Winston Ntshona

Actor whose work challenged the injustice of apartheid South Africa

Winston Ntshona, a renowned black South African actor whose performances on Broadway in two short anti-apartheid dramas earned him a Tony Award in 1975 with his co-star, John Kani, but led to their imprisonment the next year, died on 2 August in New Brighton, a township near Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He was 76.

His death was announced by the South African State Theatre in Pretoria. His son, Lawula, told the local media that he had been ill for several years.

Ntshona’s theatrical career was inextricably connected to Kani’s. Both were factory workers in the mid-1960s when they joined the Serpent Players, a mixed-race troupe that white playwright Athol Fugard had helped form. South African blacks could not be employed as “artists” at the time, so Ntshona and Kani were classified as servants to Fugard in the identification passbooks that blacks were required to carry.

“South Africa was a strange place,” Ntshona recalled in an interview with the Globe and Mail in Toronto in 2001. “Everyone was totally oblivious to the need to express the plight oftheblackpeople.everybody wanted to forget there was pain – they just wanted to be entertained.”

Ntshona, Kani and Fugard collaborated in the early 1970s on the plays Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island, both directed by Fugard. Ntshona played the title role in Sizwe Banzi, a man so desperate for work that he takes the identity of a dead man whose passbook he finds.

In The Island, Ntshona and Kani portrayed prisoners on Robben Island, biding their time and rehearsing for a production of Antigone.

They performed those roles in London, on Broadway and around the United States and South Africa over 30 years, beginning when apartheid was the official government policy and continuing well after its dissolution, as they reinterpreted the parts and built their stage chemistry.

In The Island, an explicit criticism of conditions at Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for 27 years, Winston (Ntshona) rebukes cellmate John (Kani) when John’s sentence is reduced to 90 days. “You stink, John,” Winston says in a diatribe that suggests how much he will miss him. “You stink of beer, of company, of freedom … Your freedom stinks, John, and it’s driving me mad.” “No, Winston!” John replies. “Yes!” Winston says. “Don’t deny it. Three months’ time, at this hour, you’ll be wiping beer off your face.”

Allowed to tour, Ntshona and Kani performed the plays in repertory on Broadway from 1974-75. In his review of The Island, Douglas Watt of the Daily News wrote that he could not recall “ever having seen a more frank or heartrending depiction of the steady, everyday attrition of the spirit presented with bold, simple strokes”. When the two men shared the 1975 Tony Award for best actor in a play – defeating five others, including Henry Fonda and Ben Gazzara – they did not waste time on speeches. “Thank you very much,” Ntshona said, to which Kani added, “Thanks,” before they left the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre.

Duringaninterviewwiththe New York Times in 1975, Ntshona said the success of the plays had an unintended consequence. “It’s only the outside world that made us realise there is some universality,” he said, “and it took our getting to the so-called free world [to see] that some of the problems that affect us so much do affect blacks in the outside world in the so-called pseudodemocratic societies.”

But in 1976, when they were touring South Africa with the two plays, they were arrested and imprisoned for about three weeks after a performance of Sizwe Banzi in Butterworth, a town in Transkei, one of the nominally independent “homelands” for blacks created by the apartheid government. News reports at the time said that they had angered Transkei officials with improvised political commentary.

After their release, Ntshona said: “We will continue working. Things like hassles, being locked up, are second nature to us in our country.”

Winston Zola Ntshona was born on 6 October 1941 in the Eastern Cape province and began acting in high school with Kani, who later introduced him to the Serpent Players and Fugard, whose many plays include ‘Master Harold’ ...and the Boys.”

In addition to his stage work, Ntshona appeared in the films The Wild Geese (1978), Marigolds in August (1980) and A Dry White Season (1989), among others. He had a small role in a 2008 episode of Alexander Mccall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency adaptation on the BBC.

Marigolds reunited him with Kani and Fugard, who wrote the screenplay. In the film, Ntshona plays a gardener in South Africa whose threats of violence against a man looking for work (Kani) are averted by a chance meeting with Fugard’s saintly character.

In an interview with a radio station in South Africa after learning of Ntshona’s death, Kani said: “It hurts so much. How should I feel that my twin brother has passed away?”

In addition to his son, Lawula, Ntshona’s survivors include his wife, Vuyelwa.

Ntshona remained linked to the roles he originated with Kani and Fugard. In 2008 they reprised Sizwe Banzi at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

In his review, critic Charles Isherwood said Ntshona “makes us notice the fiercely won dignity underneath Sizwe’s goofy exterior”.

“When Buntu begins his campaign to persuade him to assume a new identity,” he added, “Sizwe clings with quiet tenacious to his own.”

Sizwe asks Buntu, “How do I live as another man’s ghost?”

Two years later, Ntshona was awarded the National Order of Ikhamanga, given by South Africa to those who have excelled in the arts.

“Indelible in all thespians and enthusiasts’ memory,” the citation read, “is an image of Winston Ntshona and John Kani as they rendered the politically loaded Sizwe Banzi Is Dead – directed and performed right under the authorities’ noses.” RICHARD SANDOMIR The Scotsman welcomes obituaries and appreciations from contributors as well as suggestions of possible obituary subjects.

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nn2 Winston Ntshona, right, with playwright Athol Fugard (centre) and fellow actor John Kani at the Royal Court Theatre during 1973’s staging of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead

“We will continue working. Things like hassles, being locked up, are second nature to us in our country”