A piece of personal, political and theatrical history….

Nearly 35 years on from when they first performed Sizwe Banzi is Dead as a piece of underground political protest theatre in Cape Town, John Kani and Winston Ntshona are back in London, performing the piece again – this time at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton. It’s a long journey that has brought them back in every sense to a city where they first performed it in 1973, and much has changed in the intervening years: the iniquitous pass laws that the play revolves around are happily now a thing of the past there — though as more than one review (including my own) has noted, may yet be a feature of our own lives in Britain if ID cards are introduced, and apartheid is dead. But also both actors have, of course, conspicuously aged – a fact poignantly underlined by a photograph in the programme of the two of them with Athol Fugard, whom they co-wrote it with, taken when they first brought the play to London’s Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1973 (It subsequently transferred to the main house downstairs, and then on to the West End and Broadway, where they took the rare distinction of being jointly awarded the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play).

The role of photography in providing a history of people’s otherwise unrecorded lives is one of the themes of the play, since Kani’s character is a photographer. But their play is also a snapshot of something else: a particular time and place in history, but also one with wider resonance to the world beyond it. Indeed, as I also noted in my own review, “Peter Brook is also bringing his own Theatre des Bouffes du Nord production of the play to the Barbican’s BITE season in May (where it will be performed in the Pit in French with English surtitles). Brook clearly recognises the universality of this very specific story of identity; but at the same time the creators of it – now veterans both of the political struggle in South Africa and elder statesmen of its theatre – bring an utterly unique and tangible connection to it.”

This is a piece of personal, political and theatrical history, and I hosted an onstage talk with both Kani and Ntshona after Thursday evening’s performance for the National Theatre’s gold corporate members. It was personally extraordinary for me to share a stage with the two men – not just after witnessing their phenomenal performances in the play that night, but for the role they have played in my own personal, political and theatrical history, too: for I, like them, hail originally from South Africa. (Though, being white, I never had a passbook myself, I vividly remember the fact that black people had to carry them at all times – something it never even entered my teenager mind to question. The play, however, has made me question it and much else). And although a lot of the early theatre I was raised on was “white” boulevard imports from the London and Broadway stage (or at least plays not subject to the cultural boycott), the biggest part of my theatrical education was provided at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, and that’s where I saw them in a production of Edward Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith.

Kani has been having a busy time in the British theatre lately – last year he was part of director Janet Suzman’s South African cast production of Hamlet that came to Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the Complete Works Festival, playing Claudius; and in February, he appeared at Hampstead Theatre in his own debut as a solo playwright, Nothing But the Truth, that will also begin an extensive UK tour at the end of next month at Newcastle (see http://www.ukarts.com for details). That play, poignantly, is about the clash of those who stayed in South Africa to fight apartheid – and those who fled. As someone who fled – though not of my own choice, since I was only 16 at the time – it, too, had a special resonance for me. Watching Kani in that play, wrestling with the idea of forgiveness, was incredibly moving.

And to be able to share a stage with these two wonderfully generous and warm-hearted actors was even more so. I felt part of my life coming full-circle – who would have thought that, 28 years on from watching them as a teenager on the stage of the Market Theatre, I would be on one myself at one of the world’s pre-eminent English theatres with them?