South Africa: The National Arts Festival (review)

As an artist, to say that Apartheid was a terrible thing is to say nothing—or at very least, to say nothing new. For decades, the plays of Athol Fugard, Zakes Mda, and many others have come out of the wilderness of oppression with vitally important stories. While these plays still resonate with the power of the suffering human voice, their edge of political immediacy has been dulled. The South African drama that pressed for change has succeeded, and has brought about—at least in part—its own demise. The question now is, when the protest drama of the Apartheid era is no longer needed, what will fill its theatrical vacuum?

The National Arts Festival is a weeklong celebration of the performing, literary and pictorial arts held in a most unusual site: a small rural college town with few of the amenities familiar to audiences at major events in big cities. There is virtually no public transportation or taxi service, accommodations are simple, and restaurants are created just for the week; they blossom and die like strange flowers, their candle-lit rooms open for just two weeks of the year.

The Festival provides a wide variety of drama. South African plays written during the Apartheid era were in short supply at the Festival, with only a sparse, rough production of Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena representing the protest theatre that put South African drama on the map. A handful of the productions, such as Private Lives and King Lear, drew focus away from the political. A few new productions continued to wrestle with Apartheid-era events; notably, Duma Kumalo performed the story of his trial as a member of the "Sharpville Six," and Pieter-Dirk Uys skewered politicians in Foreign Aids. A disturbing street theatre production titled The Hungry actually celebrated the attack on the World Trade Center, including a parody of the image of falling bodies. An all-Black production thrust Tennessee Williams's American classic A Streetcar Named Desire awkwardly into a Soweto setting. The highlight of the Festival, however, was the premiere of John Kani's Nothing But the Truth.

Like many of the plays by Athol Fugard in which John Kani performed during the Apartheid era, Nothing But the Truth, Kani's first solo effort, premiered at this year's Festival. The play takes place in the home of Sipho (John Kani), a Port Elizabeth assistant librarian approaching mandatory retirement, who lives with his daughter Thando (Dambisa Kente). Their house is modest and middle-class, by [Begin Page 364] South African Standards; simplicity and economy dominate the décor. Sipho's brother, a political activist during South Africa's Apartheid era, had escaped to England where he raised a daughter, Mandisa (Pamela Nomvete). The brother died before returning from exile in London, so his daughter Mandisa brings his remains back to South Africa for burial. Mandisa's chic European clothes and hair contrast with the spinsterish simplicity of Thando's cotton shifts and Sipho's stodgy cardigans and slacks. The costumes and sets establish the realistic characters and Port Elizabeth locale, and move to the background, allowing the story, characters and issues to come to the fore.

The characters first meet when the cosmopolitan Mandisa arrives from London with the remains of her father: an urn of ashes. Sipho cannot conduct traditional funeral rites without a body, however, and it is up to Sipho's daughter Thando to negotiate a series of truces between the Europeanized Mandisa and the traditional Sipho. Mandisa's progressive ideas begin to rub off on Thando, adding more stress to Sipho's life. To cap it off, the head librarian position—unavailable to Sipho during Apartheid—has come open, and the other candidate is younger and foreign-educated. These combined forces—a funeral, a feminist niece, a daughter demanding independence, and the prospects of his dream job disappearing—force Sipho to confront the myths of the new...