Shakespeare in the ‘Rainbow Nation’: an autoethnography of teaching multilingual/multicultural actors in South Africa

‘The Rainbow Nation’ is a term coined during the fall of apartheid to describe an aspirational multicultural future for South Africa. The realisation of this collective aspiration can be seen in many actor training programmes in South Africa today. This racial and cultural diversity in the student body comes with a diversity of language affordances and proficiencies with English, which is still the dominant language in theatre locally. Additionally, engaging with Shakespeare’s plays is an inevitability; they are regularly staged as they are integral to the high school English curriculum. Performing Shakespeare remains a particularly challenging task for EAL trainees in South Africa, largely due to the inaccessibility of the language used in the text. In this article, I draw on my experiences of working with Shakespearean text - both as a teacher in South African schools and as a bilingual actress - to discuss methods of drawing on EAL trainees’ individual cultural/language affordances to understand and interpret the storytelling and characters in Shakespeare’s plays. I present this autoethnographic account of teaching practice in South Africa to contribute to uncovering underrepresented perspectives in performance pedagogy research. By decentring the text in the initial stages of the textual-analysis of the play being staged, trainees are guided to master the challenging English used through the context afforded to them. Collaborating with trainees to find resources to adapt to performance in English ensures that the unique needs of each trainee are addressed and that they are equipped to find their own solutions.