Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✭✭
by Athol Fugard, John Kani & Winston Ntshona,
directed by Peter Brook
Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Enwave Theatre, Toronto
April 18-22, 2007
Bring together one of the 20th century’s most important plays and one of its most important directors and you have an unforgettable evening of theatre. Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) was created by the white playwright Athol Fugard and the two black actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona as an indictment of the laws of South Africa’s apartheid regime that viewed all blacks as “foreigners” in the land where they were born and required them to carry government-issued identity papers on their persons at all times or risk arrest and imprisonment. Even though that regime and its pass laws are gone, the play is eerily relevant today not just because governments are considering requiring identity cards for all citizens but because the play universalizes the question of human identity as determined by governmental and social hierarchies. The play asks what gives people their identities if you take away their names, their families and their work.
As directed by Peter Brook the production is a masterpiece of minimalism. A couple clothes racks, a few cardboard cartons, a garbage bag are all that he and his actors need to conjure up the world of township life. This very simplicity brings back the notion of “play” into the theatre. So masterful are Pitcho Womba Konga as Sizwe and Habib Dembélé as the photographer Styles and a myriad of other characters that they give the sense that the work is being created afresh as they speak. Dembélé is a marvel in himself as he slips with amazing precision from role to role with the merest change of posture or inflection. The play originally written in English is presented in the language of Brook’s French company but that is no impediment to enjoying fully such acting and direction like this of the very highest calibre.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-04-20.
Photo: Pitcho Womba Konga and Habib Dembélé. ©Pascal Victor.
2007-04-20
Sizwe Bansi is Dead