Missed Connections: Antony Sher’S Titus Andronicus in Johannesburg
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MISSED CONNECTIONS: ANTONY SHER’S TITUS ANDRONICUS IN JOHANNESBURG by John Agee Ball BA, Hendrix College, 1992 MA, Indiana University, 1998 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2009 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH Faculty of Arts and Science This dissertation was presented by John Agee Ball It was defended on January 11, 2009 and approved by Bruce McConachie, PhD, Professor Attilio Favorini, PhD, Professor Kathleen George, PhD, Professor Wendy Arons, PhD, Associate Professor Dissertation Advisor: Bruce McConachie, PhD, Professor ii MISSED CONNECTIONS: ANTONY SHER’S TITUS ANDRONICUS IN JOHANNESBURG John Agee Ball, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2009 This dissertation is a production history and reception study of the Market Theatre’s controversial presentation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in 1995. Although directed by Gregory Doran, the star attraction and creative force behind this event was Antony Sher, a celebrity actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company and a luminary in the United Kingdom’s South African expatriate community. Johannesburg theatre audiences initially welcomed Sher’s self-described “homecoming” and the prestige his performance of Shakespeare would bestow upon that city’s traditional Anglophile elite. For his part, Sher saw this event as a stepping stone towards repatriation and the beginning of a more ambitious career as a South African public intellectual. These mutual expectations were disappointed, however, when Johannesburg critics and audiences responded unfavorably to the actual staging of Titus, which featured South African stage accents instead of traditional Received Pronunciation. After Sher publicly countered public antipathy by writing a column accusing Johannesburgers of “philistinism,” a bitter quarrel erupted on editorial pages of both South African and British newspapers. It reignited two years later with the release of Sher and Doran’s apologia Woza Shakespeare! Titus Andronicus in South Africa. To date, this polemical work has served as the primary history of this affair. Drawing on communitarian philosopher Michael Walzer’s theory of “connected criticism,” this dissertation offers an alternative reception narrative that locates the failure of this production in the rhetorical mismatch between Sher’s advertized intention to celebrate the iii achievement of racial “reconciliation” in that country and the aesthetic formation of “relevance,” (as theorized by Alan Sinfield) that governed Sher and Doran’s conceptual efforts to make Titus more accessible to a contemporary South African audience. I argue that Sher’s professional immersion in the working methods of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and belated local knowledge of controversial new African National Congress cultural policies (such as the restructuring of the English-language radio station SAfm) diminished his ability to gauge the critical force of his production concept. The result was an inadvertent act of “bait-and-switch” that subsequent rancor over Sher’s support for the apartheid-era “cultural boycott” and defensive appeals to “postcolonial Shakespeare” did little to illuminate. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 ANTONY SHER AND “CONNECTED CRITICISM” …. 1 2.0 ADVANCED PUBLICITY ……………………………….. 56 3.0 PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS …………………………… 103 4.0 THEATRE REVIEWS ……………………………………. 143 5.0 THE PRODUCTION CONTROVERSY …………………195 6.0 CONCLUSION ……………………………………………. 267 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………. 277 v 1.0 INTRODUCTION: ANTONY SHER AND “CONNECTED CRITICISM The effort to maintain some degree of commitment to a group of people and some degree of independence from that same group of people continually runs into difficulties. [ . ] It is important to be able to talk about the difficulties.1 Michael Walzer Is it possible to be socially critical and affirmative in the same symbolic gesture? Is it, perhaps, preferable to do so? And, further, can theatre artists employ a powerful cultural artifact such as Shakespeare to fulfill such a project? These questions are central to my evaluation of Antony Sher’s efforts to stage Titus Andronicus at the Market Theatre, and the arguments he advanced to explain the significance of the production to the complex demographic milieu of post-apartheid Johannesburg. As the above epigraph correctly cautions the reader, these are ‘difficult’ claims to evaluate. But they are also, for the same reason, important difficulties to consider. The rhetorical situation that Walzer describes – one of divided loyalties – is an ordinary locus of social criticism. Put in theatrical terms, this is the location, not of exceptional avant- garde performance, but the ‘rule’ of popular regional, Off-Broadway and much educational theatre—institutions that function by staging compromises between social “commitment” and the expectations of its audiences.2 In this chapter, I present two theoretical vocabularies that describe the bookends of Antony Sher’s South African errand: the American political philosopher Michael Walzer’s polemical conception of “connected criticism,” and British cultural historian Alan Sinfield’s description of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s signature aesthetic formation, i.e., what he 1 Hart, William D. Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000: 187, Appendix B. 2 On the matter of the progressive potential of popular theatre, I am indebted to a recent lecture by Jill Dolan, “Feminist Theatre Criticism and the Popular: The Case of Wendy Wasserstein.” Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh, Pa. 3 Apr. 2008. 1 calls “Royal Shakespeare.” These figures will provide me with strong definitions of two key terms that reappear frequently in this study. From Walzer, we shall derive an understanding of the rhetorical strategy of “connection” that is premised on the practice of “reiterative,” rather than revolutionary morality. I also borrow Sinfield’s description of the RSC’s “relevance” as a related maneuver of presenting Shakespeare as both a shrewd contemporary observer of the times and a fund of timeless moral truths that transcends the political divisions of the moment. While Sinfield represents “Royal Shakespeare” in a wholly disparaging light, my intention in this chapter is to offer sympathetic explications of “connection” and “relevance,” and to present these as morally and artistically valid constructions for Antony Sher to have adopted in his quest to produce a Titus Andronicus that would serve as a ideological supplement to the emergent New South Africa of the 1990s. As a caveat, there is one sense in which both Walzer’s and Sinfield’s arguments could be summarized quite economically; to claim that one should argue like an “insider,” or that Shakespeare should be staged so as to accentuate its contemporary relevance, does not necessarily require extended analysis. What is of greater interest to me, and why Antony Sher’s Titus Andronicus is more worthy of our attention than it might seem at first, are the more fundamental issues that each raises: Is social change better promoted by Platonic appeals to Truth or to Aristotelian phronesis? Is there merit to clinging to Shakespeare as an avatar of a benevolent, universal humanism or does Walter Benjamin’s suspicion towards all “artifacts of civilization” apply to the Bard, as well? Consistent with the promise I made in the introduction to let my report occasionally crest the banks of strict narrative necessity, I have pursued my representation of Walzer into the wider field of debate over communitarian political theory and, also, Edward Said’s quarrel with Walzer over “connection” and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Viewed 2 from this perspective, Sher’s Titus is an event of mere footnote-sized proportions. However, this event also has the virtue of being a concrete embodiment of these philosophical debates, and one centered on a practice (Shakespeare in the theatre) that remains a primary arena of cultural articulation and contestation. Michael Walzer and Communitarian Theory Although communitarian social thought and rhetorical theory has became a mainstay for center-left political parties in Western Europe and North America after the watershed events of 1989, the best thinkers associated with this movement have found little resonance in the field of performance studies. A list of the most prominent “philosophical communitarians,” as Daniel Bell would specify, includes Amitai Etzioni Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Alasdair McIntyre, Michael Walzer and, less reliably, the late Richard Rorty. Despite the fact that each of them is considered an eminent political thinker, their critical perspectives have been almost entirely absent from the field of theatre scholarship—a discipline that otherwise devotes an enormous quantity of collective attention to the political implications of performance. As Daniel Bell has explained, what came to be known as philosophical “communitarianism” began as a critical reaction to the extraordinary popularity of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971).3 While the principal theorists associated with communitarianism (the five aforementioned thinkers) have, in various ways, distanced themselves from this label, they nevertheless consistently challenged the Rawlsian claim that social justice requires the abandonment of community “goods” language and the radical adoption of an individual “rights” 3 Bell, Daniel. “Communitarianism.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 4 Oct. 2001: http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/communitarianism/