This dissertation is a production history and reception study of the Market Theatres controversial presentation of Shakespeares 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 Kingdoms South African expatriate community. Johannesburg theatre audiences initially welcomed Shers self-described homecoming and the prestige his performance of Shakespeare would bestow upon that citys 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 Dorans 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 Walzers theory of connected criticism, this dissertation offers an alternative reception narrative that locates the failure of this production in the rhetorical mismatch between Shers advertised intention to celebrate the achievement of racial reconciliation in that country and the aesthetic formation of relevance, (as theorized by Alan Sinfield) that governed Sher and Dorans conceptual efforts to make Titus more accessible to a contemporary South African audience. I argue that Shers 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 Shers support for the apartheid-era cultural boycott and defensive appeals to post-colonial Shakespeare did little to illuminate.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04212009-232813 |
| Date | 29 June 2009 |
| Creators | Ball, John Agee |
| Contributors | Wendy Arons, Bruce McConachie, Kathleen George, Attilio Favorini |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04212009-232813/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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