This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th July 2007 

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Shakespeare gets a going-over

What is today the National Arts Festival began, in 1974, with a Shakespeare Festival organised by Professor Guy Butler and colleagues to inaugurate the Monument complex on Signal Hill overlooking Grahamstown.

Though no longer the main offering, Shakespeare is still on the festival menu; there are no fewer than five ‘Shakespearean’ shows in 2007, and the bard’s work has been Joburged, hip-hopped, quarto’d, Zimbabwe’d and, would you believe it, even played ‘straight’.

Perhaps the most prominent production has been The Dance Factory’s Macbeth (conceived and created by PJ Sabbagha). From the moment that we see Dada Masilo, who dances the part of Lady Macbeth, appear – ‘Joburg’-branded shopping bag in hand – dressing in designer gear offered to her by the witches, we are immersed in a seductive but dangerous city culture of cellphones and consumerism, of corporate high-flying and sexed-up nightclubbing.

As with many dance pieces, audience members looking for narrative continuity and clear characterisation will be disappointed; we have a Macbeth, certainly, but beyond that it becomes increasingly difficult to identify (for instance) a Duncan, or a Macduff, or a Banquo. Rather, there are thematic resonances with Shakespeare’s play – which, of course, might lead the cynical to suggest that the piece be titled ‘Lust, Greed, Power, etc.’ or something similar, rather than Macbeth. Nevertheless, it is a compelling piece and has been received enthusiastically by dance aficionados.

At the other end of the dance scale is the student production Fresh: Till Death Do Us Part, which weaves hip-hop dance sequences into a township version of Romeo and Juliet. The cast and creators have made an attempt to keep some of Shakespeare’s text, but the dialogue in the scenes linking dance pieces is pretty much incomprehensible, and anyone not fairly well acquainted with the story of Romeo and Juliet would soon be lost.

The ensemble dancing is more convincing, but the hip-hop genre is such that the dancers – however much the symmetry and precision of their movement might be pleasing on the eye – are not able to express in their dancing the full range of emotions that comes with the story. This has much to do, I think, with the derivative and USA-imitative nature of hip-hop as a local art form.

No doubt many ‘festinos’ feel that they have already seen Hamlet once too often. Fortunately for them, Shakespeare SA (the performance arm of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa) has achieved the not insignificant feat of revitalising the world’s most famous play by choosing to follow the text of the First Quarto – a lesser-known playscript, very rarely performed, but described by director Paige Newmark as “more vibrant and muscular than the other considerably longer versions”. Thus, those over-familiar with Shakespeare’s lines could find themselves pleasantly surprised by much of the dialogue (and even some of the Danish prince’s soliloquies); ‘Hamlet virgins’, on the other hand, need not be scared off by the imposing length and fearsome reputation of the play as it is typically performed.

This particular production commemorates the first performance of a Shakespeare play in Africa – to be exact, on board a ship moored just off the coast of Sierra Leone – in 1607, so the audience is actually watching a staging of a 400-year-old staging. The set reconstructs the deck of the ship in question (The Red Dragon), complete with rigging and main sail, which is used to good effect as a flexible backdrop.

Dion van Niekerk is a fine Hamlet, and there are strong performances from other members of the Shakespeare SA ensemble: notably Sdumo Mtshali as Polonius (Corambis in the Quarto text), who finds the right combination of folly and near-violent paternalism as the King’s toady and the crude enactor of state surveillance; Megan Knowles as a troubling and troubled Ophelia; and S’bo Ntshebe as both an earnest Player King and a clowning grave digger.

Hamlet has been running in conjunction with a production of As You Like It, in which the same cast relocates Shakespeare’s bucolic comedy to contemporary Zimbabwe. Mtshali, demonstrating great diversity, plays Orlando; van Niekerk is Charles, the WWF-style wrestler and Corin, the boer country bumpkin; Ntshebe is a trembling but tough Adam, the aged servant to Orlando; Colin Ward is a dope-smoking, lapsed hippie of a Touchstone, and Henry Botha doubles up as the camp courtier Le Beau and the doleful Jacques.

Unfortunately, Rosalind (Nomakhosi Mabija) and Celia (Neliswa Mateta) are the weak links; they do not convince in these roles, which is a pity, as Rosalind in particular has the potential to be a prototypical feminist figure.

Barefoot Productions took the risk of staging their A Midsummer Night’s Dream outdoors in Grahamstown’s botanical gardens. They and their audience have had to seek refuge from the rain on at least one occasion, but when I went to see the play, it was a balmy day and the setting was just right (although a number of the lines were lost amidst the noise of a helicopter flying overhead, a nearby municipal lawnmower and what sounded like an angle grinder in the middle distance). Nevertheless, the fairy magic did its work and it was an entertaining hour.