By Andrew Dickson for The Guardian, 25 September 2015
It was a Monday morning in central Johannesburg – September, early spring. Inside the church hall, a cold light streamed on to the hard tile floor. The walls were raw plaster, stained and grey; bars were on the windows. In the centre of the small room were 12 or so plastic garden chairs. Occupying them there were seven men, all of whom were black. They were huddled over cups of instant coffee. Threads of steam gathered and shifted in the air. Abruptly, one man in his late 20s, neatly dressed, stood and turned towards us, fists bunched by his sides. He began to speak:
If there were reason for these miseries,
Then into limits could I bind my woes.
When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o’erflow?
If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad
Threat’ning the welkin with his big-swoll’n face?
It took me a few seconds to place the lines: Titus Andronicus, act three, scene one. This is Titus’s – and perhaps Shakespeare’s – first truly great tragic speech. Words of desolation, teetering insanity, at the point in the play where the hero realises that his daughter has been raped and appallingly mutilated, and that his sons are about to be killed. Of all the places I’d been expecting to hear them, it wasn’t here.
The group was called Johannesburg Awakening Minds, Jam for short. It had been in existence just over a year, and mainly consisted of unemployed men, many of whom had been sleeping rough. Corralled by the veteran South African actor Dorothy Ann Gould, its members met once a week to do drama workshops in the inner-city district of Hillbrow. Few had any previous experience of acting. Their specialism was Shakespeare.
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