THREE drama pupils from Westville Boys’ High School, Murray Clark, Carrick Keating and Pierre Parrott, accompanied by the school’s director of culture, Luke Holder, will tour Cape Town as invited performers for the annual Shakespeare Schools Festival at The Baxter Theatre, with their acclaimed 20-minute production of The Merchant of Venice from 17 to 24 April.
Playing all the characters between them, with no sets or props and aided only by a towel, they weave a tale of desperation and intrigue on the filthy streets of Venice.
While in the Cape, the pupils will also perform the phenomenally popular parody, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), at The Waterfront Theatre, and school performances at Wynberg Boys’ High School and Rustenberg Girls’ High School. The play, written by Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield, premièred at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1987, went on to nine record-breaking years on London’s West End and has been the world’s most performed stage parody for the last 20 years.
The annual Shakespeare Schools Festival South Africa is proudly presented by NPO Educape, founded in 2007 by festival coordinator and creative director, Kseniya Filinova-Bruton. Educape’s vision is to mobilise the collective and individual dreams of the country’s youth through performing arts and education – an ideal that is shared by the WBHS’s performing arts mandate.
The three WBHS pupils and a few former prisoners will host a celebration event on Robben Island on Saturday, 23 April. This event aims to tell the story of how a copy of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, smuggled onto the island disguised as a Hindu prayer book by Sonny Venkatratnam’s wife, inspired the detainees on the island during their imprisonment. Sonny Venkatrathnam will return to the island once more in remembrance of the event and to honour the importance that Shakespeare played in his life, and many others’, while imprisoned.
Westville Boys’ is proud of the students who have been asked to perform extracts from the works of the Bard at this auspicious occasion.
Tickets for The Baxter Theatre performance of The Merchant of Venice on Thursday, 21 April can be purchased through Computicket or any of its registered outlets.
