News

We warmly invite you to two intriguing research colloquia by Lina Ritchie and Dr. Marguerite de Waal taking place this week.

Linda Ritchie, M.A., University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

“The Challenge of Teaching Shakespeare in South Africa’s Fledgling Democracy“

The pedagogy of Shakespeare in South Africa's fledgling democracy presents considerable challenges. During the time of colonialism and apartheid, the pedagogy of Shakespeare was used as a tool to promote the universality and superiority of the British culture and English language.

Despite admirable constitutional attempts to promote greater equality and inclusivity in the education system since the advent of South Africa's democracy in 1994, the pedagogy of Shakespeare in South African schools and universities remains largely unchanged. To address this issue, a multimodal and multilingual intervention in the teaching of Shakespeare was applied in a private Johannesburg high school, as well as a digital exchange course with English students from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and the University of Texas in the United States of America.

The intervention revealed that the school learners and university students displayed an openness to this approach and embraced the opportunity to interpret a Shakespearean play from their own linguistic and cultural perspectives. However, the university students indicated a strong bias towards English as a language of power. The results of the intervention suggest that while it is possible to teach Shakespeare in a more culturally inclusive manner, additional changes need to be implemented – arguably on an assessment level – to create an authentic sense of cultural and linguistic equality in the study of Shakespeare.

Dr. Marguerite de Waal, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

“Performing The Tempest in South Africa (1989-2019)”

This talk will provide an overview of the ways that theatre productions have tried (and often failed) to map shifting national narratives onto The Tempest.

Within a thirty-year period, the country moved from a pre-democratic phase anticipating the fall of the apartheid government, to a post-1994 moment defined by hopes for the reconciliation and transformation of a divided society, to a general disillusionment with the failure of these ideals against the backdrop of increasing corruption and populist political rhetoric.

Productions of The Tempest during this time suggest a double bind in performance. The relationship between Prospero and Caliban, taken as representative of a colonial paradigm and racialised conflict, becomes an inescapable and frequently inadequate vehicle for expressing complex and variable local experiences.

Starting with a production by German director Dieter Reible in 1989 and moving on to various productions in 1994, 2002, and 2009, I show that theatre makers have at times emphasised the colonial allegory of the text or, conversely, moved beyond its usual boundaries, suggesting a need for something more or other than The Tempest to express contemporary concerns.

This was most fully demonstrated by two further productions from the 2010s: Miranda’s Tale (2016), and Kunene and the King (2019). In relation to productions of The Tempest that preceded them, these two plays demonstrate significant departures from the text and the politics it has come to represent.