Sizwe Banzi is Dead (review)

The BAM Harvey’s grand stage seemed unusually empty on 18 April 2008 as the last straggling audience members filed toward their seats. The few simple properties of the Baxter Theatre Centre production of Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s Sizwe Banzi Is Dead—a camera and tripod, a table topped with everyday objects, a cardboard display covered with photographs— were swallowed up by the cavernous space. What unfolded after the entrances of veteran South African actors Kani and Ntshona, however, provided a stirring reminder of just how full a theatre space can seem when pulsating with the humor, intelligence, moral conviction, and vital energy of two virtuosic performers. In many ways, Sizwe Banzi’s long history can be seen as a continuous process of filling-out—one that began in the early 1970s with the conjuring into three-dimensional life of the image of an anonymous black South African captured in a found photograph. Now, eight years into a new millennium, the stream of human impulses comprising Kani and Ntshona’s collaborative performance has become unusually dense, saturated with years of performance practice and life wisdom—two spheres of experience that the seasoned South African actors have often emphasized are, for them, inextricably interfused.

From its very genesis, Sizwe Banzi has undertaken the work of revival. Provoked by their seminal photographic “mandate” (Fugard’s term), the creative team breathed theatrical life into a moving narrative of an everyman who takes on the identity of a murder victim in order to circumvent apartheid’s Kafka-esque pass-laws and provide for his family. The eponymous protagonist’s agonized decision to surrender his name asks the audience to weigh compromise and survival against the preservation of personal integrity. The universal implications of its theme and the successes of its international engagements in London and New York during the mid-seventies secured for Sizwe Banzi’s co-creators a place in theatre history—both in South Africa and abroad—as iconic artist-activists of the “protest theatre” movement. Of course, the moral–historical significances attending the Sizwe Banzi production’s relation with its apartheid past are highly contextspecific. Thus, I will address these significances comparatively by assessing the dynamics of reception at the revival’s 2006 South African premiere, and those surrounding its run at the BAM Harvey almost two years later.

The news that Kani and Ntshona would revive Sizwe Banzi under the direction of State Theatre (Pretoria) artistic director Aubrey Sekhabi generated considerable anticipation both within South Africa’s theatre community and in the nation’s mass media. The revival would carry a doubly weighted sense of historical import as a reanimation of the social behavior of black South Africans under apartheid, as well as the restoration of a powerfully oppositional political engagement with the regime’s oppressive ideology. Plans were laid for the production to follow up its premiere at Grahamstown’s Rhodes Theatre

John Kani (Buntu) and Winston Ntshona (Sizwe Banzi/Robert Zwelinzima) in Sizwe Banzi Is Dead. Photo: Richard Termine.

with runs at the Baxter in Cape Town (July–August 2006) and at London’s National Theatre (March–April 2007) before arriving at BAM in April 2008.

In Grahamstown, the Sizwe Banzi revival stood as the unchallenged marquee event of South Africa’s National Arts Festival, the chief annual celebration of the visual and performing arts in a nation still negotiating a complex set of relationships with its apartheid past. Judging by the receptive generosity, affirmational impulse, and concentrated spectatorial attention manifested in the bursts of laughter, murmurs of agreement, simultaneous gasps, and effusive applause that filled the Rhodes Theatre during the performance I attended, the revival’s audience had been driven to attend by a powerful commemorative impetus: a desire to lay claim to the historical and moral vision being...