Shakespeare's African Nostos Township nostalgia & South African performance at sea

Summary

The opening act of the Globe to Globe festival, a South African adaptation of Venus and Adonis, the long narrative poem that first earned ‘honey-tongued’ Shakespeare his fame, exceeded in several respects the festival's exacting rubric of ‘37 plays, 37 languages’. Created and performed by the Isango Ensemble, ‘UVenas no Adonisi’, was at once an exemplar and an exception in the festival. As a dramatisation of a poem, UVenas lay somewhat outside the main programme. Isango's ‘contribution’ did not complete the festival lineup of plays (which lacked Two Noble Kinsmen) but rather emphasised the raggedness of this incomplete works after the RSC's well publicised Complete Works Festival in 2006–2007, an Olympic feat of programming. And as the Ensemble performed in a total of six languages (a nod, though still an incomplete gesture, to South Africa's eleven official languages), their multilingual performance pushed the festival well beyond the tidy promise of 37 languages for 37 plays. But, while the performance undermined the illusion of completeness in the programming, its blending of English, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Setswana and Afrikaans underscored the festival's investment in multilingualism, an essentially different logic. The decision (articulated in the tagline) to direct the festival's global search toward language rather than nation allowed the festival to promote itself (and London) as a polyglot, cosmopolitan site of translation and cultural interpenetration. From this perspective, the project aimed to be inclusive, rather than encyclopedic, avoiding setting up a Shakespeare themed ‘cultural’ (read ethnographic) expo in the mode of the now infamous world fairs.