Reviewed by
James Karas
The number of crimes against humanity in the twentieth century alone is grotesquely long. The holocausts committed by
the Turks, the Russians, the Chinese and the Nazis are only
a part of the list. What the whites did to the blacks in South Africa with the
policy of apartheid, I suggest ranks as a major crime against humanity.
Playwrights Athol Fugard, John Kani, and
Winston Ntshona dramatized the
plight of blacks during apartheid and their 1973 play The Island is a brilliant evocation of the
era. Two men
are in jail and their crime is best described as being black.The island of
the title is
not named but there is no doubt that it is Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held
for twenty-seven years.
The production under review was played in the tiny Southwark Playhouse, in the London suburb of Southwark. The playhouse is a
theatre-in-the-round and probably holds fewer than 150 people.
The performance opens with two cellmates
miming the loading of
wheelbarrows in a
quarry. They are
working as hard as humanly possible as they fill and then empty their
wheelbarrows. Under the hot lights of the Playhouse, they begin to perspire and
show signs of real fatigue. The mime lasts for some fifteen minutes by which
time perspiration drips profusely from their faces and they appear exhausted. In
the end, they are shackled to each other on their wrists and ankles and hobble
to their cell in excruciating pain.
The performance continues on
the raised stage. The men are Winston (Edward
Dede) and John (Mark Springer) who decide to stage Sophocles’ Antigone
for the other prisoners. The staging of the Greek tragedy is apparently based
on a real incident in which Nelson Mandela took part and ironically played the
role of the dictatorial Creon.
John wants Winston to play
Antigone but when he sees the straw that will be his wig and the balls on a
string that will represent her breasts, he balks. They go through a few lines
of Sophocles’ play and then find out that John’s sentence has been reduced from
ten years to three months. This creates some tension but the two men are
reconciled to their fate and are able to perform their version of Antigone.
Winston as Antigone pleads guilty
to the charge of disobeying the law against giving burial rites to her brother
because the same law considers him a traitor. He/she argues that there is a
higher law than the man-made one and she had an obligation to honour her
brother. Creon as a dictator argues that laws are made to be obeyed and must be
obeyed without any reference to external considerations such as higher laws.
The defendants at the Nuremberg trials had pretty much the same argument – they
were just obeying the law.
Dede and Springer give outstanding
performances that were emotionally and physically taxing. The lights above the
stage produced so much heat, you felt you were in the quarry with the prisoners
on a scorching hot day. The heat was so intense that several people left and
one woman fainted and was carried out of the theatre.
Director John Terry and the two
actors deserve a five-star rating and a standing ovation.
_____
The Island by Athol Fugard,
John Kani, and Winston Ntshona in a Production by The Theatre Chipping Norton and The Dukes Lancaster Theatre
Present played until June 24, 2017 at the Southwark Playhouse, 77-85 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6BD. http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/
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