Haunting Revival of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead Gives Audience Chills

Courtesy of Richard Termin

Courtesy of Richard Termin

As any snobbish 20-something with a taste for Heineken, President Brie, and Diesel Jeans will tell you, the best beers, cheeses, and denim are all imports. This rule also proves true for ghosts.

Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, Athol Fugard’s astounding post-apartheid duet starring Winston Ntshona and John Kani, takes its final curtain at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre this coming Saturday, April 19 after a run 34 years and three continents in the making. The sublime energy, natural chemistry, and chilling reality of director Aubrey Sekhabi’s elegant revival inhabit a foreign ghost that has risen from the past and will continue to haunt our future for years to come.

The play revolves around the title character, Sizwe Banzi (played by Ntshona), a black man from King William’s Town seeking work in Port Elizabeth. Denied employment by the oppressive Afrikaner regime, Sizwe drifts through the streets with an invalid passbook, identification governmentally required for all black South Africans during Apartheid, and little hope. For Sizwe, the options are refuge, arrest, exile, or death. It is not until Sizwe and his friend Buntu (played by Kani) drunkenly stumble upon the corpse of a man named Robert Zwelinzima in the street—a perfect corpse with a perfect passbook—that any opportunity presents itself. The choice here is apparent: live as the ghost of a dead man to become free or be destined to live as the ghost of a former self. This decision is made in the opening scene of the play, as Sizwe Banzi shakily walks into the photography studio of an ebullient man named Styles (also played by Kani) and announces his name: Robert Zwelinzima.

The artful and nuanced veteran tragicomic performances of both Ntshona and Kani serve to complicate the issue even further. Presenting a range of emotions—from the manic gusto of Styles to the cautionary uncertainty of Sizwe—the pair displays the difficulty of maintaining personal identity in a regime in which the primary tactic is dehumanization. Styles’ occupation as a photographer, gleefully preserving the identities of his self-defined black clientele, is harshly juxtaposed with Sizwe’s fear as he mutters, “How do I live as another man’s ghost?” The production asks which is preferable: dehumanization by the death of a name or the death of a person? Either way, the show makes it clear that the Afrikaner regime has rendered the majority of its black citizens ghosts.

Ntshona and Kani return to their roles originally played 34 years ago in an invitation-only performance in South Africa. The play, double-billed with Fugard’s The Island, then transferred to London’s National Theatre. Only after this run did it arrive on this side of the Atlantic, where a unique dual Best Actor Tony awaited both men. The play’s incredible success and seemingly endless sparkling acclaim north of the equator were countered in South Africa by secrecy, disgust, and the arrest of both actors on the grounds of treason for, as Kani recollects in a recent interview, “promoting communism, promoting the aims of banned organizations ... the charges went on for a couple of pages.”

From small touring venues in South Africa to the National Theatre in London to Harvey Theatre in Brooklyn and around and around again and again, Ntshona and Kani continue to amaze audiences with their incredible effervescence and enthusiasm that seem to stem not only from a sense of cultural necessity, but also from a sense of pure enjoyment.

The pair of actors has announced that this incarnation of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead will be their final revival of the play. Walking out of the theater, all other imports seem obsolete in the shadow of Fugard’s masterpiece. The après-théâtre appreciation of smooth denim, smooth beer, and smooth cheese was collectively momentarily suspended in an appreciation for a much rockier and more complex import—the ghosts which will haunt our cultural memory long after our jeans rip.