Athol Fugard’s timeless play, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, opens a dialogue for all South Africans between the past and the present, writes Janet Smith.
When South African theatre challenged the status quo, when it was a driving force against the apartheid regime, Athol Fugard was king.To the authorities, who tried to shut down his mind and his ideas, he was a dangerous monarch of the arts. His tongue, his imagination and, more than that, his bravery, had made him an enemy.
When Sizwe Banzi is Dead, a magnificent two-hander that drills down into the dark tunnels of racism and oppression, was first performed in October 1972 at the Space Theatre, it was clear that Fugard’s agenda was to destabilise the political stage. And if there was a belief among the apartheid cultural czars that they might be able to contain his views by shutting him down here, they couldn’t have been more wrong.
The play – about a man who must change his identity in order to “live” again, his old passbook having restricted him to a life away from his family and without hope – went on to make headlines in other parts of the world. And in that way, using his remarkable skills, Fugard helped to push the anti-apartheid position in the West.
Sizwe Banzi is Dead has now made an accomplished return to the Market Theatre, and suddenly, that time of artistic protest, when most of us were not yet alive, lives again. Written with the top South African actors of that time, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, Fugard’s play about good men trying to survive evil, is as potent today as ever.
But there’s an additional beauty to it. Kani’s son Atandwa, who has gradually been building up a formidable profile in theatre, plays the same role which his father did all those years ago. And his Styles, the former Ford worker who becomes a portrait photographer and storyteller, must surely restore some powerful memories for those who saw the play at its beginning all those years ago.
And indeed, it is memories which are at the centre of this experience: the desire of men without power to try to recast themselves in a manner they believed would give them just a taste of what they properly deserved. If Sizwe Banzi, who finds the passbook of another man, Robert Zwelinzima, can become that other man and find another life, he can still live the one he intended.
The complicated pathways of that moment are so peculiar to apartheid and yet, as we know, there are still battles for freedom all over the world which could be mapped onto this play and find relevance today.
Mncedisi Shabangu, who plays Sizwe Banzi and his alter ego, Robert Zwelinzima, gives such an exceptional performance that he must certainly be a contender for the best of the year. Indeed, his characters’ bewilderment at this absurd existence is exquisitely cast.
The young Kani, too, is brilliant.
You cannot but wish you could lift your own moral game when you are in the standing ovation.