St Mary’s Drama Students to Meet the South African High Commissioner

Drama students at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham have been invited to the South African embassy later this month as guests of the High Commissioner Dr Zola Skweyiya. The visit is part of the preparations made by students studying the Theatre for Development module on the Drama and Applied Theatre course. They will visit South Africa next month to run a series of Drama workshops with schools, community groups and students from the University of Kwazulu Natal in Durban. Using the interactive theatre practice of ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’, the workshops will explore attitudes to gender assertiveness and HIV/AIDS prevention with young South African actors. Both visits have been organised by Drama lecturer Matthew Hahn whose verbatim theatre play The Robben Island Bible has received international acclaim. The play explores the power of Shakespeare’s words as a site for political resistance and features interviews with many of the anti-apartheid prisoners incarcerated on the island in the seventies and eighties. Recently, excerpts from the interviews have been published and critiqued in Hamlet’s Dream by South African academic David Schalkwyk, the most recent publication in the Arden Shakespeare Now! series. In June, Matthew will travel to Washington DC as a guest of Dr Schalkwyk to direct a gala presentation of the play at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Mark Griffin, Academic Director for Drama, commented, “We’re incredibly pleased that Drama St Mary’s students are given these fantastic opportunities to work abroad and gain such an exciting international perspective to the radical  process of theatre making and storytelling.”