In the on-going play, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, being staged at Theatre@Terra, written by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, Sizwe Bansi, the protagonist, is stranded without a work permit in Port Elizabeth. The only solution to his dilemma is summarised in Kafkaesque terms by his benefactor Buntu, analysed the rigours he has to go through in other to secure a Residence Permit in New Brighton.
Sizwe Bansi opens with a now famous improvisation by the character Styles, a photographer, on themes provided by whatever news is topical in the newspaper. There is an improvisation on this part of the play compared with what his in the printed version which covers about fifteen pages.
Styles’ narration is a political satire and its dramatic significance lies in its contribution to the definition of the character, Styles, and his history. The play opens in the here and now of Styles' photographic studio, where he finds himself, facing his audience, waiting for a customer to turn up. From this point Styles returns to his beginnings, his first job as a worker in the Ford Factory in Port Elizabeth, and traces the vicissitudes of his life along the route which will bring him back to this studio. There is indeed, in Styles’ seemingly light hearted a tale embedded in both past and present pain a search for identity. The interaction of time past and time present establishes a base and a model for the further evolution of the play.
Styles' account of his life's journey is metaphorical. Upon first acquiring his studio, he faces a problem of infestation by cockroaches, and the first remedy he reaches for is an insecticide. Clearly, in this scene, the cockroaches become a metaphor for the black masses infesting the white capitalist's condemned premises. This becomes most evident in the failure of the attempt to "doom" the "pests" in Styles’ words. But for the metaphor to work, Styles himself becomes, at least temporarily, allied to the forces of white repression. An even more convoluted situation arises when the failure of the first attempt to evict or kill the cockroaches is followed by a much more efficient method: a cat called Blackie does the job. Even if one resists the temptation to tread much further through this particular labyrinth of metaphors, Styles' appropriation of the strong-arm tactics that traditionally characterised the apartheid regime sends some unexpected signals.
Undoubtedly, Styles’ story contains a strong and explicit political text---- the lack of choices available to him as a black worker in a white-owned factory; the dreary realities of job reservation, of group areas, of the whole complex of laws that define apartheid as a system; the futile pleasure derived from a momentary reversal of white and black roles (when Styles makes a fool of ‘Baas’ Bradley by saying in Xhosa what cannot be said in English, by standing erect while the foreman is "kneeling there on the floor," by "wearing a mask of smiles," by changing the customary order of perception as a key to the racial power play at work in the scene—("We were watching them. Nobody was watching us"); the process of transformation into a self-made man with his own studio.
The problem is that Sizwe Bansi knows no white man to start with. In the circumstances, Buntu’s evaluation of the situation is straightforward when he says: “There’s no way out, Sizwe. You’re not the first one who has tried to find it. Take my advice and catch that train back to King William’s Town.”
However profound the personal implications for Sizwe Bansi may be, the problem as formulated by Buntu appears to be a purely social one. Within moments, however, another dimension grows from it. When Buntu suggests, as the only other ‘way out,’ a job on the mines, which Sizwe refuses point-blank. The statement is echoed in Antigone's acknowledgment in The Island that: “I know I must die”, and in the resignation to: “a susceptibility to death” in Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act.
Much of the impact of this moment in Sizwe Bansi derives from the way in which it represents an interface between the play’s two key dimensions: the socio-political and the existential. Sizwe Bansi has long been recognised as an indictment of the wickedness and brutality of apartheid.
In the present post-apartheid era it is perhaps time to take a more dispassionate look at some problems illuminated by Sizwe Bansi Is Dead: not only the interaction between socio-politics and theatre within a given text, but the dilemma of the writer as a person with both artistic integrity and a social conscience. Or, in terms of Fugard’s own explanation of his improvisational technique in his preface to the play.
The basic device in the play has been that of challenge and response, the problem of reacting to an ideological or political challenge, that is apartheid and the struggle for liberation; with a response on a different level altogether --- theatrical, existential, and moral.
What marks the Styles circle above all else is his resort to role-playing, which is, interestingly enough, a strategy in any number of resistance plays by black writers in South Africa. Much more than a mere device to resolve the problem of tedium presented by straight narrative, role-playing operates within several systems of signification. In the first place, role-playing extends the scope of the character's involvement in the narrative. Instead of being merely this individual implicated in this situation (a photographer and ex-factory worker in his township studio), Styles becomes a crowd, reaching beyond the twenty-seven members of an extended family who turn up to have their photograph taken to a whole community, a whole society, the blacks in South Africa.
What marks the Styles circle above all else is his resort to role-playing, which is, interestingly enough, a strategy in any number of resistance plays by black writers in South Africa. Much more than a mere device to resolve the problem of tedium presented by straight narrative, role-playing operates within several systems of signification. In the first place, role-playing extends the scope of the character's involvement in the narrative. Instead of being merely this individual implicated in this situation (a photographer and ex-factory worker in his township studio), Styles becomes a crowd, reaching beyond the twenty-seven members of an extended family who turn up to have their photograph taken to a whole community, a whole society, the blacks in South Africa.
In the second place, role-playing makes it possible to represent the all-encompassing yet invisible apartheid system on the stage. The representation of the objects and victims of the system is inevitable and inescapable --- that is what the play is about.
However, the attempt by the producer/director, Wole Oguntokun to a female as the lead character, Sizwe (played by Kemi Lala Akindoju), is not completely a success as there are lapses by character to fully play the role. Some aspects of the script should have been changed to suit the new perspective. For instance, when Sizwe tries to explain her predicament of loosing her identity by changing her name from Sizwe Bansi to Robert Zwelinzima to Buntu. She could not understand how she will explain her transformation to her husband or children in her letter. Of course, the change of name may not completely affect her husband, but for her children, it may be a big dilemma because they cannot afford to change their last name from Bansi to Zwelinzima. In the original text, Sizwe is a man transformed from being Sizwe into Robert Zwelinzima and he finds himself at a crossroad in his letter to his wife about his sudden change of identity. The message of hopeless which Athol tries to pass across in the original text is not clearly portrayed; it is not forceful. Oguntokun’s attempt is quite commendable although, the fact that Sizwe is dressed in a three-piece suit at the beginning of the play before she changes her costume shows the difficulty in using a female to play such a lead role.
However, the attempt by the producer/director, Wole Oguntokun to a female as the lead character, Sizwe (played by Kemi Lala Akindoju), is not completely a success as there are lapses by character to fully play the role. Some aspects of the script should have been changed to suit the new perspective. For instance, when Sizwe tries to explain her predicament of loosing her identity by changing her name from Sizwe Bansi to Robert Zwelinzima to Buntu. She could not understand how she will explain her transformation to her husband or children in her letter. Of course, the change of name may not completely affect her husband, but for her children, it may be a big dilemma because they cannot afford to change their last name from Bansi to Zwelinzima. In the original text, Sizwe is a man transformed from being Sizwe into Robert Zwelinzima and he finds himself at a crossroad in his letter to his wife about his sudden change of identity. The message of hopeless which Athol tries to pass across in the original text is not clearly portrayed; it is not forceful. Oguntokun’s attempt is quite commendable although, the fact that Sizwe is dressed in a three-piece suit at the beginning of the play before she changes her costume shows the difficulty in using a female to play such a lead role.
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