ case”, Speak Me A Speech (dir. Victor van Aswegen), 2023, screen grab. |
| Crédits | Accessible online at: https://speak-me-a-speech.com/monologue/sir-thomas-more/ |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/revueshakespeare/docannexe/image/407/img-2.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 153k |
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Chris Thurman, « Small South African Shakespeares onscreen », Revue de la Société française Shakespeare [En ligne], 43 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 février 2026, consulté le 16 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/revueshakespeare/407 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15nn8
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