Titus Andronicus

Abstract

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 rightwing 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 twentiethcentury South Africa. 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. The production opened March 27, almost a year after the first democratic elections ever held in South Africa on April 27, 1994, elections that brought an official end to apartheid with the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president. The end of apartheid also ushered in the "New South Africa," a slippery term minted in 1990 by then-President F. W. de Klerk, the last pro-apartheid Nationalist party president, in his speech announcing the release of Mandela from prison. It is not insignificant that Doran directed the play at the Market Theatre, a theater founded in 1976 by Barney Simon during one of the most repressive periods of the apartheid regime with the mission of playing to desegregated audiences. Indeed, Gregory Doran, an English actor/director with experience at the Royal Shakespeare Company, made the decision to direct Titus Andronicus and to cast his partner, Antony Sher, as Titus during a two-week visit to the Market Theatre by the Royal National Theatre's Studio in September 1994, just months after the elections in post-apartheid South Africa. A troupe of British actors, including Sir Ian McKellan, arrived for two weeks of actors' workshops and classes at the 2 Borrowers and Lenders Market Theatre. That visit represented a complicated homecoming for the English-speaking, SouthAfrican born, British-naturalized actor Antony Sher. Sher had played his small part in the antiapartheid struggle, burning his South African passport when he was granted British citizenship, joining protest marches, endorsing the Cultural Boycott imposed on South Africa, voting in London in the 1994 South African elections, and, finally, reclaiming his South African passport for use on this particular journey. Positioned as always and inexorably "other" (in his own words, "trebly a member of three minorities — white, gay, and Jewish"), Sher, by virtue of the personal history he brought to the role of Titus, was to find himself at the center of a post-colonial knot which he never fully understood, but to which his several identities almost certainly contributed. Sher's father was born Jewish, but was raised as an Afrikaner; Afrikaans was his first language, and he spoke English with an Afrikaans accent. That Doran imagined Sher saluting the "New South Africa" in Titus's opening speech, "Cometh Andronicus, bound with laurel boughs, / To resalute his country with tears, / Tears of true joy for his return to Rome" is to grasp at once the unintentional act of imperialism that the production was to embody (Titus Andronicus 1.1.77-79). What is the currency of Shakespeare's cultural capital and legacy in a post-apartheid South Africa? In 1995, Doran and Sher might have thought that they could produce performance art which would hold a mirror up to South African society at that pivotal historic moment. To Doran, the world of the play was a striking reflection of Africa with its cycles of violence, its savagery, and its search for justice. However, the project, as they described it, and the production, as it was received by South African audiences at the Market Theatre, rehearsed some of the complexities and contradictions inherent in making Shakespeare relevant for "our" times. In this paper, I examine the production as Doran and Sher conceived it — what they thought they were doing — and then explore audience and critical responses to the staging. I consider some of the historical foundations — political and theatrical — for these responses in order to investigate some of the freight Shakespeare carried, and continues to carry, on the South African stage. Finally, I locate both Shakespeare as a body of texts and the English language in a wider historical and educational milieu in order to evaluate further Doran and Sher's unanticipated failure to translate their production of Titus Andronicus for a "New South Africa." Shakespeare has played, and continues to play, an important role for South Africans, but Doran's cultural mistaking of a fractured South Africa for "Africa" led him to a unitary vision of his audience and their modes of reception. Why direct Titus Andronicus in 1995 post-apartheid Johannesburg? In answer to the specific question posed by Sher, "Why would Titus Andronicus work in an African context?" Doran Borrowers and Lenders 3 responded, "I suppose because of the violence. It can seem so gratuitous, just a gory melodrama . . . but not here somehow. . . . And . . . it's got Shakespeare's other great black part" (Sher and Doran 1996, 5). I have not seen the production or the videotape (the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford owns the only known extant copy), but we have all experienced what one may term the aesthetic of violence and dismemberment in the play — whether on the page, on the stage, or on film. Perhaps Doran's own distance from the violence which had become, over the past quarter of a century, increasingly a condition of South African life, particularly in the city of Johannesburg, allowed him the luxury of reflecting that "it was fascinating to be doing a play in which a fiercely contested election threatens to topple into chaos, here in South Africa" (Sher and Doran 1996, 112). In this paper, I argue that Doran, who cast his production as a conflict between extreme right-wing Afrikaner nationalists — the Romans — and tsotsis (black township gangsters) — the Goths — in a post-apartheid South Africa, set off a debate in the metropolitan center/colonial/ post-colonial arena that had its origins in two historical contexts: key historical/political events of nineteenth and twentieth-century South Africa and the earliest introduction of formal theater — and Shakespeare — to the Colony in 1801. Here, I will not offer an analysis of historical events at the macro level; rather, I will explore the nexus of intractable conflicts which were mapped onto this controversial production. In the ensuing controversy, the particular adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare's text became the locus for competing claims on representations of Shakespeare, claims that were themselves rooted in a colonial/post-colonial past. South African theater critics took exception to the choice of play, to the production elements of "tourist trendiness" (The Sunday Times, 2 April, 1995), and to the dialogue spoken in heavy South African accents. It should be noted for those unfamiliar with South Africa's multiethnic, multilingual history that not all South African accents are created equal. All, however, depending on the listener, have very particular valences. A heavy guttural Afrikaans accent might evoke in a British-descended South African listener memories of a rural, uncultured trekker Boer. Many English-speaking white South Africans mock their own intonation and enunciation and would happily replace both with British Broadcasting Corporation standard English. Black-accented English might remind a Dutch-descended Afrikaner of his deep reluctance to share political power in a land he once claimed as his own. All accents employed in the production flagged class and race identities in stereotypical ways for the listener. Furthermore, the production was accused of being "too relevant." "Titus topples into the 'relevant' pit," ran the Weekly Mail and Guardian headline for March 31, 1995. A bitter exchange ensued in the South African press, with Sher joining battle in radio interviews and in the press 4 Borrowers and Lenders to excoriate South Africa for the "demise of serious theatre." Sher, who had originally imagined that he might like to return permanently to the "New South Africa," in his editorial on the Opinion page of the Johannesburg Star, April 26, 1995, claimed that he felt "very lucky to be getting on a plane and going home where the run [for Titus Andronicus at the National Theatre] is sold out. . . . It's taken this bruising homecoming to realize how lucky I am. I don't say that with any smugness. The demise of serious theatre in Johannesburg is very painful to witness" (Sher 1995). He went on to explain the relatively small audiences the production had drawn at the Market Theatre as a kind of "cultural indifference." This he blamed on the Cultural Boycott instituted in 1968 by a United Nations Resolution that urged artists to isolate South Africa and reject all offers to perform there. Soon after Mandela's release from prison in 1990, the Cultural Boycott crumbled. Sher, ignoring his own part in the Cultural Boycott, castigated Johannesburg audiences for their unresponsiveness and for being out of the step with the rest of the world in recognizing and honoring the Market Theatre's international stature. The Market Theatre was acclaimed worldwide as a cultural institution where black and white South Africans had gathered to make theater in spite of the vicissitudes of repressive national regimes and the follies of