Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, staged in the Michael Young Theatre.DAHLIA KATZ
- Sizwe Banzi Is Dead
- Young Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto
- Written by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona
- Directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu
- Starring Tawiah M’Carthy, Amaka Umeh
When is a name more than a name? Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, a 1972 play by South African playwright Athol Fugard and South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, has no easy answers.
Set largely in a photographer’s studio in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, during the Apartheid era, the play details the meeting of photographer, Styles, and the titular Sizwe, who, as the audience learns, is not what he initially appears to be. Told largely in flashbacks, the play demands strong performances and creative staging, both of which unfold fruitfully in the current Soulpepper Theatre production.
The work, staged in the Michael Young Theatre with seating arranged in a U-shape around the performance area, brims with anger, passion and a palpable immediacy in its deft handling of identity and expressions of selfhood.
It opens in the photography studio of Styles (Amaka Umeh), a fitting name given the character’s self-styled career. His lengthy opening monologue recalls the ups and downs of past experiences: working at the Ford Motor Co.; dealing with a cockroach infestation when he first opened his studio; photographing a large family and being moved by the quiet grace of its elder. Umeh effectively captures the poignancy of these chapters with a magnetic mix of comedy, pathos and charm.
Styles’s monologue, initially improvised by Kani in a stream-of-consciousness style, isn’t so much a navel-gazing rumination as it is an out-facing performance, one director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu emphasizes through Umeh’s bold interactions with the audience – winking, smiling, dramatically pointing. The intimacy cultivated through such use of the small space is keen; not only is the audience brought closer to Styles’s stories, but to Styles himself, and subsequently to a third character, Buntu, also played by Umeh. This isn’t her first time playing a male character (she was Hamlet at Stratford last summer), but her casting does underline the richness of the text as it explores the vagaries of identity and its costs, risks and compromises.
The complexities of such compromise come through in Sizwe Banzi himself. With initially halting body language and hushed responses, Tawiah M’Carthy’s portrayal is like a quiet storm, a minor key to Umeh’s brash, major one. M’Carthy uses his immense physicality to touching effect, particularly in a scene at the bar with his friend Buntu. Lighting designer Raha Javanfar and sound designer/composer Richard Feren’s mood-setting effects, together with set designer Ken MacKenzie’s inventive accoutrements, offer heady illusions of warmth and camaraderie, in sharp contrast with those of harshness and isolation. There is a palpable chill when Buntu finds a dead body, one that just happens to have an identity book with the all-important worker’s permit Sizwe had previously been denied.
During Apartheid, every Black citizen over the age of 16 was forced to carry such a book, one that restricted travel and employment within the country. In the play, we learn that Sizwe left his wife and four children in a distant part of the country to find work, but must depart Port Elizabeth within three days because of his lack of such a permit.
If he takes the name of the dead man (Robert Zwelinzima) as Buntu suggests, everything could change – but does that mean Sizwe would too? Would he indeed be “dead”? Buntu coaches the hesitant Sizwe with calculating precision, assuming various authoritarian figures (preacher, policeman) and barking out questions and hard truths.
The play returns to Styles taking a picture of his client, who wears his new clothing more easily than his new name, standing before a fake streetscape and holding a fake pipe, frozen in pose. The scene brings to mind the words of Susan Sontag, who wrote in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, that photographs are “not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement.”
As Styles suggests early on, nothing can or will replace the true self – but its performative veneer is, even in an age decades past the end of Apartheid, still demanded in many facets of an increasingly narrow and hostile society. Sizwe Banzi Is Dead asks what might be done to preserve that true self, and in Otu’s production, the resurrection is indeed glorious.
Sizwe Banzi Is Dead runs until June 18.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)
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