Titus Andronicus
South Africa's Shakespeare
Abstract
Cluster: Directions
One of the more interesting examples of the global circulation of texts and productions is the Antony Sher-Gregory Doran 1995 production of Titus Andronicus at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg. Gregory Doran, an English actor/director with experience at the Royal Shakespeare Company, made the decision to direct the play with Antony Sher as Titus during a visit by the Royal National Theatre's Studio in September 1994, just months after the first democratic elections in post-apartheid South Africa. In this paper, I argue that Doran, who cast his production as a conflict between extreme right-wing Afrikaners and tsotsis (black township gangsters) in a post-apartheid South Africa, set off a debate in the metropolitan center/colonial/postcolonial arena that had its origins in the earliest introduction of formal theater to the Colony in 1801 and in key historical/political events of nineteenth and twentieth-century South Africa.