Judge Dennis Davis
Cromwell: the Movie
Summary
“Cromwell” is a British historical drama film written and directed by Ken Hughes based on the life of Oliver Cromwell, who rose to lead the Parliamentary forces during the later parts of the English Civil War and, as Lord Protector, ruled Great Britain and Ireland in the 1650s. Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer discuss some of the many interesting aspects of the film and its impact.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Well, it depends on which book you’re going to read, really. I think the certainly thing is that the books I’ve read, as I say I mentioned too that Fraser and Hill, they’re very nuanced. Cromwell is certainly not a hero in a classic sense of the word, but there was a great deal of nuance in the history, so it depends which history you read.
It’s a really important question. No, I don’t. I think that this has evolved over centuries and more in particular in countries.