I hope, by the close of this entry, we will have discussed the excellent production of Sizwe Banze is Dead, directed by Peter Brook, still playing for a few more days at the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House. But why not let’s start somewhere else and, in the wandering manner of Aboriginal story-telling, begin with:

I visited Melbourne recently to complete some interviews on tape with ‘eminent theatre practitioners’ for the OralHistory Unit of National Library of Australia. One my inteviewees was Mike Mullins, who gave Sydney and, indeed, the national theatre scene, a good rattle with his cutting-edge practice, and engagement in debate, for two decades from the late 1970s.

We are likely to return to Mullins’s work another day, but let’s simply note here that Mullins was launching his professional career as a trainee director at the Old Tote when he was seconded to the Arts Council of NSW to organize the 1974 Australian tour of Teatr Laboratorium, Jerzy Grotowski’s celebrated company.

This led to Mullins working with that company in Poland where his duties included, in 1975, managing a gathering of a selection of the world’s most eminent and progressive theatre directors (and others) of that time.

Guests included Peter Brook, who a decade earlier had emerged as a leading figure at the Royal Shakespeare Company with early productions including The Marat/Sade (starring an audacious teenager, Glenda Jackson), later made into a film in 1967. Grotowski participated in workshops at the RSC during preparations of Marat/Sade and some of his ideas, especially those drawn from his own research into Antonin Artaud, fed into Brook’s ‘Theatre-of-Cruelty’ inspired production.

Soon after, Brook directed a culture-shifting version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which premiered in London in 1970 and, at the end of an acclaimed world tour, visited Australia in 1973.

Australia has been both a beneficiary and contributor to Brook’s creative journey since. The tour over, several actors from the MSND cast stayed on: Hugh Keays-Byrne was later cast as the notorious Toecutter in Mad Max; and Ralph Cotterill has worked consistently here since, recently delivering a most moving and subtle performance in The Small Things at Belvoir Street Downstairs. Philip Sayer, who had played Demetrius, also stayed a while, performing in Richard Wherrett’s well-remembered production of Peter Handke’s Kaspar at the Nimrod.

Sayer made a bunch of Aussie friends while in Australia, and even I got to spend some time with him in London when I made my first pilgrimage to London during the university summer break between 1975-6. Sayer and his friend, Ian Charleson (of Chariots of Fire fame) both died way too young. Sayer passed away in 1989, age 42; and Charleson died of AIDS the next year, in 1990, age 40, after an acclaimed season in the title role of Hamlet at London’s National Theatre.

Brook’s company delivered program highlights to the 1980 Adelaide Festival with three works including The Conference of the Birds; and Brook premiered his nine-hour The Mahabharata in a quarry setting at the 1988 Adelaide Festival.

A highlight of Anthony Steele’s 1976 Adelaide Festival was a production from South Africa called Sizwe Banze is Dead, written by Athol Fugard with the assistance of actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Born out of the then raging fire of apartheid, the play’s fierce politics is hidden, like an escapee in hay, in truckful of humour, boldness of spirit and disarming charm. Admittedly the anger was not so well-disguised in the original production. Appropriately so. Brook’s version is a lot softer: less political, but still of note for its theatrical finesse.

The plot turns on a man who is being sent back to his village from the larger township where he has been able to earn a little money for his family, after police find his papers are not in order. With the help of a new friend he is encouraged to take on the identity (papers intact) of man they find dead. Free to live in one sense, but his true identity buried alive in the process. A suitable photograph of oneself is crucial in such an environment, and so it is only right that much of the action takes place in Sizwe’s photography studio.

With the mass movement of political refugees a regular headline, the possession of ‘identity papers’ is once again an issue – and now on a global scale. So it is not surprising that John Kani and Winston Ntshona recently revived their performances in a new London production to good reviews.

Taken up by the same mood in the air, Peter Brook has now also created a version. While lacking the political knife-edge of the original, it is still worth seeing for the quality of the direction and superb performances.

Sotigui Kouyate, one of the actors in Brook’s Paris-based company, is said to have introduced Brook to writer and performer Habib Dembele who plays Buntu in this production, the man who must give up his identity to live. Through him, Brook met Pitcho Womba Konga, a well-known rapper and hip-hop artist from the Congo, who plays Sizwe. When you see his work, that background makes sense.

Currently touring the world, Brook’s production of Sizwe Banzi formed part of this year’s Melbourne Festival season and we are lucky to see it in Sydney before it moves on. The season has been extended a week to 16 December, so some of you may still have a chance of catching this work of high distinction.

Meanwhile, if anyone working at the big State theatre companies is wondering why their recent works fell flat (namely The Madwoman of Chaillot at the MTC and Tales from the Vienna Woods at the STC), they only need to catch this Sizwe Banzi to be reminded: sets and costumes can never replace something to say, consummate direction and focus on acting craft!

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.
A man walks across this empty space whilst someone
else is watching him, and this is all I need for an
act of theatre to be engaged.”
- Peter Brook, The Empty Space

Further Reading:

Peter Brook’s own books on the theatre include The Empty Space(1969), The Shifting Point (1987) and The Open Door (2005).

Review of Peter Brooks’ ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by Clive Barnes, New York Times, 1970: http://www.alanhoward.org.uk/dreamnytimes.htm

An Online Exhibition of the Peter Brook MSND:
http://www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk/exhibition/MND/home.html

Ian McKellen on Ian Charleson’s Hamlet: http://www.mckellen.com/writings/90charleson.htm

Photos -

Top Left - Pitcho Womba Konga and Habib Dembélé. Photo - Catalin Anastase

Centre Right - Poster from the Nimrod production of Kaspar

Centre Left - Ian Charleson