A transracial reckoning
Applauds the simple but effective two-hander the Swan in Stratford at
‘During the Fifties and Sixties we thought we were happy,” Antony Sher noted in his 2002 memoir Beside Myself as he looked back on his remarkably sheltered upbringing in Cape Town under Apartheid. “No, that’s putting it mildly – we thought we were in paradise.” He was 11 at the time of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 but can’t recollect it at all.
Almost 60 years on, approaching 70 this summer, Sher is treading the boards at the RSC Stratford – where he has starred in more than 20 productions – and confronting the iniquitous past as well as the insecure present of his homeland.
A sustained but not overly serious 90 minutes of transracial reckoning with a dash of tentative reconciliation thrown in, Kunene and the King is a simple but effective two-hander written by fellow South African John Kani (best known today as T’Challa’s father in Black Panther), seven years his senior and a major anti-Apartheid player. Growing up in a Port Elizabeth township, Kani’s tough life experience was a world away from that of Sher.
It was Kani’s input, along with that of the late Winston Ntshona, that helped the country’s greatest living playwright Athol Fugard devise Sizwe Banzi is Dead (1972), and
The Island (1973); these two works relayed the shaming brutality of the regime. It was a brutality Kani felt at close hand. He once spent weeks in solitary following a performance of Sizwe Banzi, lost an eye after a police beating, and even faced interrogation when he became the first black South African to play Othello – in 1987 – kissing his (white) Desdemona.
Ten years ago he played Caliban to Sher’s Prospero at Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre and at the RSC in Janice Honeyman’s lauded transposition of The Tempest to an African setting. Now, again working with Honeyman, he has fashioned
for Sher the unflattering role of Jack Morris, an ageing South African classical actor beset by terminal cancer, alcoholism and an addled mind. The author plays Lunga Kunene, a black male “live in” agency nurse. We’re in Johannesburg; it’s 25 years after the first democratic elections, but how far have things progressed?
Though it’s a bit hackneyed to have an old actor lose his marbles while preparing to play Lear, it provides some ancillary psychological justification for the way Jack expresses an unpleasant residual regality and even downright distasteful flashes of racial superiority that contradict his surface liberal credentials as an actor; drawling and sneering, Sher’s performance is not an easy one to warm to and is therefore, in its way, brave. Pushed from his perch of dignified restraint by Jack’s irascible entitlement, Kani’s good fortunedeprived Fool figure retaliates with pent-up recriminations: “All the people who died in your jails just because they wanted freedom, you ‘harmed’ them – you said nothing!” Kunene and the King
It might sound clichéd to posit Shakespeare as a saviour. But in this art-meets-life drama, it’s based on truth. Sher’s first acting gig was as a spear-carrier in Richard II – like him his character made his name thanks to the Bard, while Kani directly incorporates into his script his own revelation as a schoolboy on hearing, in a Xhosa translation, the inspiring defiance contained in Mark Antony’s speech over Caesar’s corpse (“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth”).
If only that life-or-death sense of Shakespeare mattering was found on these shores (and even at the RSC) today. And in general, quietly engaging and gently touching in its valedictory way though the play feels in Stratford, I imagine it will land with more visceral, pointed force when it transfers to Cape Town later this month; after all, the Fugard theatre is located in the ghostly District
Six, which saw more than 60,000 residents forcibly removed in the Seventies – a modern instance of Lear’s “houseless heads” that still chills.