Worlds Elsewhere (55 page)

This was less a performance of
Julius Caesar,
more a live remix of the text. The action had been juggled so that different plot strands
were isolated: first the scenes with the commoners, then scenes with Caesar, then with Brutus. The actors were swapping fluidly between roles, making it hard to tell who was playing whom. It said a great deal about the flexibility of Shakespeare's scripts, their openness to recontextualisation and reconfiguration, that one could tear apart the play like this and it still just about make sense. And it achieved one thing I'd never expected from
Julius Caesar
: the most famous assassination in history came as a surprise.

Afterwards, the students and I sat around on the stage, dissecting their dissection. All eight were studying English and drama.
Julius Caesar
was a set text. They had known they wanted to do something performance-based, but couldn't agree on a director; also, the group wasn't large enough to do the play in its entirety – it has forty-plus roles, many of them speaking.

An associate professor at Wits called Sarah Roberts had initiated the project and acted as director. She suggested reassembling the text to clarify its themes. One inspiration was a British television series from the early 1980s called
Playing Shakespeare,
presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company's co-founder John Barton, which explored the meaning of the plays through democratic, actor-led workshops. Another was a book on improvisation. Could they somehow combine the two? How would that even work?

The result was a kind of game, with elegant if brain-bending rules: every actor would learn the script in its entirety, and only decide who was playing which part in the seconds before they went on stage. The cast could also exchange roles at a moment's notice: if someone started speaking, say, Caesar's lines in a particular scene, everyone else would have to scramble to catch up.

It sounded like a recipe for insanity, I said. They grinned: it made things fun.

Emma Delius, who had played Brutus before migrating to Casca, explained that everyone in the group, from different schools across South Africa, had had different levels of exposure to Shakespeare, so this was a way of making the playing field even. But the project had taken on its own momentum. It was Shakespeare – but improvised Shakespeare.

Another student, Sinako Zokufa, nodded vigorously. ‘The way we do
Julius Caesar,
it's literally never the same show – that's what people always say about theatre, I know, but here we deliberately make it a surprise. The audience shares the surprise.'

I liked the concept, not simply because it offered a fresh way into an overfamiliar text, but because it released many of the questions buried within
Julius Caesar.
Who is really in charge? Where does power reside – in the dictator about to be crowned king, or the citizens lining the streets? Tribunes or senators? Conspirators or cobblers? It seemed a pertinent approach in post-apartheid South Africa, a country still grappling with the workings of democracy.

Political process was very much on their minds, agreed Karl Thurtell, a tall, blonde boy who had briefly taken on Caesar. ‘By highlighting particular stories in the play – say the story of the citizens – we've highlighted something that might otherwise go missing. It shows what it means to be an active citizen. Most of our theatre history in this country is embedded in protest theatre. This was our way of making
Caesar
in that tradition.'

One thing was undeniably South African, and fully in the mould of Solomon Plaatje. In a country where most of the population spoke at least two languages, it had been felt necessary to incorporate at least some of those languages into the production. I'd been right to identify isiXhosa, but scraps of isiZulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans and siSwati also jostled alongside Shakespeare's English – all of them, like the acting, left up to chance. If someone wanted to speak a particular language at a particular moment, they could.

Setswana too?

Yamikani Mahaka-Phiri, who'd briefly played Cassius, nodded. ‘A few more, sometimes.'

The next question was obvious: how about race? The students came from a variety of ethnic groups; was this also part of the point? A way of putting the rainbow nation on stage?

There was some awkward shuffling. ‘Look, it's difficult,' said Thurtell eventually. ‘I'm white, a second-language Afrikaans speaker, and I know the political weight that brings. If I start the first scene in Afrikaans, playing a tribune trying to control the masses, then I know a large portion of the audience will interpret that as something from the apartheid state. In some places it will work, but not elsewhere.'

Zokufa was frowning. ‘In this country, theatre is political. It gets politicised, everything gets politicised. This ensemble is mixed-race, and we have to be aware of messages we're sending, even if they're unintentional. But we don't want it to be
about
race.'

What did they think about the argument, still raised every so often
in South Africa, that they shouldn't be doing Shakespeare at all – that to do so was simply to reinscribe a colonial heritage?

For the first time, they looked entirely nonplussed: Shakespeare was simply part of South African life, along with so many things, good and bad.

Delius spoke up. ‘Just because the text happens to be by Shakespeare doesn't mean we can't use it!'

Mahaka-Phiri was visibly incensed. ‘It should not sit on a shelf somewhere in England.' He threw out his arm expansively. ‘It should be
here,
on a South African stage.'

In the taxi back home, I remembered what one scholar had called Plaatje's translations: ‘linguistic activism'. It seemed a pretty fine description of what I'd just seen.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING,
sitting in the Johannesburg sunshine, I sat down and took stock. I had become so enveloped in the story of Plaatje and his legacy I was in danger of forgetting the reason I had come to South Africa in the first place: the Robben Island Bible.

My brief conversation with Sonny Venkatrathnam in London had left me with a teeming series of questions. How had Shakespeare been read on Robben Island?
Had
he been read? What was Shakespeare's significance in a later period of apartheid from that experienced by Solomon Plaatje? Had Shakespeare been – as the media were so keen to make out – a familiar part of prison life, or did his works have a different significance in South Africa's most notorious political penitentiary? In London in 2012, 100,000 visitors had queued to see the exhibition. What had we all been looking at?

I'd been exchanging emails with Venkatrathnam's granddaughter, Teneille. Durban was only an hour-long hop away by plane; would they mind if I paid a visit? The answer came back straight away: of course. Sonny was a man of his word.

I found him watching cricket in the glare of a Durban afternoon. As I came inside the house, a large flat-screen TV was showing England playing Australia in Cardiff – a wide shot of turf, as green and smooth as a billiard table, beneath an eiderdown of soggy Welsh cloud. The scene looked as freakishly alien as if it were being beamed back from the Moon.

‘You like cricket?'
Crrrickutt.
‘I like cricket. It's slow. Good pace for me these days.'

He was frailer than I remembered, even from fourteen months before: as thin as a marionette inside a worn green checked shirt and loose flannel trousers. Though his handshake was strong, his face was pinched and sharp, eyes dark and pebble-bright. As he sat down in a leather recliner, exposing a bony pair of ankles, he gestured towards a framed photograph propped on a small table. A single candle was placed in front. His wife Theresa. She had been ill, I recalled him saying. She had died later that summer.

I mumbled my condolences.

He smiled distantly, as if it were I who had lost somebody. ‘She was my rock, my support, all the way through my detention.'

Sonny's wife had played an important part in the story of his copy of Shakespeare. But before we talked about that he wanted to discuss his old life. Brought up in the Sea View district of Durban, he had majored in English Literature at the university of Natal in the late 1950s. A set text was
Clarissa
; Sonny had become one of countless undergraduates worldwide to be defeated by Samuel Richardson's 970,000-word leviathan.

He brushed away a hand in distaste. ‘Pffft, so boring, it didn't inspire me at all. Useless, pain in the butt.'

But he also discovered something more suited to him: Shakespeare. Several plays were set texts at school –
Julius Caesar
stuck in his mind – but he'd not paid a huge amount of attention. Then, during his final year, he'd written a short dissertation on the role played by fools, those riddling philosophers – from Touchstone in
As You Like It
and Feste in
Twelfth Night
to
King Lear
's Fool – who stand at an oblique and ironic angle to the action, alone licensed to tell the truth about what they see.

The interest reflected Sonny's own fragile position in South African society. As one of the country's million-strong Indian-heritage population, he was granted greater liberties than black South Africans, but apartheid had its own fanatically detailed rules when it came to Indians, too, and the white elite never came close to regarding them as equals. Sonny – born Surinarayan – made common cause with activists of all ethnicities, joining the Unity movement.

In June 1971 he was arrested in Pietermaritzburg and charged with inciting a military uprising. The sentence was stinging: twelve years. He was bundled away to Leeuwkop prison in Johannesburg, then on
to Robben Island, five miles off Cape Town in the chill seas of Table Bay. Because he was one of the terries' – convicts under the Terrorist Act – he faced heavy suspicion. Conditions were brutal. Hard labour, breaking stones and chopping wood from morning until night.

Initially political prisoners were prevented from having any reading material at all save the Bible – of limited interest to Sonny, brought up in the Hindu faith – but they petitioned for access to books. Grudgingly they were permitted to use the prison library. One deliriously happy day, it was announced they would each be allowed a book of their own, to be sent by their families.

In the absence of anything more controversial (hardly likely they'd allow texts on African politics), Sonny decided his must be a copy of Shakespeare. It would be something he could read and reread, and which would help keep his mind active through the indignities and inanities of life on the island. Theresa, at home in Durban and supporting their three children, bought a copy. In May 1972, it arrived.

This is where the story got a little confusing. I had read, I said, that the book was smuggled on to the island and kept there in secrecy. Was that the case?

He produced a shallow laugh: no way anything could be smuggled across the bay, past all those guards. ‘It
was
confiscated, two months after it arrived – they were having a clampdown or something. They put it away in the storeroom, in our section. Then one day, a Sunday, I was standing at the gate and a warder comes up and says, “Tell the fellows that the church is here.” “Church” meant priest, you know. I said, “OK, but let me get my Bible, it's in the storeroom.” So he opened it, I took out my Shakespeare and showed it to him. I told him, “It's the Bible of William Shakespeare.” So he let me have it.'

So it was this that had given the book its nickname: not because it was a quasi-devotional text, but because of an off-the-cuff remark. Something similar accounted for the Hindu greetings cards that lined the cover. They had been sent by Sonny's family for Diwali: touching gifts, when one considered they portrayed Lakshmi and Vishnu, Rama and Sita – gods and goddesses who have been united after numerous travails – but not otherwise of significance. Sonny himself was agnostic, and had cut them up and used them to cover the book – not because Shakespeare was banned, but to discourage the poorly educated, God-fearing Afrikaner warders from touching it. It wasn't in any case a
camouflage that would have withstood much scrutiny: Shakespeare's name was plainly visible. The book had never been confiscated again and had remained there undisturbed for the rest of Sonny's time on the island.

I wondered how often he and the others read Shakespeare. Was the book passed between them?

Again, yes and no. When his copy of Shakespeare first arrived, he had been kept in a communal cell. One of his Apdusa confederates, Joseph B. Vusani, had read from the book to other prisoners, many of whom struggled to read for themselves, adapting stories and retelling them at night in isiXhosa – not dissimilar from Plaatje's oral tradition, perhaps. But once conditions had improved and Venkatrathnam and others had been relocated to single cells, then permitted to study by correspondence course, Shakespeare had fallen by the wayside: simply no time. Caught in the baffling, maze-like intricacies of a bachelor's degree in accountancy (chosen because it fitted the remaining duration of his sentence), Sonny reckoned he had not read it for the last four years of his incarceration on the island.