A Wistful Smile and a Pucker

THEIR BEWYSBOEKS--required identification booklets--say that John Kani and Winston Ntshona are private servant employees of Athol Fugard, the white South African playwright with whom they have collaborated to "devise" Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island, now in Boston for their last performances in the United States. "Actor" is not recognized by apartheid South Africa as a possible profession for blacks, so Kani and Ntshona, the best actors you will have a chance to see on stage for a long time, remain second-class citizens, despite a three-year international tour that has garnered universal rave reviews and the 1975 Tony award for best actor.

Sizwe Banzi is Dead begins with a rambling, anecdotal, seemingly spontaneous monologue that makes up almost the first half of the play. It is a way of setting the stage for an American audience--Styles (John Kani) leafs through a newspaper commenting on whatever happens to catch his eye, joking about expresidents and the like, and finally settling into a long, bitter description of the servility of black workers in a Ford motors plant and the frenzied preparations in the plant when Henry Ford descended from rich mythical America for a visit. There is a swift transition to the play proper one of Styles's customers, Sizwe Banzi, is desparately trying to find a way to stay in white Port Elizabeth beyond his permitted time. He is persuaded by his friend Buntu (also played by Kani) of the utter hopelessness of the effort; Buntu instead takes him out to get drunk, saying, "the only time a black man is happy is when he is drunk, or when he is dead."

Coming home, late at night, they stumble on a dead man in whose wallet is a bewysboek with a permit to work in Port Elizabeth. This is Sizwe's chance--in drunken self-righteousness and rebellion, he at first refuses to steal the bewysboek and take on the dead man's identity, because for a black man in South Africa, his name is all that he has, the last proof of his manhood. But he finally relents, and Sizwe Banzi is dead.

The Island is about two political prisoners in a cell on Robben Island, the infamous prison island off the coast of South Africa. John and Winston still try to maintain their dignity and humor despite the deadening fatigue and hard-labor in the quarry. The main action of the play is their effort to stage Sophocles's Antigone in the prison. Unexpectedly, John finds out he will be released in three months; Winston, in for life, is condemned to become one of the desiccated, withered shells of men they see working silently at the quarry. Their staging of Antigone shows a clear bias for Antigone, but it cannot gloss over the real dilemma of State-enforced law vs. the individual.

The first ten minutes of The Island are an intense, powerful theatrical experience, a pantomime of toil and fatigue, blood and pain. The rest of the play is inevitably an anti-climax that never fully lives up to the expectations and intense atmosphere set up by the play's beginning. When Kani exhibits the quick comic energy that worked so well in Sizwe Banzi, although the audience is laughing and the comic relief much needed, it is as if the high drama of the opening is reduced to situation comedy. John's comic exasperation in teaching the plot of Antigone to slow-witted Winston seems out of place, almost blasphemous beside the agonized beginning. The comic relief here is unbearable, perhaps because there are only two actors; King Lear turns into Falstaff before our eyes. The Island is the less popular play (it only plays twice a week against six showings of Sizwe). It has less of a story line, and it's more cerebral. The introduction of the arguments of Antigone early in the play is done with an abruptness and step-by-step repetition (for the benefit of slow Winston) that is really reminiscent of the didacticism of guerrilla theatre.

SIZWE BANZI AND The Island are expositional, didactic and propagandizing. That would be a simple criticism if the didactic aspect of the plays were a necessary, extra-literary appendage--soothing balm for liberal consciences, good drama with a cause, candy-coated political message. But the message is not so simple.

In fact, the two plays have been criticized for presenting a blunted, inadequate condemnation of apartheid, and avoiding the brutality and inhumanity of South African racism. Sizwe Banzi accepts the rules of apartheid in sacrificing his identity for the immediate reward of being able to work in Port Elizabeth. The prisoner, John, is overjoyed by his imminent release, and submits even more servilely to the daily humiliations in order not to jeopardize it. His mind is wholly filled with the expectation of domestic happiness, meeting his wife, his family. He never questions the authority that jailed him in the first place. There is no hint of rage or rebellion. The very introduction of the Antigone plot introduces a note of ambiguity, a possible justification of the South African regime.

And it is astonishing that the South African government has allowed the two plays to tour, not only in South Africa itself, but also throughout the world, when it has at its disposal the convenient Robben Island of a traditionally unscrupled police force. Even if South Africa has been in recent years forced by economic and guerrilla pressure to edge toward a far-off detente with Black Africa, its lenience here suggests that the government, at least, does not consider the political message overbearing. The two plays may suffer from a sense of unsubtle didacticism, but an audience that expects an angry expression of the black rage it feels apartheid deserves will also be disappointed.

BUT SIZWE BANZI and The Island are Kani and Ntshona. Kani and Ntshona laugh, cry, joke, pray, confide, console, with the unforced naturalness of the neighbors next door, but glow in our dreams and memories even weeks after the performances with a stunningly vivid brilliance. It is as if we had swallowed whole a complete vocabulary of previously undiscovered emotions, gestures, and facial and body expressions. A particular situation, the gesture of a friend, can, at some of the most unexpected moments, trigger the memory of an image or scene from the plays, much as we are suddenly reminded by smells or mannerisms of childhood memories, or of old friends we had known and loved long ago.

John Kani held and played with the audience through his 45-minute monlogue with the comic sense and gyrating energy of a stand-up comic. But his jokes are corny, deliberately innocent of the contrivance of real jokes or comic routines. And we laugh because he laughs, that infectious, throaty, all-teeth laugh that quakes from his chest. He wants us to be happy, with the urgent eagerness of a child wanting to share a joke with his mother.

Winston Ntshona, with his missing teeth, child-like face, wistful smile and pucker, is a slower character. He chews through a heavy accent. He thinks slowly, with his body. When he is considering something, we can see the thought travelling sluggishly up through his body, from his heavy limbs, through his fidgetting torso, up to his frowning puzzled pucker. He seems a combination between what Kael described in Brando--his emotions originating deep in his chest, then reverberating slowly to the extremities and finally to the face--and John Cleese in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a dull-witted ignorant peasant baffled by the witch problem.

The world that emerges in these plays is a variegated, richly human, willfully troublesome one, one that Styles accepts with philosophical resignation, a shrug of the shoulder, and a toothy laugh. Sizwe Banzi and The Island are political plays about the horror of apartheid, but they are much more than that; the world they create is a world of futility, reminiscent of novels about India, by Indian writers writing in English, such as Narayan and U.S. Naipal. Like Naipal's Mr. Stone, Styles has the distinctive resigned sensibility of a colonized people, an intelligent people who know their supposed masters are either insecure Orwellian sahibs or bigotted idiots, but who put up with them, along with the other discomforts of the world, with a shrug.