You can love him or hate him, but the works of Shakespeare are a poetic force that can’t be ignored — and can be taught creatively
THAT most famous bard of Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare, is being subjected to an experiment. The aim is to find out whether his plays are relics of old (not to mention products from foreign shores) that deserve to be consigned to the archives, or 400-year-old artworks that are still meaningful to us today.
Breathing life back into Shakespeare: Malcom Purkey blows the dust off Shakespeare’s works by making them vivid, dramatic and relevant to the schoolgoers of today.
photograph: eddie mtsweni
The laboratories in which Shakespeare is being put to the test are some 26 Gauteng-based schools as part of a Shakespeare 2000 Festival. The festival programme is sponsored by FNB/Vita and run by the dramatic arts school at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Led by head of the drama school, Malcolm Purkey, a roving ”troupe” of student actors are like a dramatic hitsquad, moving from Bryanston to Soweto in their pursuit to see if new life can be breathed into Shakespeare.
Facing a hall full of sceptical matrics at Johannesburg Secondary School in Mayfair, it’s clear that Purkey and his team have a real task on their hands. Just mention the word ”Shakespeare”, and you can feel the boredom and resignation that dominate the atmosphere. But Purkey tackles this head-on: ”We have a problem. We live in Johannesburg, South Africa, it’s the new millennium. We have this question: is there a place for Shakespeare in our curriculum and our lives anymore?”
The mood lifts — the youngsters clearly welcome the fact that this is no lofty sermon extolling the virtues of Shakespeare, but a playful workshop that investigates whether our modern lives and tastes can still accommodate the Bard. And where Purkey really scores is when he makes this comparison: ”Believe it or not, Shakespeare was the rap artist of his time.”
The comparison is no cheap device to get the new generation listening — it actually rings true as the class rap star stands up and gives a demonstration of the modern form. The fundamental point is that there is a rhythm and beat to Shakespeare’s poetry — as much as there is a rhythm and beat in rap and kwaito. Having made an all-important link between the formal poetry and popular music forms, Purkey goes one step further in blowing the dust off Shakespeare’s sonnets: he dramatises exactly how alive the poetry is. What is usually burdened with the name ”iambic” is suddenly presented as ”the heartbeat” of the poem. A light stress, followed by a heavy stress — ”ta-tum, ta-tum, ta-tum”. Purkey has his audience with their hands over their hearts, experiencing that exact rhythm in their own bodies.
And more than just having a heartbeat, that dreaded word ”pentameter” is dramatically redefined as ”the feet” of the poem — literally the feet, with Purkey pacing out the rhythm of ”When I count the clock that keeps the time”, demonstrating how the rhythm of the poem fits in perfectly with his five measured steps.
Suddenly Shakespeare is a vivid experience. To make the sonnet form still more accessible, Purkey also gives clues of the typical devices and favourite themes in Shakespeare’s poetry: the use of opposites, of assonance and alliteration, and his favourite topics of love, death and time.
The young audience are now hooked — and it shows. They are sincerely engaged with the experience — and as Ntando Bongani said afterwards, it was a ”five-star performance. It acknowledged us. I thought that the poetry was just an old-fashioned and boring thing — but this time I enjoyed it.”
But even Purkey, who is clearly passionate about Shakespeare’s works, has to admit that there are some areas of the works that are destined to remain meaningless to modern scholars. After all, language changes over time, and there are some words that were commonplace 400 years ago but simply no longer exist today. The crafted verses can also be cumbersome to deal with, sometimes making their meaning as clear as mud.
Together with his fledgling dramatists, Purkey is finding a way around this dead wood in the Wits production of Romeo and Juliet. While Purkey wants to keep as much of the original play as possible, he wants it to be ”a lively contemporary production set in Johannesburg. We’ll rewrite it where necessary, and play games with other vernacular languages as well.” The typical Shakespearean rhythm will not be lost, though, as Purkey is determined to recreate the same beat, but using more accessible language.
So while dramatists bend over backwards to make Shakespeare easier to stomach for those not devoted to classic literature, it will be interesting to see if curriculum developers of the future will be flexible enough to put our modern rap and kwaito artists on the list of approved materials. Perhaps in a generation or so it will be TKZ who rings out in English lessons.
The Wits Drama School’s production of Romeo and Juliet will be staged at the Wits Theatre from April 4 to 20 (no shows on Sunday or Monday). The full price is R23,50, for block bookings R12 a head, and for those who belong to the Shakespeare 2000 club, R10 per head. Evening shows are at 7pm, but matinees will be performed if there are sufficient numbers.
For enquiries about booking for shows or organising matinees, contact Cathy on (011) 716-4051.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, March 2, 2000.
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