Performing the Nation at the London Globe – Notes on a South Sudanese Cymbeline ‘We will be like other people in other places’

Summary

In a world where everything seems to have already been seen and staged, a deceptively straightforward production of one of Shakespeare's later and lesser known plays caused quite a stir at the London ‘Globe to Globe festival: Shakespeare in 37 languages’, itself part of the nationwide Cultural Olympiad, the cultural events running alongside the Games in 2012. The South Sudan Theatre Company's Cymbeline, performed in Juba Arabic, had critics and audience in raptures: ‘standing ovations’ (Bloomekatz 2012); a ‘historic […] performance’ (Mayen 2012); plus a four- (out of five-) star review by The Guardian which declared that the actors ‘played with this much heart, even Shakespeare's most rambling romance becomes irresistible’ (Trueman 2012).

Irresistible the performance certainly was but as Kim Solga perceptively points out, it was evident that the appeal of the company was ‘most over-determined by its circumstances’ (2012). Here was a theatre company that represented the world's newest nation-state, South Sudan; a country which had emerged out of two lengthy, violent civil wars (1955–1972, 1983–2005), a complex six-year peace process after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005, and a virtually unanimous vote for independence in January 2011. This had led to secession from Sudan on 9 July 2011. While the official transformation process from the region ‘Southern Sudan’ to the Republic of South Sudan seemed to have been concluded, the process of nation-building was still in its infancy, with larger problems such as border demarcation, control over oil fields, and internal conflicts posing a major if not critical challenge.