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Crossing boundaries: the genesis of the township plays - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Dennis Walder
Within weeks of that decision (which meant they had to be classified as Fugard's domestic servants in their pass-books) their joint commitment issued in the workshop production of Sizwe Bansi. Its first appearance before a multiracial audience at the Space was prevented by the police, so Astbury reopened the next night as a massively enlarged "club," effectively defying the authorities, who were nevertheless represented (as usual) by Special Branch observers. According to Kani, he, Fugard, and Ntshona had been looking for a two-hander drawn from urban black experience; after toying with Soyinka's The Detainee, they found their "mandate" in a photo of a smiling black man who, they agreed, would only smile like that if his pass was in order (Kani, personal interview).
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Acting as a means of survival was central to the brilliant combination of monologue, mime, improvisation, and remembered gesture which insured immediate local recognition for Sizwe Banzi (original spelling), and an invitation from the Royal Court in London before a written script had been put together. And while the three waited for permission to leave for London, they decided to apply the same workshop techniques to material accumulated (in Fugard's case, over some seven years) from their relatives (including Kani's elder brother, since shot at a funeral), friends, and former colleagues about life on Robben Island. The focus became a two-man version of Antigone arranged by Ntshinga and Sipho "Sharkey" Mguqulwa as prison entertainment; but they began with a simple exercise of exploring a diminishing space, which suddenly became infused with a specific but dangerous meaning: "To take the island and say something about it. We joined hands, closed the garage door and after two weeks we were on stage in Cape Town" (Kani, personal interview). The play was called Die Hodoshe Span, "Hodoshe's Work-Team," after a brutal warder's nickname (Xhosa for carrion-fly), but a usefully obscure title for the unscripted production, since it was illegal to make public information about prison conditions.
The rest of the story is well enough known--including the short imprisonment of Kani and Ntshona in the Transkei "homeland" for a performance of Sizwe Bansi there in 1976. The important point is that, unlike the earlier township plays, by mediating the black experience so much more closely, the New Brighton works offered explicit statements about the injustice of apartheid, as well as the opportunity, through their improvisational, storytelling structure, for comment by performers on personal history and current issues. But their lasting impact as well as their local influence--most new black drama bears their mark, as Kani has pointed out ("Combatant" 57-58)--demonstrates how they also transcend the limitations of immediacy, or agitprop, thereby becoming repeatable by performers unfamiliar with the township experiences they mediated. Thus playwright and performers, isolated by race and position within their fractured, semi-colonial society, have been led by their joint commitment to the potential of theatre, to become actors in the painful transformation of their country today.
