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The South Africa Shakespeare Festival

The annual Shakespeare Schools Festival South Africa.

Photo: The Robben Island 'Bible' (The Complete Works of Shakespeare)
Credit: Roy Reed

The annual Shakespeare Schools Festival South Africa (SSF SA) is organised and developed by NPO Educape, founded in 2007 by Festival Coordinator and Creative Director, Kseniya Filinova-Bruton.

Educape’s flagship project, The Shakespeare Schools Festival South Africa, is aimed at improving language and social skills through the performing arts.
Each year the festival encourages schools to perform abridged “thirty-minute” versions of Shakespearean plays in their local professional theatres throughout the country.

In the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death his resonance and relevance live on around the Globe. As part of the Forum’s recorded discussion in Cape Town, 4 students involved in the Shakespeare School’s Festival came and performed 4 short Shakespeare extracts in local languages to an appreciative audience. Quentin Cooper, the presenter of the programme, also interviewed two of them. The readings and the audio are here.

The student actors and their short extracts:

Lonwabo Notana with a prologue from Romeo and Juliet and an extract from the Tempest in IziXhosa
Tafara Nyatsanza with All the World’s a Stage from As You Like it in Shona
Veronique Wheels with an extract from The Tempest in Afrikaans
Brady Slingers with an extract from Macbeth in Afrikaans.

Photo: The Robben Island 'Bible' (The Complete Works of Shakespeare)
Credit: Roy Reed

Release date:

Duration:

11 minutes