‘Difference matters’: challenging myths of Africa-as-country in the RSC’s 2012 Julius Caesar through the legacy of shakespeare.za's #lockdownshakespeare

This article will propose that in the field of Shakespeare performance in Southern Africa, selfrecorded, digital performance which reveals the location of recording affords a methodology that repositions the cultural relationship between site and Shakespeare. This approach can challenge the traditional flows of knowledge and cultural production in the global Shakespeare performing arts ‘industry’. In order to demonstrate this, a phenomenological reading of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa’s #lockdownshakespeare project will be deployed in this article in opposition to a critical analysis of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) 2012 production of Julius Caesar. Finally, the work of the Decentred Shakespeares Network, inspired by the specificity of some of the site-based self recordings of #lockdownshakespeare will suggest that the Southern African project offered a potential model of de-centred and decolonised practice that can rebalance the generalised depictions of Africa, such as the 2012 RSC production described by Nora J.Williams as looking ‘clumsy and ignorant in its displacement of Roman violence into an African continent imagined as an amorphous mass’.