1 – Sizwe Banzi is Dead – revived
Thirty-one years ago, shortly before the Soweto uprisings, two young black South African actors – Winston Ntshona and John Kani – made Broadway history. It was the first – and to this day the only – time that in winner-takes-all America two performers shared the first place for best actor at the theatre world’s Oscars – the Tony Awards. The play was Sizwe Banzi is Dead – devised by the actors together with Athol Fugard. It was a morale-boosting coup that cast the international spotlight on the cruel bonds of red tape that underpinned draconian apartheid.
The story of the honest rural black man battling a dehumanising Kafkaesque bureaucracy, who cannot find employment, because he does not possess a pass, and must assume the identity of a dead man to survive, struck a universal chord.
Now firmly cited as a classic of South African theatre, it is still widely referred to, performed and was even published in book form incorrectly as Sizwe Bansi – due to a misspelling on a poster that was sent to the Royal Court Theatre, which neither Fugard nor the actors bothered to correct, according to Brian Astbury, progenitor of the legendary Cape Town Space Theatre, which premiered the work in 1972.
Overseas success soon brought political heat. After a performance in Umtata in 1976,
the puppet Bantustan regime in the Transkei rather capriciously arrested Ntshona and Kani, for what the vulgar tinpot despot George (brother of Kaiser) Matanzima called the “vulgar” language in the play. It caused international outrage – thanks to that Tony. But harassment didn’t let up – even in 1979, the police managed to stop the opening night when the play returned to The Space after its international accolades and its 1978 run at The Market in Johannesburg.
In the 1970s Ntshona and Kani bravely toured Sizwe Banzi and The Island to schools, community halls, churches – any venue they could find in the black townships. Known collectively as the Statements plays they originated at around the same time from Fugard’s Port Elizabeth troupe – The Serpent Players. Sizwe Banzi’s reputation as a ‘watershed’ production breaking new ground was established.
Its revival in 2006 at the National Arts Festival appropriately returns the work to the Eastern Cape and features the original cast – Ntshona who turns 65 this year and Kani who is just three years younger. Theatrical facilitator Mannie Manim says they’ve been talking about doing Sizwe Banzi ever since they started their highly successful revival of The Island in 1995, and have been touring it to the capitals of the West ever since.
Director of the current South African revival Aubrey Sekhabi has not worked from the published text, but from a BBC recording made in the late 1970s. According to Sekhabi this is the version that won Kani and Nsthona the Tony.
The cast describe their rehearsal period at the State Theatre as a rewarding process of sharing. Although the ‘old boys’ – who are lifelong friends – often knocked off early, Sekhabi says they are committed, seasoned professionals – in stark contrast to many of the lackadaisical young actors he has to deal with these days. Kani’s penchant for telling stories seems to have occupied a fair portion of their time. On the opening night in 1972, Kani’s improvisation, which starts the play, went on for an hour and half, until Fugard sent a furious Ntshona on stage in the middle of yet another yarn.
The revival is doubtlessly a great commercial idea. Representing it as commemorating the thirty years since the Soweto uprisings, is a tempting hook, but stretching things rather unnecessarily. A revival of a classic work with the original cast is a perfectly legitimate activity and the producers should feel quite secure within this. Only the sourest of audiences would not wish to indulge them.
In their press release Ntshona comments that the play allows today’s audiences to experience life as it was in the “dark period of this country’s history”, while Kani maintains it is a vivid portrayal of “what it was like to have been black in South Africa at the time”. In his original review, American critic Stanley Kauffmann, rather dismissively wrote that the play was “only about the troubles of South African blacks”.
What then of its contemporary relevance. I put the question to Sekhabi, who replied that it has a significant message for “anyone living under an oppressive system anywhere in the world”. Director Peter Brook who is currently staging the work in French as Sizwe Banzi est Mort and touring it everywhere from Jerusalem to Dublin, told The Economist that the play is for him “about a fundamental lack of respect for the African” – which exists to this day in the world.
In an academic paper, Andre Brink feels ambiguous about its infusion by Fugard with European existentialism, and Anne Fuchs in her Playing the Market Theatre Johannesburg 1976-1986 regards it as “too white-oriented”. These are misgivings that should be aired and interrogated in an on-going debate about the interaction between today’s demographically shifting audiences – in terms of language, culture and age – and protest works developed under the previous dispensation.
But the proof of its enduring popularity, arguably due to its Fugardian existential transcendence of socio-political themes, and its almost continuous performance in one part of the world or another, speaks for itself.
The production moves to the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town after the National Arts Festival. It will then travel to the State Theatre in Pretoria, The Market Theatre in Johannesburg and will also be seen at the Hilton Festival.
2 – Opening night Grahamstown 2006
Revivals are always dogged by questions of contemporary relevance, but the tyranny of “why now?” needs some deflating. Sizwe Banzi is Dead is a defining work in South African theatre, and last night’s triumphant opening night featuring the original cast was a celebratory occasion.
Sexagenarians John Kani and Winston Ntshona acquitted themselves brilliantly before an adoring public. Neither man lacks vitality. Their seniority has deepened its pathos, especially considering that the actors – now venerated – were subjected to many of the shocking degradations the play relives from apartheid’s ugly past.
‘Sizwe’ – means ‘the nation’, and ‘banzi’ means ‘large’ or ‘broad’. The implication of the title was political dynamite when performed during the 1976 student revolt. Today we believe – or at least hope – we do not have a revolutionary climate. Yet the story of the honest man forced to negate his integrity by a cruel and inhumane system is always germane to the affairs of man. Playwright Athol Fugard wrote in his notebooks that, “Survival can involve betrayal of everything – beliefs, values, ideals – except Life itself”. This existential dilemma is the reason the play still speaks to people today.
Since the plot involves specific apartheid laws, it is firmly set in the 1970s. The trickiest part of performing in the present is the opening soliloquy, which historically was an improvisation on the day based on current news stories. Yet the past has many echoes, including an objectionable USA president. Then it was Nixon.
Director Aubrey Sekhabi, working from a 70s BBC recording and not the published text, has perhaps been too faithful. When the lively Styles (Kani), bearing his humiliations with humour and dignity, finally has revenge on his bosses deliberately mistranslating in Xhosa their orders to the factory workers, Sekhabi has chosen to stick to the original text and relate all of this in English. Given that a significant part of the audience here speaks Xhosa, and the rest of us should be learning, it seemed polite, but anachronistic.
Surprisingly, the age of the performers only jars when Sizwe, played by the somewhat frail Ntshona, is told he could make head message boy in fifteen years, and when it’s suggested he apply to work in the mines.
But why is such a beautiful play in need of reviving at all? Although it is a regularly prescribed for students, there have been almost no local professional productions in nearly thirty years. The Market Theatre last staged it in 1978.
A disheartened Wim Vorster at South Africa’s Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO), says that despite many requests, permission has never been granted for a professional production. “Athol always says go ahead, but John (Kani) always says no.” Last year the Liberty Theatre on the Square begged to stage it with the vibrant young talents of James Ngcobo and Vusi Kunene. A production I would have loved to see. The world really is big enough for both. Curiously, the current run in Grahamstown is licensed through the William Morris Agency (New York), and not DALRO.
“It is sad that a great script like Sizwe Banzi has been unseen for so long,” says Vorster. The younger generation only know it in text form, published with the erroneous spelling – Bansi. At last the generation caught in the political veldfire of the Soweto Uprisings, can see Sizwe Banzi revived.
3 – Sizwe Bansi is Dead – review Baxter Theatre
The watershed South African play Sizwe Banzi is Dead, has at long last been taken out of mothballs. The original cast (from 1972-78) John Kani and Winston Ntshona acquit themselves brilliantly before an adoring public. If anything, their seniority has deepened the play’s pathos, especially when one considers that the actors – now venerated – were themselves subject to many of the shocking degradations the play relives from apartheid’s ugly past. It’s a moving experience.
Kani is at his best, delivering the opening monologue with winning charm. The last time he performed this well was in his own play Nothing but the Truth. Sizwe Banzi is clearly his natural habitat. Ntshona, now stiffening somewhat in the joints, uses it to maximum effect with precision comic timing. Surprisingly, the age of the performers only jars when Sizwe, played by the older Ntshona, is told he could make head messenger in fifteen years, and when it’s suggested he apply to work in the mines.
At a time when many whites have gone into denial and are stubbornly hard-hearted and resistant to accommodating the on-going hardships of those previously classified as non-white, the use of the words “white’ and the “white man” will come as a shock from the past. The play is a timely reminder to whites who cherish their amnesia just how brutal the system was they benefited from and presided over.
The story of the honest man forced to negate his identity and his integrity to survive in a cruel and inhumane system is always germane to the affairs of man. Playwright Athol Fugard wrote in his notebooks that, “Survival can involve betrayal of everything – beliefs, values, ideals – except Life itself”. This existential dilemma is the reason the play still speaks to people today. Sizwe Banzi is not only a South African classic, but a beautifully written work.
