Word: banzi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Criticism is not welcomed. When the celebrated South African play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead was presented in Umtata, Matanzima was furious at its barbed references to the Transkei's independence as meaningless. Though the play has been hailed both in the U.S. and Britain, Matanzima closed it down and jailed Xhosa Actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona (who appeared in it on Broadway last year) on the grounds that the play was "highly inflammatory, abusive and vulgar...
...Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the only worthwhile homegrown native son's work to be produced in Boston in this Bicentennial season of foreign imports (fireworks by Equus of England and South Africa's Sizwe Banzi is Dead). It survived a stormy infancy, including a Pulitzer abortion at birth in 1963 (nominated, then rejected for being offensive), early charges of obscenity and immorality, vicious rumors (Was the play really written for four homosexuals?) and callous adolescent pranks (an Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton movie version with more fangs than heart, 1966) to emerge as a classic of the American theater. The current...
...Sizwe Banzi is Dead. At the Charles Playhouse, 74 Warrenton Street, through October 19. Performances Thursday through Saturday evenings at 8 p.m., Sunday evenings at 7:30 p.m., Saturday matinee at 2 p.m., Sunday matinee...
...SIZWE BANZI and The Island are Kani and Ntshona. Kani and Ntshona laugh, cry, joke, pray, confide, console, with the unforced naturalness of the neighbors next door, but glow in our dreams and memories even weeks after the performances with a stunningly vivid brilliance. It is as if we had swallowed whole a complete vocabulary of previously undiscovered emotions, gestures, and facial and body expressions. A particular situation, the gesture of a friend, can, at some of the most unexpected moments, trigger the memory of an image or scene from the plays, much as we are suddenly reminded by smells...
...world that emerges in these plays is a variegated, richly human, willfully troublesome one, one that Styles accepts with philosophical resignation, a shrug of the shoulder, and a toothy laugh. Sizwe Banzi and The Island are political plays about the horror of apartheid, but they are much more than that; the world they create is a world of futility, reminiscent of novels about India, by Indian writers writing in English, such as Narayan and U.S. Naipal. Like Naipal's Mr. Stone, Styles has the distinctive resigned sensibility of a colonized people, an intelligent people who know their supposed masters...