Kani fills a theatre
● There is the voice that is rich and majestic in Shakespearean English and achingly poetic and powerful in high isiXhosa. He says it is his “soul speaking” and you can believe it.
There is the body that inflates with authority into a general’s uniform pumped up with military swagger, that is light with the buoyancy of young love and then progressively collapses — spent, sinking and folding into itself, infected, and finally defeated by the still shocking malice of Iago.
He is Othello, he is Atandwa, and every now and then he is his father’s son in the briefest flicker of reflected genetics and a lifetime of proximate familiarity.
If we have anything approaching an acting dynasty in South Africa this is it.
John Kani was in attendance at the opening night of Lara Foot’s ambitious and unsettling Othello at the Baxter theatre last week.
“I’ve got various names for him, at work it’s Doctor Kani, at home it’s Tata,” Atandwa laughs.
“But at the end of the day, he is the man that I’ve known all my life, who has formed me, who has taught me responsibility, who’s, you know, instilled morals and love and duty, is the same man that was there last night. It doesn’t change. So my father came to see the show. Yes. I saw him not as Dr Kani but [as] my father. So I was not expecting notes from him.”
Did he in fact get notes?
“Yes.”
John Kani reprised Othello in the historical 1987 groundbreaking performance directed by Dame Janet Suzman that broke the colour bar and actively challenged the apartheid state apparatus.
So he has notes, of course he has.
As does Janet Suzman, who flew in from London for this moment of theatre history.
I meet Atandwa for lunch at the Vineyard Hotel on the insanely beautiful terrace with the mountain creating a theatrical backdrop, because it is in proximity to the theatre the day after the premier.
He orders lunch to take away — he says he will eat at 4 or 5 — it is a take on intermittent fasting.
Last night he did not get to eat after the performance — all the questions from the adulatory fans at the stage door kept him from the food, and it was finished by the time he got to the opening night party.
He has lived in New York City for the past nine years — he went to study for his master’s at New York University and stayed on to get his Green Card and now citizenship and for international work.
It is this personal experience of dislocation that he has mined for his interpretation of Othello’s inner landscape.
“To live in a world that is not yours. To be surrounded by people that are not your own
— of your world. Yeah, to not hear your language, to not hear these accents. It’s really jarring and it does something to you and you feel alienated literally, and ostracised in a way and fighting to be liked, to be like them, to be assimilated, to be liked. And, you know, there’s so many times I was like, I don’t know what I’m doing here. But it was a journey of self-discovery. You know, I had to do a lot of introspection.”
I wonder if Shakespeare is really a universal reflection of humanity?
“I kind of feel that sometimes Shakespeare’s writing does not suffice. To tell you the truth, especially in this instance, with Othello the fellow is a white man in 16 something, who wrote about a black man, having no experience or no understanding of what blackness is?
“It’s not surprising that it’s just reinforcing the westernised notions and fears of the other. So you’ve got the traditionalists that love it because it makes them feel comfortable. It’s a crazy black man who kills the white woman. Yeah. So that narrative is safe for them. You know?
“So how do we love Shakespeare as black people if it doesn’t represent us even though he’s writing about a black person? Yeah. Because there’s nothing there. He doesn’t provide language he doesn’t provide the insight, his prayers, his thoughts, his fears, his doubts.
“It’s just on a surface level that Shakespeare wrote, like, ‘why am I black?’ Oh, that’s brilliant. I love that. I love that line. But no, it’s deeper than that, and what we tried to do in this production is to show that he’s got fears — the fear of abandonment, which is what Iago takes advantage of, because from a child he was taken away and he was, you know, made to be a child soldier, he’s got tears and possibly the only person that has loved him after his mother is Desdemona.
“So the extremity to which he takes his actions is because of how dire the situation is. Imagine you put all your eggs into that basket. It’s hell. So I don’t think Shakespeare’s writing suffices. I think it’s safe and I think it’s safe for a lot of people. But in today’s time that we do talk about genderbased violence, we do talk about racism, we do talk about deception, lies, that’s all relevant. All those things are universal, right? The themes of love and deception, but what’s not universal is being white.”
What struck me about the experience of watching a play like which is familiar but also entirely new is that in a world where AI is making inroads into what it means to be human — a theatre is almost a bastion of humanity where the ritual of being human is played out in an almost mystical way! Atandwa rolls with this idea.
“Well, it starts with the actors on stage. Do you know? Yeah, I mean, you know, if a magician didn’t really sell his magic trick, yeah, you’d never, it wouldn’t be impressive. You know, People forget that. It’s also not just a sleight of hand. It’s also him being amazed by what he’s jus t said. Like, he just kind of sits up and he does the trick. And you’re like, wait, are you also tricked by your own tricks? Yes, well, that’s us. We perform with such conviction. There is no way I do not believe every night that this is happening.
“Yeah, there’s no chance for me to question it. There’s no way that I don’t believe it’s real, but it’s really dangerous because when you’re on stage and someone like Karla Smith (Desdemona) who is beautiful. You have to really be careful because now I don’t want to like fall in love for real in my real life.
It’s like, my church. This is where I go to worship. This is where I exhibit the blessings and the gifts from God. Church’s the same thing, this is just a stage. But we would be paid a lot more money.
“If we gave you answers. We create dialogue, discourse. You know, we show the truth and what do you do with that? That’s up to you. But we’re the ones that are showing it because most of society doesn’t want to look at it, even though it lives on your doorstep.”