Trekking with Shakespeare in South Africa: Stephen Gray’s Cambridge Tour

Abstract

In 1964 Stephen Gray, president of the Cambridge Shakespeare Group, took a troupe of 16 Cambridge students and five professional actors and actresses to South Africa to perform productions of Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost as part of a Shakespeare festival organised by the newly formed English Academy of Southern Africa in celebration of the quadricentennial anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. The aim was to perform mainly before underprivileged audiences of Africans, Coloureds, and Indians in theatre spaces open to all in townships throughout the country. They had many adventures and some problems along the way which Gray attempted to write up afterward in a book commissioned by a British publisher. But what he wrote never got published. The narrative of their 65 performances over 10 weeks was truly a comedy of errors as well as a tragic example of love’s labour’s lost.