Paper Title: “Setting the (Blue) Stage: A littoral view of South African Shakespeares”

Originally delivered at the British Shakespeare Association Annual Conference, ‘Practising Shakespeare: new collaborations, expanding horizons’. University of York, 2025.

Paper Abstract

​​Ecological concerns in a South African context are commonly linked to “the land issue”: the long history of displacement and dispossession of black South Africans, first during the colonial period and later under apartheid. (There is also the problematic linkage of “whiteness” and “environmentalism”.)

Within a land-based paradigm, one may identify a number of post-apartheid Shakespeare productions that gesture towards “green” stagings and ecodramaturgy. Given its lengthy coastline, however, South Africa is particularly exposed to the oceanic consequences of climate change.

Why, then, have there been no “blue” Shakespeares? While the country’s history has been shaped by sea crossings and maritime encounters, and while many sub-fields within the Oceanic Humanities have made productive use of this scholarly framework to address both shared colonial histories and present/future catastrophes facing countries across the Global South, it has remained largely underutilised in terms of South African Shakespeares. Certainly, the country’s theatre-makers have tended not to apply an oceanic imagination in their approach to Shakespeare’s plays. Even productions of “watery” plays like The Tempest have mostly focused instead on the coloniser/colonised thematic rather than the play’s island setting, or have perhaps overlooked the fusion of history and geography in seascapes.

There have been a handful of oceanic or littoral elements in South African Shakespeares over the past three decades. Taking its cue from performance projects in India and Ghana presented by the preceding speakers, the paper will propose future possibilities for scholarly and creative engagement in this area.