NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. To 16 June.
Tour
NOTHNG BUT THE TRUTH
by John Kani
UK Arts/Hampstead Theatre Tour to 16 June 2007
Runs 1hr 40min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 May at West Yorkshire Playhouse (Courtyard Theatre)
whatever the dramaturgical bumps this is an illuminating evening.
It’s unusual to start a review with the post-show discussion, but it’s worth finding a night when there is one. While John Kani’s co-cast members contributed to the Leeds discussion, there’s no doubting where the overwhelming wealth of experience lies. Kani clearly knows the personal and political impulses behind the action, while bringing four decades’ theatrical and political experience to inform his play’s context.
At 64 one year older than his character Sipho Makhaya, Kani’s seen how easily one generation’s vital experience become history or irrelevance for the young. This is a man who started in the 1960s in an amateur Antigone. Several years on it became subsumed within The Island which, along with Sizwe Bansi is Dead was a seventies landmark, co-created with actor Winston Ntshona and playwright Athol Fugard.
South African political theatre, Kani makes clear, had to adjust to Nelson Mandela being transformed from prisoner to President and the end of apartheid. Yet, as was discovered, winning parliament didn’t mean controlling an economy in which South Africa’s wealth was owned by companies beginning with names like ‘Anglo-American…’.
All this illuminates Sipho’s story, his rivalry with the dead brother whose body returns to the country not in a coffin but an urn, along with the daughter who’s assimilated the family surname into an Anglo-friendly form and brings from London a youthful assertiveness and independence at odds with the expectations of both confident paterfamilias Sipho and obedient young Thando.
Kani doesn’t seem a natural playwright. Information is over-obviously stated at times, and characters, while consistent throughout, behave in response to the playwright’s matter of the moment rather than developing organically. Situations allow significant eavesdropping with suspicious frequency.
Unsurprisingly. It’s the young women who seem most to have just left the playwright’s storyboard, despite strong performances from Motshabi Tyelele, blossoming under her newly-arrived relative’s influence into designer-African wear and Rosie Motene’s confident Mandisa.
Kani, of course, has superb, unforced authority as Sipho, responding to the suddenly assertive young generation. And his play, fluently directed by Janice Honeyman, faces with honesty the dilemmas of memory and change in a new society.
Sipho Makhaya: John Kani
Mandisa Mackay: Rosie Motene
Thando Makhaya: Motshabi Tyelele
Director: Janice Honeyman
Designer: Sarah Roberts
Lighting: Mannie Manim
2007-05-15 11:27:32