SIZWE BANZI IS DEAD
Lyttelton Theatre, London SE1
Opened 21 March, 2007
****
Reviewing John Kani in his play Nothing
But The Truth last month, I wrote of the phenomenal dignity he
exudes onstage. This is true even when he is bantering in forthright
terms with the audience, almost clowning, as in the first half-hour of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, the play which
he and Winston Ntshona created with Athol Fugard in South Africa in
1972, and which Kani and Ntshona have brought back to London for a
fortnight as part of the NT's Travelex £10 season. Kani's
character here may be an unpretentious township photographer, but he
also knows that his pictures make real his clients' dreams and show
them as their own people, in contrast to the reality of a country where
every black man is a white person's "boy", or, worse, a ghost.
There may be all kinds of other oppression in the world today, but it
is hard to grasp the pervasive subjugation of South Africa's "pass
laws" which regulated where the black majority could and could not
move. The play's thesis is simple: in order to stay where there is
employment, Sizwe Banzi takes over the pass book and thus the identity
of a dead man, and so "Banzi" dies. There is some debate about the
importance of identity versus the brute necessities of life under
apartheid, but the radicalism of the idea no longer communicates itself
to a 21st-century British audience. Kani's co-star Ntshona, too, now
looks wizened where once he was impish; 35 years on, it is hard to
believe in him as a man of Banzi's working age. (The pair yielded to
the inevitable a few years ago and retired their other two-hander play The Island, a more physically
demanding piece about imprisonment.)
In many ways, then, this is heritage theatre. (It will be interesting
to compare this "original" with Peter Brook's production of the same
play when it comes to London in May.) But what heritage! The mere fact
of Ntshona and Kani working with Fugard was a proud act of defiance in
1972, never mind their creating plays which spoke so directly of the
iniquities of the apartheid regime. History has, thank heaven, changed
the tone of the testimony which the play now gives in performance, but
that testimony remains strong and important. There may no longer be a
visceral charge of right-on-ness for trendy liberal viewers, but
sometimes it is a downright honour to be under the same roof, present
at the same event.
Written for the Financial Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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