REVIEW OF THE ARTS

Kenneth Hurren on the black and white Fugard show

I wish I could stop thinking of John Kani and Winston Ntshona as Amos 'n Andy. This is an embarrassingly frivolous attitude with which to approach the three plays in the Royal Court's ' South African Season' and since there is a tendency in progressive circles to confuse any criticism of a play about the less appetising aspects of South African life with a blanket endorsement of apartheid, I hesitate to confess even a small lack of solemnity, but there it is. The plays are terribly well-meaning, and the matters with which they are concerned — the incarceration of political prisoners, the 'pass' laws and the Immorality Act — are suitable subjects for anyone's indignation, but the ideas that inform the plays are a great deal more striking than the plays themselves, and I feel like a dog in being unable to associate myself with the general encomia.

But to get back to Kani and Ntshona, these are a brace of African actors who cpmprise the entire casts of two of the plays — which they also had hands in devising, apparently by some improvisatory method, in sympathetic collaboration with the season's author-director, Athol Fugard. They are stunningly good. As black actors (if a simple truth

can be stated without its seeming either racialist or patronising) they are in a class of their own in Britain, and by any standards at all their performances are enormously accomplished. They are also quite a comic turn when the fancy takes them, which may account for my Amos 'n' Andy thought and I'm not sure that Fugard should have encouraged their fancies in this regard. They do seem just a little too cute. Kani, for instance, opens one of the shows, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, with an hour-long patter act that might be very big at the Bantu Talent Night at the Port Elizabeth Palace of Varieties, and might just as well be there, for all the relevance it has to the case of Sizwe Bansi. The latter is in ' pass ' law trouble and has to go to drastic lengths, involving a change of identity, to get the documents that will enable him to wcrk. What Kani is on about in his protracted curtainraiser is his experience as a Ford factory worker prior to setting up in business as a photographer. The juxtaposition of the amusing and the moving, to heighten the poignancy of the latter, is a respectable wheeze, but neither Kani nor Fugard seem to know when enough is enough.

There are a great many other things which Fugard seems not to know, either, and which doubtless account for my being rather less (or, at least, no more) sympathetic to what he had to say than I was before he said it. One of them is that the law of diminishing returns is a killer in improvised theatre, in which actors are apt to get carried away with their inventions and repeat them interminably, perhaps on the principle that a thing worth doing is worth doing twice, not to say ten times.

In The Island, in which Kani and Ntshona make their other

contribution to the season, they also get off to a dispiriting start. As political offenders on Robben Island, South Africa's maximum security prison off the Cape coast, they see it as their first duty to establish that they are at hard labour and not at a holiday camp, which they proceed to do by means of mime. This is an art based on the bizarre inversion of the adage that one picture is

worth a thousand words and is greatly appreciated by lovers of statements of the obvious, though I'm bound to say it makes me fractious and I doubt if I'd have felt any happier even if I'd known it Was to be the most realistic part of an evening otherwise devoted to statements of the improbable. One is that the two cell-mates, confronting the news that one is shortly to be released, would explore their reactions in a manner that might seem overanalytical in a couple of psychiatry students. Another, rather more vital, since the thematic thread of the piece derives from it, is that the Antigone of Sophocles not only would be enthusiastically chosen for performance by the prison dramatic society but, granting that the convicts were unusually well up in their classics, would be approved by prison authorities who are generally thought to be uncommonly touchy about works with the kind of heavy political reverberations to be found in that story of rebellion and punishment. I may be being uncommonly touchy myself, but it seems to me that ` arty ' and 'literary' contrivances are tawdry in a context of genuine human pain.

They are less evident in — though not entirely absent from — the third play in the season, Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, which focuses on the plight of lovers of different races. A schoolmaster, faintly coloured, and a librarian, white, are discovered one night — by police following up the complaint of a prying neighbour — more or less in flagrante delicto on the floor of the empty library. They are not 'pretty' people, the affair is adulterous and, even without the miscegenative element, whould have to have been furtively conducted; and I am puzzled that Fugard, having gone to some pains to make all this clear (to underline the point, characteristically, he gives the man the name 'Philander'), should have soared off on one of his ` poetic ' flights in their post-coital conversation in an apparent endeavour to make the liaison in some sense idyllic. Again the genuine is given an overlay of the spurious, but it is less decisive here — the emotional sincerity of the players, Yvonne Bryceland and Ben Kingsley, helps — and the anguish and indignity of the public intrusion upon the private moment are not fatallY diminished. It's a near thing. though. C. P. Taylor's comedy, The Black and White Minstrels, at the

Hampstead Theatre Club, which you might easily have imagined to be some lightsome variation on one of Fugard's themes, is in fact set in Glasgow and the only black i in t is a pious Nigerian girl who Is about to be evicted from her lodgings by a Scots playwright of nervously socialist views. Taylor's general purpose is the illumination of the gap between liberal ideals and the attitudes and emotions of those who profess them. There seem to be some fairly compleg

symbols wandering around the piece, but most of it centres on the

sexual arrangements of the

playwright, Cyril, and his friend, Harry, and the wives, Gil and 13a, whom they amiably share. This is presumably a commonplace lifestyle in Glasgow (there must be, some reason for the location), °I

which Taylor, who gave up living there fifteen years ago, probablY

disapproves. But I cannot be a.1together certain of that. When Gil, contemplating the notion .0,f taking on a third man, Cyril lawyer, says casually, " He's just another body — I mean, if I take

the pill, why should I stop at solve arbitrary barrier like holding hands or kissing?" is she to be

regarded as splendidly liberated or, sadly amoral, and is Cyril's flare 01 jealousy a criticism of his failure to accept the conditions of the ' permissiveness ' he preaches, or a hopeful indication that he is not entirely beyond salvation? These are teasing questions, but; frenetically directed by Michae 1,: Rudman and nimbly acted by a, 1 hands (with especially notabi,; performances from Tom Conti att° Patti Love), the play is often riotously amusing in its unseern. way; so, eventually, is PhiliPe Magdalany's Section Nine 0,1; Spectator, October 20, I973/; though I'm surprised the ROY4; Shakespeare Company thought I; worth promoting from t"ti,„ ' experimental ' season at 1. Place to the Aldwych.