The Library
“What country, Friends, is this?” : cultural identity and the World Shakespeare Festival
Tools
Purcell, Stephen (2013) “What country, Friends, is this?” : cultural identity and the World Shakespeare Festival. Shakespeare Survey, Volume 66 . pp. 155-165. ISSN 0080-9152.
Research output not available from this repository.
Request-a-Copy directly from author or use local Library Get it For Me service.
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/SSO9781107300
Abstract
A banner on the publicity material for the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2012 ‘Shipwreck trilogy’ bears the slogan ‘what country friends is this?’ Upper case and, aside from the final question mark, unpunctuated, it is emblazoned across posters, flyers, programmes and websites, for the most part sharing its space with the logos of the World Shakespeare Festival, London 2012, and corporate sponsors BP (the irony of the association with maritime disaster being apparently lost on the latter's PR department). The question presents itself as an urgent and ubiquitous one, but one which is not without ambiguity: to which country, or countries, is the question referring? And who are the ‘friends’ to whom the question is addressed? In this article, I shall attempt to put this question, in various ways, to my own partial and incomplete experience as an audience member of the World Shakespeare Festival, and to Shakespeare's incorporation into the Olympics and Paralympics opening and closing ceremonies.
What country, friends, is this?
Viola's question at the beginning of Twelfth Night is given a fairly direct and unambiguous answer: ‘This is Illyria, lady’ (1.2.1). There was no such certainty, however, for the audiences of Gregory Doran's acclaimed production of Julius Caesar, which relocated Shakespeare's Rome to what the publicity told us was a modern African state, though it remained no more specific than that. In many ways, the parallel works extremely well: one need not look too far back in that continent's history to find stories of republics sliding into dictatorship, of civil war, or of militaristic and dangerously charismatic leaders. Certainly Jeffery Kissoon's Caesar was loaded with references to recent historical figures: he wore Colonel Gaddafi's safari suit, carried Hastings Banda's flywhisk, and the gigantic bronze statue in his likeness which stood at the back of the stage toppled when he fell in a clear invocation of (the distinctly non-African) Saddam Hussein. Commentators in the press found themselves reminded of Idi Amin and of Robert Mugabe. Jude Owusu's Cinna the Poet was trapped in a tyre and doused with petrol in a scene which referenced the gruesome practice of ‘necklacing’ common in apartheid-era South Africa. The characters’ accents, meanwhile, were indeterminately ‘African’: hard to pinpoint geographically but emphatically not the actual British accents of most of the cast.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Shakespeare Survey | ||||
Publisher: | Campbridge University Press | ||||
ISSN: | 0080-9152 | ||||
Official Date: | September 2013 | ||||
Dates: |
|
||||
Volume: | Volume 66 | ||||
Page Range: | pp. 155-165 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
View Item |