Word: winstons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THEIR BEWYSBOEKS--required identification booklets--say that John Kani and Winston Ntshona are private servant employees of Athol Fugard, the white South African playwright with whom they have collaborated to "devise" Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island, now in Boston for their last performances in the United States. "Actor" is not recognized by apartheid South Africa as a possible profession for blacks, so Kani and Ntshona, the best actors you will have a chance to see on stage for a long time, remain second-class citizens, despite a three-year international tour that has garnered universal rave reviews...
...Island is about two political prisoners in a cell on Robben Island, the infamous prison island off the coast of South Africa. John and Winston still try to maintain their dignity and humor despite the deadening fatigue and hard-labor in the quarry. The main action of the play is their effort to stage Sophocles's Antigone in the prison. Unexpectedly, John finds out he will be released in three months; Winston, in for life, is condemned to become one of the desiccated, withered shells of men they see working silently at the quarry. Their staging of Antigone shows...
...quick comic energy that worked so well in Sizwe Banzi, although the audience is laughing and the comic relief much needed, it is as if the high drama of the opening is reduced to situation comedy. John's comic exasperation in teaching the plot of Antigone to slow-witted Winston seems out of place, almost blasphemous beside the agonized beginning. The comic relief here is unbearable, perhaps because there are only two actors; King Lear turns into Falstaff before our eyes. The Island is the less popular play (it only plays twice a week against six showings of Sizwe...
...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...
Died. Ivan Maisky, 91, Soviet Ambassador to London from 1932 to 1943; in Moscow. A dapper, moonfaced charmer, Anglophile Maisky interpreted Stalin's often twisting policies to the British through the 1930s, forging friendly relations but no alliances with Lord Halifax and Winston Churchill. Under a cloud after the Nazi-Soviet pact and Stalin's 1939 invasion of Finland, he rebounded to become one of London's social lions when Hitler attacked Russia in 1941. A superb p.r. man, Maisky donated the Soviet embassy's iron railing to Britain's wartime scrap drive...