Word: ntshona
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...black amateurs, including the international hits Sarafina! and Asinamali! But it is quite a departure for Fugard, normally a believer in elite craftsmanship despite the egalitarian sentiments of his work. He has collaborated only once before, developing Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island with professional black actors Winston Ntshona and John Kani, who jointly won a 1975 Tony Award for their performances in the two shows...
...reason for the picture's impact is its straight-ahead melodramatic structure. At its simplest level the movie functions as a well-constructed mystery story. A black man, a gardener named Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona), comes to his employer, Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland), asking him to help find his son. The boy was taken into police custody during the Soweto protests of 1976 and has disappeared. Du Toit, a calm and rational man, believes this is surely just a bureaucratic muddle that can be easily ameliorated by a solid citizen's firm but polite intervention...
...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...
...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...
...Winston Ntshona, with his missing teeth, child-like face, wistful smile and pucker, is a slower character. He chews through a heavy accent. He thinks slowly, with his body. When he is considering something, we can see the thought travelling sluggishly up through his body, from his heavy limbs, through his fidgetting torso, up to his frowning puzzled pucker. He seems a combination between what Kael described in Brando--his emotions originating deep in his chest, then reverberating slowly to the extremities and finally to the face--and John Cleese in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a dull-witted...