Still good but lacks context
King Kong feels a bit too modern, and characters are a bit shallow
From time immemorial, the storyteller has always occupied a precarious position.
In Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar, the poet Cinna gets killed by mobs for his bad poetry. During King Shaka’s reign, bearers of bad tidings were usually killed.
In contemporary times, the pressure on the story teller messenger commentator“to say the right thing” is even more pronounced.
In informal talks with colleagues – with whom I watched King Kong: Legend
of a Boxer – the criticism was that it did not go “far enough” in showing us what the country was like in the period in which this story is set. After a successful twomonth run in Cape Town, the musical opens in Johannesburg on September 12.
As the subtitle suggests,
King Kong is inspired by the real-life story of Ezekiel “King Kong” Dhlamini. Born in Vryheid, Natal, in 1921, Dhlamini came to Johannesburg as a young man, not unlike many black people who had been shaken by the 1913 Native Land Act.
In Johannesburg, Dhlamini got sucked into gambling and fighting. But he soon found an outlet for his restlessness. He became a boxer and rose quickly through the ranks to become the non-European heavyweight champion.
King Kong lived in the Sophiatown of gangsters, overcrowding and heightened anti-apartheid political activism.
In the production there is a lot of boozing and partying, but almost no direct reference to the pitted battles between the people of Sophiatown and the government of the day.
In their defence, when the novelist Harry Bloom and
Drum journalist and music maestro Todd Matshikiza set about writing this story, their primary concern was to document, in musical form, the life and times of Dhlamini, not to mount a challenge against apartheid.
But still, Dhlamini did not exist in a vacuum. The production leaves you with the impression that Sophiatown was all about partying and drinking.
Black people are portrayed as brutes with no redeeming qualities, with no ambition. Except, of course, King Kong himself whose ambition to be the champion of the world is undermined by his predisposition to violence.
Sophiatown was indeed a violent place, but not because black people are intrinsically brutal. As a character in Sebastian Barry’s novel Days
Without End observes: “Hunger takes away what you are”. When everyone is struggling to make a living, human decency flies out of the window. We become animals. Or worse.
A line or two of context would help humanise King Kong’s interlocutors. This would show that the minute they stepped out of their houses – sometimes without even stepping out! – people of Sophiatown were running the gauntlet. Every day they diced with a possible jail term. Or death.
At the pinnacle of King Kong’s career, Sophiatown was about to be razed to the ground by the National Party government. But the production does not even mention that.
My other gripe is music. In this production it sounds a tad too modern.
I was hoping for pieces that would evoke the Sophiatown spirit of kwela and Marabi.
As a work of art, King Kong couldn’t have been revived at a better time.
We need to be reminded of what happened in the past, so we can better appreciate the present.
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Every day they diced with a possible jail term. Or death