Pray, cast thine eyes upon yon sight – ‘Speak Me A Speech’ at Woordfees 2023

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare (and language in general), and you find yourself in the Stellenbosch area on 10 or 13 October, pop into the Toyota US Woordfees for a surprisingly accessible preview of the multi-lingual film Speak Me A Speech.

EasyEquities has sponsored the two preview screenings in Stellenbosch during Woordfees 2023, which will offer audiences a first look at the ground-breaking feature-length film currently being shot in the Western Cape.

“EasyEquities has always been a supporter of arts projects such as Woordfees, the Festival of Excellence for Dramatic Arts (FEDA), and Wits University’s Tsikinya-Chaka Centre,” says EasyEquities chief engagement officer, Carel Nolte. “Art has the capacity to provoke and challenge, inciting debates and conversations that transcend boundaries in an often-divided world.

“As staunch advocates for democratising access and dismantling barriers, we find a remarkable synergy in the arts. Speak Me A Speech is an example of the amazing diversity in our country and our ability to see our culture in the context of a connected world.”

Speak Me A Speech, the new film from Cape Town’s CineSouth Studios, produced in association with the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre, is still in production, with shooting scheduled to continue to end 2024. The 42-minute preview created by Speak Me A Speech director Victor van Aswegen for Woordfees from material filmed for the project to date, gives a foretaste of the film that will be released in 2025.

The festival screenings are a rare opportunity for the public to get an early look into a forthcoming feature-length work still in production and meet the people behind the project. The Woordfees preview screenings start at 2pm on Tuesday 10 and Friday 13 October in the Neelsie Cinema on the Stellenbosch campus, and are followed by Q&A with the director and co-producer Victor van Aswegen, and co-producers Chris Thurman.

“With this project,” says CineSouth Studios founder and Speak Me A Speech director Victor van Aswegen, “we are bringing to life an astonishing 28 Shakespeare characters in 10 South African languages through 35 iconic monologues. But more than that: we are also presenting these characters reimagined as inhabitants of the modern-day world, speaking to us in a natural, colloquial, conversational style as contemporaries.

“What they’re articulating are timeless human concerns – as pertinent to our lives as these were to the lives of the people in Shakespeare’s audiences over four hundred years ago.

“The project deliberately transcends the colonial past with which Shakespeare has often been burdened, and speaks across cultural and linguistic boundaries to our common humanity.”

The preview film features outstanding performances by actors Anelisa Phewa (pictured above), Royston Stoffels (below left), Chantal Stanfield (below centre) and Buhle Ngaba (below right), bringing to life in isiZulu, Afrikaans and Setswana four unforgettable Shakespeare characters: Thomas More, Sir John Falstaff, Mistress Page and Portia from the plays Sir Thomas More, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV Part II and Julius Caesar. This is the first time these characters, created by Shakespeare over four centuries ago, have been realised and presented on film in these languages.

While the performance in Setswana draws from the near-century-old classic translation by Sol Plaatje dating from the 1930s, the other translations were created for the film – the isiZulu by actor Anelisa Phewa and the Afrikaans by director Victor van Aswegen – and have never before been presented to the public in a cinema screening.

The five monologues in the preview film – Falstaff as a giant among Shakespeare characters gets two – were carefully selected for the satisfyingly wide range of topics, situations and emotions they cover. Old-age mischief-making for love and money, indignation at the receipt of an unwanted advance, and eloquent words on the manifold merits of sherry give us Shakespeare in light-hearted mode – in Afrikaans.

A shift of tone takes us into the life and mind of a Setswana-speaking woman trapped in an unhappy marriage, and finally to an impassioned speech delivered by a Zulu leader to a violent, xenophobic mob.

“The project draws on and showcases the extraordinary talents of the actors and translators working in South Africa today,” says Prof Chris Thurman, founding director of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre and producer alongside van Aswegen of Speak Me A Speech. “What a privilege to be able to work with creative, gifted individuals of this calibre – and such a pleasure for us to play a role in exposing their work to an even wider audience.”

All monologues filmed for the project are made publicly available on the web platform www.speak-me-a-speech.com, with user-selectable subtitle options (Shakespeare, the South African language being spoken, and the translation into contemporary English of the spoken language), and texts.

Screenings of Speak Me A Speech:

Preview: Tuesday 10 October 2023 2pm

Friday 13 October 2023 2pm Neelsie Cinema, Stellenbosch

42 minutes, followed by Q&A with director and producers

Sponsored by EasyEquities: www.easyequities.co.za

Admission free ● Limited seating ● Arrive early