FASCINATING SNAPSHOT OF A SOUTH AFRICA STILL AT WAR
Kunene And The King (Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon) Verdict: Shakespeare sheds light on the country after Apartheid ★★★✩✩
I NEVER cease to be impressed by Shakespeare’s posthumous reach. It turns out that his Complete Works were required reading for Nelson Mandela and fellow inmates while jailed on South Africa’s Robben Island. His plays were considered revolutionary and smuggled in under the cover of a Hindu prayer book. Who knew?
This love of the Bard is the starting point of John Kani’s play about modern South Africa, 25 years since the end of Apartheid.
Kani was the first black South African to play Othello in 1987 and he has been aptly paired here with the great South African-born actor Antony Sher.
Kani plays a nurse, Lunga Kunene, who’s been sent to care for Jack, a bibulous white thespian with terminal liver cancer. Jack is preparing to play King Lear at a theatre in Cape Town, and in a nod to that play, Kani’s nurse is like Lear’s loyal servant Kent, putting up with his grandiloquent irascibility. But the play is also about the festering resentments that still continue to divide South Africa along racial grounds. Lines such as the one suggesting that white South Africans voted for Mandela only to protect themselves against black anger must seem even more incendiary there than they do here.
Kani occupies the moral high ground as the big-hearted nurse putting up with Jack’s snarling dyspepsia. But Sher has the better part as the truculent old soak, veering between delusions of grandeur and quivering pathos.
It’s not the most sophisticated drama and the two men are authorial mouthpieces with little investment in each other.
But it’s still an intriguing 90-minute snapshot of life in South Africa today.