Academia has its gateways, its increasingly rarefied rings of knowledge and power the keys to which are handed over with ceremony to those who crack the nod.

After Cardenio is similarly layered and how deeply you are able to penetrate it depends on your grasp of theatre and literature, both historical and contemporary.

However – and I don’t claim to have penetrated anywhere near the inner sanctum of this piece – After Cardenio is not exclusive. The view of ivy-clad masonry from the outside can be as pleasing to the inquisitive first-year undergraduate as the Dean’s view from inside their elevated office – one does not have to be an experienced or learned theatregoer to walk away satisfied.

• Complete review in the West Cape News

Event details

• Date: 25 August to 2 September 2011
• Time: 8:00 PM
• Venue: Anatomy Theatre,
  Old Medical Building
  UCT’s Hiddingh Campus
• Book at Computicket
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Press release:

Jane Taylor, in association with the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA), presents the premiere of After Cardenio at the newly renovated Anatomy Theatre on the top floor of the Old Medical Building on Hiddingh campus, UCT. Previews are on 23 and 24 August, and the run is from 25 August – 2 September at 20:00.

It is 1650. England is in the grip of a bloody Civil War, and theological dispute rampages across the countryside. In this context of radical upheaval, the new sciences are emerging. It is the year in which the philosopher Descartes dies in Sweden. In Oxford, a young woman, Anne Greene, is hanged for killing her infant. Her body is prepared for dissection for an anatomy in the presence of several surgeons and scholars.

After Cardenio is a new work of experimental theatre, written and directed by Jane Taylor, based upon the true account of Anne Greene, as taken from the historical archive. It is a combination of sculptural puppetry, live performance, sound and visual art.

The Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt, from Harvard University, has commissioned several theatre-makers/writers to make new works with ‘Cardenio’ as a hypothetical point of origin, in order to consider what Shakespeare may have reworked from Cervantes’ romantic hero. This work, After Cardenio arises from such an invitation by Greenblatt to Taylor. After Cardenio is written and directed by Taylor in collaboration with Aja Marneweck and the Paper Body Collective, sculptural puppet design and construction by Gavin Younge, with music composition and sound design by Julia Raynham. Video and visual elements are made by collaborating artist Penny Siopis It is presented in association with GIPCA.

The work is a meditation on the late works of William Shakespeare, whose play The History of Cardenio has disappeared with no extant copy of the original text. The so-called “missing Shakespeare play” was registered in 1653 (shortly after the episode with Anne Greene) by the publisher and bookseller, Humphrey Moseley, who declared that it was by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s collaborator on several of his late works. Moseley’s credibility has been questioned, because of his commercial interest in the matter, but there is no question that a play titled The History of Cardenio was performed in London in 1613 by The King’s Men. Little is known about the play, except that it is presumed that the work is named after Cardenio, a character in Cervantes’ great novel, Don Quixote.

“After Cardenio is a tribute to the two giant figures, Shakespeare and Cervantes, who dominate the traditions of Western literature (both the theatre and the book),” said Taylor. “It explores the imaginative worlds of these writers, and their perennial themes of heroism, brutality, sexual infidelity, political intrigue, and the fragile beauty of hope. The play also considers the situation of the women who are at the centre of the work of these two writers,” she added.

Cervantes and Shakespeare, through a curious quirk of history, died on the same date, though not on the same day. Because Spain and England were on different calendars in 1616, Cervantes died some ten days before Shakespeare, but both men are recorded as having died on the same date, 23 April 1616. That extraordinary accident itself is memorialized in this new production.
Tickets for After Cardenio cost R80 and will be available on Computicket.

From 3 – 5 September the show becomes part of the Out the Box Festival in Cape Town. It will be in the same venue, (The Anatomy Theatre) but the times will fit in with the schedule of the Festival. PLEASE NOTE: the Festival performance times: 3 September (Saturday) at 14:00; 4 September (Sunday) at 14:00 and 5 September (Monday) at 21:00. Please note that unfortunately this venue is not wheelchair friendly for which we apologise.

Ends

Shostakovich died in 1975. In what sense, then, is this a collaboration, not simply an interpretation? The structure of “inter-generational dialogue” with the dead recapitulates Shostakovich’s own creative processes because his work is an interpretation of the short story, “The Nose”, by Nikolai Gogol, who had died in 1852.

Why, given the success of his The Magic Flute, was Kentridge attracted to this bizarre work of Shostakovich’s youthful exuberance, rather than one of the classics of the standard opera repertoire? Perhaps there is real interpretive potential for the director in the precocious performance text, such works as are conceived by a young imagination not yet constrained by generic containment and conventional thinking. Remember, Kentridge has had a substantial history of engagement with Ubu Roi, a work of juvenilia written when Jarry was a schoolboy.

Experimental novelty within Shostakovich’s creative processes means that The Nose is a work that does not fully know what may or may not be done on stage. The director thus has considerable freedom to make a piece that is theatrically anarchic while still paying homage to its ancestors. It is radical and conservative in the strongest terms.

The Nose, then, provides Kentridge with an instrument through which he can integrate some of the tensions implicit in his works over the past two decades. Kentridge has engaged in a visual exploration of the “split self” through an iconography of doubled identity, from the early ‘Soho Eckstein’ films to recent experiments with technologies such as the stereoscope. Gogol’s bizarre tale, on which the opera is based, recounts the adventures of a state bureaucrat, Kovalyov, who wakes to discover that his nose has absconded and is wandering downtown, seducing his girlfriends, wearing his medals, and beguiling his enemies. This rupture suggests the unease of a self ill at ease with its identity.

In Shostakovich’s libretto the character of the Nose has a limited role; however Kentridge (through visual projections) makes the Nose into a more or less ever-present figure of tyranny. He is the emblem of what Foucault termed “capillary power.” ‘Power’ is irresistible precisely because dispersed across voluntary agents who collude against the freedom and humanity of ordinary citizens. Those implicated in the service of power do so out of fear of reprisal, anticipation of egregious reward, and addiction to preferment.

While exploring Soviet arts, Kentridge’s production analyses the collusive seductions of self-promotion which have become so defining of late capitalism.

This article first appeared in the 26 March print edition of the Mail & Guardian

I am so very pleased, through this prize, to be associated with Olive Schreiner, and would like to thank the committee for considering a detective novel for this prestigious literary award. I have in the past weeks been trying to imagine why detective fiction would have mattered to Olive Schreiner.

One of the earliest works to demonstrate the key elements of what has become identified with the detective novel is the eighteenth century fiction Caleb Williams, by William Godwin. Godwin was a founder intellectual of the radical movement in England and was married (in most unconventional terms) to Mary Wollstonecraft, whose work on women’s rights must surely have provided Schreiner with much of her own powerful radicalism. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women still stands as a beacon. James comments that while Caleb Williams “has many of the elements of classical detection, a central mystery, physical clues, an amateur detective, a pursuit and disguise,” Godwin’s conviction was that any legal system itself was inherently pernicious.

My citation here from the author “James” refers to PD rather than to Henry. PD James herself is one of the most thoughtful and ethically engaged detective writers of our era, and she observes that Godwin “believed in an ideal anarchy in which there would be no war, no crimes, no administration and no government.*

Charles Dickens is not in the same terms a radical, but his own brilliant indictment of the law in Bleak House situates him as an unlikely interlocutor with Godwin, although for Dickens, anarchy is the alibi of corruption rather than its cure. His astonishing novel Bleak House examines the social and moral devastation of a failed judicial system. Ultimately the police redeem the law, and Inspector Bucket investigates, solves the mystery and resolves the plot. In Little Dorrit Dickens examines the misery and injustice of the penal system. Originally he had intended to call the work Nobody’s Fault, as a satirical comment on the failure of ethics within judicial and legal processes. And it is here that I pick up again the thread to Schreiner, in her allegorical novella, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland.

Raised and educated in Southern Africa under British Imperial (mis)rule, Schreiner was heir to Godwin and Dickens, and would no doubt have read the works of them both. While her own writing advocates a more radical political programme than that evident in Dickens, she must have had a skeptical understanding of how, within the British colonial context, Godwin’s Jacobin ideals of “no administration and no government” could be abused through the logic of imperial adventurism. Originally attracted by the personal magnetism of Rhodes, she became deeply critical of the free hand with which the Chartered Company was allowed to expropriate land and wealth, outside of the due process of British law. For her it meant, in devastating effect, that whatever might happen in the empire would effectively be counted as “Nobody’s Fault.”

The novella opens with the Trooper Peter Halket sitting alone on a rocky kopje drowsing beside a small fire. The dull and naïve youth fills his head with the delusional dream of imperial profiteering. He imagines himself as owner of a vast Mining Company, and in his mind he fantasizes about the accrual of wealth through trading in shares. “Well, if they didn’t like to sell out at the right time, it was their own faults. Why didn’t they? He, Peter Halket, did not feel responsible for them. . . . Other men had come to South Africa with nothing, and had made everything! Why should not he.”

As he gazes into the fire, what he sees is the image of the “fires they had made to burn the natives’ grain by, . . .the skull of the old Mashona blown off at the top. . . . Then he thought suddenly of a young black woman he and another man caught alone in the bush, her baby on her back, but young and pretty. Well, they didn’t shoot her! – .” Schreiner knew of the effects of mystification, and understood well enough what behaviours are licensed, once collectivities of people embrace the principle that it is “Nobody’s Fault.” She became a witness for the prosecution, insisting, wherever she found brutality, that systems and persons should be held to account. It was a gross injustice that one British law pertained in England, and another in the colonies.

The apotheosis of popular fiction in the British nineteenth century was Conan Doyle’s invention of the detective Sherlock Holmes. Surely much of the success of this character lay in its promise of consolation for an Imperial generation. Criminality would be identified, evil punished, and truth and reason would ultimately prevail. The horror of anything outside of such a sentiment, asserts itself as a mortal fear in Conan Doyle’s “The Cardboard Box”: “What is the meaning of it, Watson?” Holmes asks. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable.”

By way of a closing comment I will read a brief passage from Of Wild Dogs, lines which probably have more to do with Olive Schreiner than even I was aware. It is in the closing moments of the novel. Trails of responsibility have been identified through the pragmatic diligence of Inspector Cicero Matyobeni. We have reached the point at which, given the conventions of genre, the plot demands that the writer engage with matters of justice.

Spyker seemed not to understand that he might attempt to explain why he had found it so easy to kill Toni and Jessica, why his knife had found no resistance in the warp and the woof of canvas as he sliced his way into the moon-dark tent. He had no narrative that linked his action to the years bearing his mother’s Afrikaans shame in his father’s bullying and contemptuous English household, where words and phrases that he had learned during the day were banished in the evening hours, sweet round words like “katkie”, “voël” and “bloekom,” as well as sharp strong words like “mes” and “vryf”. Although it was a fair account of being his father’s son, Spyker himself knew that this was not the explanation. It did not capture the pleasure of the blade, and the blood-warm warmth of blood. Nor why he must be on top of and inside of and slashing and tearing and drowning in power. Such things do not trail back down a single corridor to “because.” (251)

To write a detective novel now, particularly within the context of post-colonial, post-TRC South Africa, is to feel Schreiner’s obligation to assert that society cannot function outside of a moral economy, while conceding that our interpretation of Who is at Fault is at worst opportunistic and at best partial.

——————
* Pamphlet, British Council Exhibition, The Art of Murder, 1993. Introduction, by PD James.

One of the symbols that I’ve chosen to adorn this space with is a drawing of an ass, reading a book on his kind – as any civilized ass might be expected to do. The drawing is by Goya, whose work I find is so deeply fixating. I puzzled for a while over this logo – but in the end it was too charming not to choose. Incidentally, GOYA is an English acronym that means – Get Off Your Ass! Valuable advice for writers, no doubt.

I look forward to posting the odd musing within the BOOK SA community. Meanwhile, here’s something more on Of Wild Dogs, my novel:

Something nasty is coming out of the woodwork at the Museum… and in the lonely bushveld, it’s not only Nature that’s red in tooth and claw. This sparkling first novel is a whodunnit with local flavour and postmodern flair. An artist at the Museum is dead: sharp-tongued Hannah, a former exile, whose passions turn out to be fatal. Three very different people must combine forces to uncover her murderer: Ewan Christopher, Hannah’s former lover and a British journalist, out of his depth in the new South Africa; Inspector Cicero Matyobeni, the world-weary policeman from Khayelitsha, holding on to his compassion for dear life; and the beautiful but insecure pathologist, Helena de Villiers, who is becoming perhaps too personally involved…

The action moves from the Company Gardens of Cape Town to the wild grasslands of the Limpopo Province, in a complex and clever plot, full of red herrings and puns, and peopled by academics, chiefs, corrupt businessmen, sangomas, ex-security policemen, car-guards and a Greek goddess or two. This thriller with a brain comes highly recommended by well-known local writers such as Ingrid de Kok.

Book Details

• Of Wild Dogs
  by Jane Taylor
  EAN: 9781919930848
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

• You can contact me by dropping a note at: taylor2@mweb.co.za.