Sizwe Banzi is Dead Production History
In 1971, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona began collaborating on a devised piece called Sizwe Banzi is Dead. Kani and Ntshona had first performed together with Fugard’s Serpent Players in Camus’ The Just (re-titled The Terrorists), and their onstage camaraderie had been undeniable. Both men resigned from their jobs to become full time actors. Because the government did not recognize acting as a legal profession for black South Africans, Kani and Ntshona had to become employed as domestic servants for Fugard (Kani a gardener, Ntshona a chauffeur) in order to remain in the city. Sizwe Banzi premiered in 1972 at the Space Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa. The opening monologue of the play, spoken by the character Styles, was originally improvised each night by John Kani, who would use the headlines of that day’s newspaper as inspiration. Recalling the play’s first performance, Guardian theatre critic Brent Meersman remembered that Kani’s improvisation “went on for an hour and a half, until Fugard sent a furious Ntshona on stage in the middle of yet another yarn.”
This South African production was followed the next year by a production at London’s Royal Court Theatre where it won the London Theatre Critics award. The production moved to Broadway in November 1974 and was presented in repertory with Fugard’s The Island, an adaptation of Antigone about life on Robben Island, inspired by two former Serpent Players who had been imprisoned there. Kani and Ntshona together won Tony Awards for “Best Actor in a Play” for their performances in both Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island.
In the 1970s Ntshona and Kani toured Sizwe Banzi and The Island to African schools, community halls, student groups, churches, and any venue they could find in the black townships. The production’s performance in Umtata in 1976 resulted in the arrests of Ntshona and Kani by the Bantustan regime for vulgar language in the play. The play moved back to London in 1977. Of that production, Fugard wrote his thoughts in his journal:
The play has a life, now, of its own. If anything, the experience has been worth it just to discover that. I’ve always rated Sizwe fairly low, a play which walked the tightrope between poetry and propaganda. Maybe I’m wrong. That first amble through the text on a bare Royal Court stage was very moving. Its structure and style remain clever — its essential honesty and humility still radiant —and, miraculously, John and Winston hand themselves over to it, are taken over by it, with the same spontaneity of four years ago. I am as confident of the integrity and honesty of its ‘witness’ now as I was then and, equivalently, am just as sustained by it.
Sizwe Banzi is Dead later ran in 1978 at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg. When the play was to be re-opened at The Space Theatre in 1979, the police stopped the event before it began because of the turmoil the play had been causing.
In 2006, Kani and Ntshona starred in a revival of Sizwe Banzi at the Baxter Theatre Centre at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, directed by Aubrey Sekhabi, who worked from a BBC recording of the production made in the late 1970s. The production also toured the State Theatre in Pretoria, The Market Theatre in Johannesburg and the Hilton Festival in South Africa. The Sekhabi revival moved in March 2007 to the Royal National Theatre’s Lyttelton Theatre. In the same year, Sizwe Banzi is Dead was translated into French by Marie-Hélène Estienne for a version staged by Peter Brook at the Barbican Centre and to tour around the world.
In its final re-incarnation with the two collaborators, Kani and Ntshona returned to Broadway in April 2008 for a limited engagement presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
–Kelli Marino, Chicago Fugard Fest 2010 Staff Writer
