How do you put a nation’s history on stage? In this remarkable play, John Kani – as formidable a writer as he is an actor – does it through a confrontation between two men who represent polarised aspects of South African experience. Marking 25 years since the country’s first post-apartheid democratic elections, the play becomes an exploration of race, class, politics, theatre and the potentially unifying power of Shakespeare.
Antony Sher plays Jack Morris, a cantankerous old actor who hopes to overcome severe liver cancer to get to Cape Town to play King Lear. Kani himself is Lunga Kunene, a retired carer assigned by an agency to tend this querulous thespian. While claiming to be apolitical, Morris embodies the reflex attitudes of white supremacy and consistently, when talking to Kunene, refers to “you people”. Although refusing to be a spokesman, Kunene recounts how his own dreams of being a doctor were thwarted, not so much by his Soweto upbringing as by the vengefulness of “comrades” towards his storekeeper father for seeking to transcend the divisions of the apartheid era.
Bound together by medical necessity, the two men reveal much about South Africa’s past and present. For all the talk of truth and reconciliation, it is clear that old antagonisms still persist: when Morris dwells on the country’s continuing internal violence, Kunene recalls the long history of white oppression and asks, poignantly, when the long-promised “better future” will arrive. Yet, for all their radical differences, the men have much in common. Both are estranged from their children. Even more significant is their love for Shakespeare, one that Kunene acquired through an isiXhosa version of Julius Caesar, and something that is part of the fabric of Morris’s life. Saturated with quotations from King Lear, Kani’s play might even be an attempt to shadow it: not only is there a storm scene, but also a suggestion that through profound suffering comes enlightenment.
By its very nature, the play omits the story of South Africa’s women, but it is directed by Janice Honeyman, in a joint production between the RSC and Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre, with exquisite delicacy. It contains two great performances: Sher, shuffling round the stage in rubberised slippers and furtively snatching bottles of forbidden liquor from every conceivable hiding place, captures all of the old actor’s testiness, insecurity and his Lear-like moral awakening. Kani is equally magnificent in showing how Kunene’s dignified forbearance, even when he has a pair of soiled underpants hurled in his face, conceals a deep anger at the cruelty and injustice created by apartheid and at the persistent inequalities in South African life. The play runs for 100 minutes but in that short time it offers a rich portrait of a relationship and a society.
At the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 23 April.
