I’ve just had two very interesting days working with actors
Jack Klaff and Jeffrey Kissoon on a revised version of my colleague Matthew
Hahn’s play The Robben Island Bible. We prepared a rehearsed reading to
open the 20 Years of South African Democracy conference at St Anthony’s
College, Oxford and then had a follow up gig in front of the deputy President
of South Africa Kgalena Molanthe at South Africa House, as part of his
country’s freedom day celebrations
Matt’s play focuses on a banned edition of The Complete
Works of Shakespeare, owned by the then prisoner Sonny Venkatrathnam which was
surreptitiously passed around the cells on Robben Island camouflaged as a Hindu
religious book. Sonny asked each
prisoner to sign next to their favourite passage. The choices made, with hindsight,
reveal the thoughts, fears and hopes of the men, many of whom would go on to
take leading political roles in the formation of the new South Africa.
Matthew spent several years traveling to Durban, Cape Town
and Johannesburg to interview the surviving signatories about their choice. The
raw verbatim material gathered in this process has formed the core of the work.
The first sharing of this material happened at St Mary’s.
RSC actor and former St Mary’s lecturer Ian Hughes led a student and staff
reading here, in the theatre.
A few weeks later the great South African actor John Kani,
who was, at the time, playing Caliban in a touring RSC production of The
Tempest, agreed to take part in a further reading at the Richmond
Theatre. Matt and I travelled up to Stratford upon Avon to meet John in-between
shows and talk through the project and we were amazed by the additional
biographical detail he was able to give us about the prisoners, many of whom
he’d met through his own participation in the anti-apartheid struggle.
Since then the play has had several readings at The British
Library as part of the Cultural Olympiad Restless World exhibition, at the
Festival Hall as part of the London Literary Festival and at the Folger
Shakespeare Institute in Washington DC.
Matt himself has just returned from directing a production
at Montana State University and there are further plans afoot for a reading in
Glasgow as part of this summer’s Commonwealth Games celebrations and a tour of
South Africa.
It’s been a while since I worked on the material and I’d not
met Jack or Jeffrey before we hooked up to rehearse in Oxford on a glorious
spring morning. They knew each other of old, Jack played Iago to Jeffrey’s Othello
at the Bristol Old Vic in 1990 and they worked together again on The
Free State, Janet Suzman’s South African take on The Cherry Orchard, which
I remember seeing at the Birmingham Rep in the late nineties.
We spent the morning clarifying the text and finding the
rhythm of the new version. Jack’s knowledge of his native country was
invaluable and he prompted us to dig underneath the literal meaning of the
lines to help grasp the emotional context of the men’s stories. Jeffrey was
superb with the Shakespeare - thoughtful, methodical and always looking at the
passages with a fresh, almost forensic eye.
They have contrasting approaches. Jack was full of broad
brush strokes, keen to demonstrate the men behind the stories. He attacked each
section with guts, fury and an impressive range of native accents. Jeffrey’s
work is more internalised, he draws you to him and makes you listen carefully
to each word. Early on I wondered if I’d be able to pull them into the same
play, but as the day developed they began to complement each other, bringing
colour and texture to the exchanges and creating the necessary variation in
pace needed to keep an audience engaged for the full forty five minutes.
By the afternoon we’d settled down, making final decisions
over line readings and working with more precision to try and communicate our understanding
of some of the meanings behind the men’s choices.
We began to see that often a contemporary English
understanding of a key passage transforms completely when it’s juxtaposed with
the biographical detail of the Robben Island prisoner who signed next to it.
The most remarkable example comes in Wilton Mkwayi’s choice of the forged letter
used to trick Malvolio in Twelfth Night. A traditional reading
of this letter would focus on Malvolio’s gullibility and naivety. We laugh
along because we’re in on the trick and want the steward’s Puritan pedantry
revenged. However, when you realise that Wilton became engaged just before his
incarceration and had to wait 23 years before he was released and could finally
marry his fiance the end of the letter - ‘Farewell,
She that would alter services with thee, The fortunate unhappy’ - takes on a completely different poignancy.
The last words of the play are Nelson Mandela’s choice from
Julius Caesar
‘Cowards die many
times before their deaths;
The valiant never
taste of death but once.’
Instinctively I’d given these to Jeffrey, based partly on
the fact that he brilliantly played Caesar in Greg Doran’s acclaimed East
African production at the RSC two years ago. When it came to it he was uneasy
about picking up the lines again and gently protested that he’d find it very
difficult to deliver them in any other way than he’d learnt for that run.
Jack was happy to take them up and delivered a pitch perfect
Mandela impersonation which was spookily life like. For a moment I wondered
whether the impact of having a bearded white man voice, so accurately, the former
president might surprise the audience to such an extent that the prophetic
impact of the lines would be lost in astonishment but both Jack and Jeffrey
were, perhaps for different reasons, enthusiastically endorsing this new ending
with wide grins. We kept it in. In the theatre it’s sometimes a very thin line
between parody and goose bumps.
The reading itself was strange. Jeffrey worked deliberately,
but, in the limited time we’d had to prepare, struggled a little to find some
of the lighter touches. Jack tried to compensate for this and, towards the end,
began to speed up. The balmy evening made the lecture theatre airless and the delegates,
straight from an agreeable College dinner, seemed attentive rather than
enthusiastic. Afterwards in the Senior Common Room everybody was incredibly
complementary and several of the audience seemed genuinely moved by the work.
In truth, I think, it dragged a bit.
Next day we met early in the sumptuous library at South
Africa house. Overnight I’d made some cuts to try and streamline the narrative.
The prisoners who signed the bible fall into two main
categories. There are the original Rivonia trialists and their associates who
came onto the Island in the mid-sixties and a second wave, the black
consciousness prisoners, who were incarcerated after the Soweto uprisings in
1976.
The cuts fell mostly on the passages nominated by the former
group who tended use their choice to outline a philosophical or even
metaphysical position about life as a prisoner. The new version I presented to
Jack and Jeffrey focused instead on the more overtly political readings chosen
by the second generation. Sadly, some of the humour went too.
As always there were some well-meaning grumbles of favourite passages lost but, in
the main, both actors embraced the streamlined text and set about renegotiating
the transitions from section to section.
The reading itself went very well and was warmly received by
the Deputy President and the hundred or so invited guests, esteemed South
Africans now resident in London. The
play had a special resonance for Molanthe as he was sentenced to ten years on Robben Island in the late
seventies and early eighties, under the terrorism act. It’s the first time
we’ve played the show in front of a former prisoner.
In the Q&A afterwards Dillon Woods, the son of the
legendary campaigning anti-apartheid journalist Donald Woods, noted that the
prisoners highlighted in the play had come from a range of political
organisations, some oppositional to the now ruling ANC, he wondered whether the
time had come to recognise that the struggle for democracy in South Africa
involved many different voices and opinions beyond Mandela and Molanthe’s own
party. Amazing that twenty years on from
the first democratic elections in South Africa we’re sitting in the High
Commission listening to these conversations take place.
What greater value can a piece of Drama have than to provide
the stimulus for a debate of this nature, asking difficult questions of those
in power, keeping authority in check, whilst reminding us of the sacrifices and
battles that have allowed us to be here in the first place?
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