Event information
The internationally acclaimed South African-born actress and director, Dame Janet Suzman, is in South Africa and 'In Conversation With' Shakespeare specialist, Professor Chris Thurman, for one night only.
This special talk coincides with the season of William Shakespeare's Othello, adapted and directed by Lara Foot with design by Gerhard Marx, music by Kyle Shepherd, lighting by Patrick Curtis and featuring a stellar cast.
Dame Janet Suzman in Conversation with Prof Chris Thurman, provides audiences the perfect opportunity to watch the matinee or evening performances of Lara Foot's Othello, before or after the talk.
Suzman, a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her services to drama, directed Hamlet at The Baxter and at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2006. When Suzman tries to remember why Shakespeare has always meant so much to her, she says her English teacher at school - who obviously fancied herself as Rosalind - opened her eyes to Shakespeare's characters who were so vivid, complex and funny, that they seemed truly human.
When she graduated from Wits, she left SA to study acting at LAMDA. She joined Peter Hall's new company in 1964 for Shakespeare's 400th Birthday, for his opening Stratford season of the history plays, kicking off her long career. For a decade, she played major roles at both Stratford and The Aldwych in London.
Chris Thurman is Director of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand, president of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa and founder of Shakespeare ZA. He is co-editor, with Sandra Young, of Global Shakespeare and Social Injustice: Towards a Transformative Encounter (2023). He has also edited South African Essays on 'Universal' Shakespeare (2014), Sport versus Art: A South African Contest (2010) and fifteen volumes of the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa.
