Ariel in Africa: Leslie French and the Port Elizabeth Shakespearean Festival
- Mann, Bruce, Wright, Laurence
- Authors: Mann, Bruce , Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2001
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/455588 , vital:75441 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA1011582X_168
- Description: The Port Elizabeth Shakespearean Festival has good reason to remember the 23'd April. Quite apart from its being the official birthday of Shakespeare and St. George (after whom the park was named in which Mannville, the company's open air theatre, stands today), the 23'd April 1904 was the birthday of Leslie French, doyen of classical theatre in South Africa in the last century, whose productions established and consolidated open-air theatre in Port Elizabeth. He had a varied and successful career in the performing arts well before his association with South African theatre began. A gifted boy singer, his first appearance was in London at the Little Theatre, December 141", 1914, while he was still a chorister at the London College of Choristers. In the next four years he appeared regularly with Jean Sterling Machinlay and Harcourt Williams at the Margaret Morris Theatre, as a soloist at many important London churches (including St. Margaret's, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral), as well as singing at the Royal Albert Hall and the Queen's Hall in the Chapel Ballad Concerts.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Mann, Bruce , Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2001
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/455588 , vital:75441 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA1011582X_168
- Description: The Port Elizabeth Shakespearean Festival has good reason to remember the 23'd April. Quite apart from its being the official birthday of Shakespeare and St. George (after whom the park was named in which Mannville, the company's open air theatre, stands today), the 23'd April 1904 was the birthday of Leslie French, doyen of classical theatre in South Africa in the last century, whose productions established and consolidated open-air theatre in Port Elizabeth. He had a varied and successful career in the performing arts well before his association with South African theatre began. A gifted boy singer, his first appearance was in London at the Little Theatre, December 141", 1914, while he was still a chorister at the London College of Choristers. In the next four years he appeared regularly with Jean Sterling Machinlay and Harcourt Williams at the Margaret Morris Theatre, as a soloist at many important London churches (including St. Margaret's, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral), as well as singing at the Royal Albert Hall and the Queen's Hall in the Chapel Ballad Concerts.
- Full Text:
Confronting the African nightmare: Yael Farber’s SeZaR (theatre review)
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7046 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007388
- Description: Yael Farber’s adaptation of Julius Caesar marks something of a breakthrough in South African Shakespeare productions. The key achievement is that the play is no longer about Rome or Renaissance England, nor is it about processes of cultural translation or trendy theatrical Africanisation, largely cosmetic. This production is, in a generous way, squarely and pointedly about Africa.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7046 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007388
- Description: Yael Farber’s adaptation of Julius Caesar marks something of a breakthrough in South African Shakespeare productions. The key achievement is that the play is no longer about Rome or Renaissance England, nor is it about processes of cultural translation or trendy theatrical Africanisation, largely cosmetic. This production is, in a generous way, squarely and pointedly about Africa.
- Full Text:
Guy Butler: 21 January 1918 - 26 April 2001
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7053 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007413
- Description: [From Introduction]: For much of the last twenty-five years of his life, Butler’s thought and work were not perceived to be ‘current’ at all. His poetry was hardly read (what’s new there? – neither is anyone else’s); some of it lay in manuscript or obscure little publications until the Collected Poems appeared in 1999. The autobiographies attracted a loyal following amongst a small, educated reading public. His early dramas, though they met with initial success, were stifled by the poetic idiom to which they aspired, and by the racial claustrophobia against which they fought. (Demea, Butler’s South African reworking of the Medea, made it to the boards only in 1990 – the multi-racial cast, let alone the themes, kept it in hibernation until then.) The deluge of journalism and polemic suffered the usual fate of ephemera. Until resurrected by Stephen Watson in 1990, the essays and lectures remained buried in periodicals where they could not be assessed as a totality. His inspiring teaching was a gift to his students, hardly accessible to the wider society; and above all, much of his time was spent as homo commiticus, serving on the boards and sub-committees of numerous university institutions and other organizations, some of which he founded. In his autobiography, he observed wryly of his changed status following accession to the Chair of English at Rhodes in 1951: ‘Professors are not entirely themselves. Their interest as persons decreases because they are now public personages. Much of their time is spent on committees whose function is to pick the brains of individuals without giving them credit.’ Guy Butler gave generously of his brains in such circumstances.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Wright, Laurence
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7053 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007413
- Description: [From Introduction]: For much of the last twenty-five years of his life, Butler’s thought and work were not perceived to be ‘current’ at all. His poetry was hardly read (what’s new there? – neither is anyone else’s); some of it lay in manuscript or obscure little publications until the Collected Poems appeared in 1999. The autobiographies attracted a loyal following amongst a small, educated reading public. His early dramas, though they met with initial success, were stifled by the poetic idiom to which they aspired, and by the racial claustrophobia against which they fought. (Demea, Butler’s South African reworking of the Medea, made it to the boards only in 1990 – the multi-racial cast, let alone the themes, kept it in hibernation until then.) The deluge of journalism and polemic suffered the usual fate of ephemera. Until resurrected by Stephen Watson in 1990, the essays and lectures remained buried in periodicals where they could not be assessed as a totality. His inspiring teaching was a gift to his students, hardly accessible to the wider society; and above all, much of his time was spent as homo commiticus, serving on the boards and sub-committees of numerous university institutions and other organizations, some of which he founded. In his autobiography, he observed wryly of his changed status following accession to the Chair of English at Rhodes in 1951: ‘Professors are not entirely themselves. Their interest as persons decreases because they are now public personages. Much of their time is spent on committees whose function is to pick the brains of individuals without giving them credit.’ Guy Butler gave generously of his brains in such circumstances.
- Full Text:
Theatre Reviews: Confronting the African nightmate
- Wright, Laurence, Jefferey, C
- Authors: Wright, Laurence , Jefferey, C
- Date: 2001
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/455890 , vital:75465 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA1011582X_170
- Description: Yael Farber's adaptation of Julius Caesar marks something of a breakthrough in South African Shakespeare productions. The key achievement is that the play is no longer about Rome or Renaissance England, nor is it about processes of cultural translation or trendy theatrical Africanisation, largely cosmetic. This production is, in a generous way, squarely and pointedly about Africa.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Wright, Laurence , Jefferey, C
- Date: 2001
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/455890 , vital:75465 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA1011582X_170
- Description: Yael Farber's adaptation of Julius Caesar marks something of a breakthrough in South African Shakespeare productions. The key achievement is that the play is no longer about Rome or Renaissance England, nor is it about processes of cultural translation or trendy theatrical Africanisation, largely cosmetic. This production is, in a generous way, squarely and pointedly about Africa.
- Full Text:
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