Titus Andronicus

South Africa's Shakespeare

Authors

  • Adele Seeff University of Maryland

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.

Author Biography

Adele Seeff, University of Maryland

Adele Seeff directs the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, a position she has held since 1986. In 1990, Dr. Seeff inaugurated the Attending to Early Modern Women symposium series, recognized nationally and internationally as the major scholarly event in the field of early modern women's studies. And in 2005, together with a colleague from the Department of English, she launched Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the first scholarly publication in its field. Dr. Seeff has co-edited five proceedings volumes published by the University of Delaware Press, is a co-editor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and is currently researching a book-length manuscript, When Shakespeare Met South Africa.

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Published

2008-09-01