Bertolt Brecht and Athol Fugard
Excerpted from The Drama of South Africa by Loren Kruger
While the play [Sizwe Banzi is Dead] emerged out of the contradiction between an affirmative image and a sober representation of apartheid, it also negotiated the tension between different modes of performance. The balancing act between Grotowskian “poor theatre” and exuberant impersonation, Brechtian coolness and the engaging, even ingratiating variety act, corresponded to the tension, in the lives of actors and characters alike, between the matter-of-fact negotiation of absurd but painful conflicts caused by apartheid law and the energetic mockery of that absurdity. The dramatization of this tension using props like the passbook and the social gests involved in handling them drew on Brecht by way of [Fugard’s earlier play] The Coat. The pace and tone of the performance was, however, shaped by the actors’ life-histories, especially
Kani’s seven years with Ford. Kani’s expansive impersonation of different characters, set off by Ntshona’s straight-man portrayal of Sizwe, also suggests the variety sketches that toured the townships. Kani’s virtuoso performance as Styles and his antagonists, from his boss to a horde of cheeky cockroaches, was not really a monologue, as it is often described, but a satirical variety turn. Kani’s impersonation of “Baas Bradley” and his own former self at the Ford assembly plant in anticipation of the visit of Henry Ford Jr. is typical. . . . Kani’s mimicry of his boss’s efforts to speak to his “boys,” enhanced by direct engagement of the audience, recalls the performance style of township shows.
This affinity did not please everybody. Sipho Sepamla criticized the ingratiating aspect of the impersonation for making black spectators “laugh too hard at the white man to see beyond that” (S’ketsh 1973: 24); his skepticism was echoed in New York, where Kani’s performance was compared to that staple of minstrelsy, Stephin Fetchit. In St. Stephen’s Hall in New Brighton, however, audiences proved able to combine heartfelt laughter at situations they knew all too well with strategic intervention:
At the end of the Ford Factory story a man…entered the acting area and then, as if he was a referee at a boxing match, held up John’s arm and announced that “Kani has knocked out Henry Ford the Junior.”
(Athol Fugard 1993:30)
Fugard calls this intervention Brechtian and, while it corresponds to Brecht’s idea of the active spectator, it is also thoroughly African. As Fugard had already noted of The Coat, there was a significant difference between the white audience’s emotional but alienated response of “horror and fascination” (1984: 143) and the cast members’ dispassionate comment. . . . The difference between the fascination with staged suffering favored by audiences accustomed to the illusionistic Anglo-American stage and an African preference for interacting with the action rather than silently watching may have been new to Fugard, but African interest in social relations on stage was noted in the 1940s (Routh 1950b: 23), as well as in accounts of present-day African producers and audiences. . . .
After watching the first few seconds of the operation [putting Sizwe’s photograph into Zwelinzima’s pass] in stunned silence… a voice shouted out from the audience: “Don’t do it brother…” Another voice responded… “Go ahead and try. They haven’t caught me yet.” That was the cue for the most amazing and spontaneous debate I have ever heard. As I stood… listening to it all, I realized I was watching a very special example of one of theater’s major responsibilities in an oppressive society: to break… the conspiracy of silence… The action of our play was being matched… by the action of the audience. . . . A performance on stage had provoked a political event in the auditorium.
(Athol Fugard 1993: 31–32)
. . . .This intervention is powerful not because it “breaks the silence” but because it acknowledges the symbolic character of the action. The audience’s debate, like the show it interrupts, is a performance; its enactment here—in the luminal space between the familiar ground of the township outside and the occasional, unlikely character of the show inside the hall—is significant precisely because it is impossible outside. When Buntu and “Robert” in Sizwe Banzi simulate likely encounters with potential power brokers like the boss or the police or when prisoner John (Kani) mimes “calling home” from The Island—recalling the symbolic acts of Robben Island prisoners deprived of family contact—this performance reenacts ordinary acts in extraordinary circumstances. By intervening in the play, the members of the audience do not abandon the fiction; they use it. Their participation in a public performance reenacts the symbolic action of reclaiming and occupying public space and so entertains the possibility of a future public culture.
Loren Kruger is a Professor in the Departments of English, Cinema and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, Germanic Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies, as well as the Committee on African and African-American Studies at the University of Chicago.
Excerpted from The Drama of South Africa by Loren Kruger, published in 1999 by Routledge. All rights reserved. Do not reprint without permission from the publisher.
Work cited:
- Fugard, Athol (1982) “Sizwe Banzi is Dead,” in R. Harwood (ed.) A Night at the Theatre, London: Methuen, 21–33.
- Fugard, Athol (1984) Notebooks: 1960–77, New York: Theatre Communications Group.
- Routh, G. (1950b) “The Bantu People’s Theatre,” Trek (October): 20–23 S’ketsh (1973)(Summer).
- Photographs: New York Public Library.
–Loren Kruger
