Sizwe Banzi is Dead: comedy and history remaining tragically relevant
6 Jun 2023

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Dahlia Katz

Styles is a photographer. He specializes, he confides, in an ability to photograph anything from portraits to events to family photos. His mission is to photograph people who don't get into history books or have statues made of them, "my people," so that they will be remembered and their name will be passed on. "We own nothing but ourselves, we can leave nothing behind but memories." Styles makes his living photographing the flat expressionless photos necessary for an "identity book," a "pass," that dictates where a South African black can work and travel. 

This information, back story and theme foreshadowing, takes the form of a lengthy monologue that is also stand-up and physical comedy. Styles is incarnated, in all his hilarious, paranoid, blustering, conniving glory but Amaka Umeh (Fall on Your Knees, Moby, Towards Youth, The Wolves, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, James and the Giant Peach, This is for You Anna, Sister Act, Jesus Christ Superstar). We very quickly become aware that Styles is an unreliable narrator, prone to exaggeration and self-aggrandization, but Umeh turns the smarm into charm and applies so much kinetic energy that Styles becomes endearing. Almost trustworthy. And an everyman portrait of struggling South Africans clinging to their sense of pride in themselves in a system that doesn't treat, or even recognize, them as human. Styles/Umeh creates an incredible intimacy in the theatre, talking to us individually and breaking the fourth wall collectively, to create a beyond photographic portrait of an individual standing in for the universal.

Styles gets some business from Robert Zwelinzima who wants a portrait to accompany an important letter to his wife who is far away and he hasn't seen in a long time. Zwelinzima is portrayed as a crafty innocent by Tawiah M'Carthy (Maanomaa, My Brother, Obaaberima, Black Boys), his emotions writ large on his face, who is all too eagerly happy to take Styles's suggestions and elaborate scenarios for photographic success. He is a slow fuse. The flash bulb goes off and we move into the history of Sizwe Banzi and while the manic energy and comedy remains, the stakes are much grimmer and far more serious. Identity politics and pride are destroyed under apartheid and if Sizwe Banzi isn't dead, he soon will be. As we know, with a horrible fog of foreshadowing, will be Zwelinzima and Styles. The hope of the photograph, the promise, the memories, are cruel fabrications. M'Carthy builds to an explosive power and, even more effectively, succumbs with a whimper that silences the theatre so that his whisper of defeat can resonate. An everyman we identify even more closely with.

Structurally, Sizwe Banzi is Dead suffers slightly from being front-loaded. Styles/Umeh is so seductive and deliciously comic that we are almost unaware of how much exposition and thematic structuring we are being fed. When Umeh becomes a no less kinetic but far less slapstick character, the information, still so necessary, becomes less appetizing. Less appetizing to absorb and less appetizing to contemplate. Playwrights Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona want us to understand just how dehumanizing the apartheid system was and that is a difficult sell as comedy. Except that the apartheid system was also ridiculous, a bureaucratic nightmare full of tiny cracks for small victories, that can play for laughs. But still, big heartaches and horror dominate. 

This production of Sizwe Banzi is Dead is blessed with two extraordinary performances and a nimble staging that dances around reality while driving that reality home. Director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu (Post-Democracy, Is God Is, Trout Stanley, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) is determined to find the joy and heart in what could easily become a historical recreation of an important document. Is the rage and frustration that existed in the text, and one assumes the performances, during apartheid, translatable into a production performed in an upper middle class self-consciously liberal theatre in 2023? It can. When encouraged to talk back and interact, the audience, swept up in the momentum, does. Despite a lengthy debate, when the final decision has to be made, the audience hung on every emotion, every breath. The program notes remind us that apartheid was a Canadian invention, the text and anger remind us that while apartheid may no longer exist as an official policy, the erasure of self and pride through continual micro-aggressions is a constant that has not disappeared. Sizwe Banzi is Dead is that remarkable production that has a lot to say and has no interest in being subversive, but can still be wholeheartedly recommended as a well-structured comedy breathtakingly performed. Maybe that is subversive.