Sizwe Banzi is Dead

Synopsis

Memorable, moving, funny and deeply human, award-winning Sizwe Banzi is Dead is, quite simply, one of the classic plays of the 20th century. In apartheid-era South Africa migrant worker Sizwe Banzi is getting desperate. To survive and to support his wife and family he needs a job. But to get a job he needs a valid pass. And that's when his problems really start. Because the only way he can get a pass is to be officially 'dead'. Voted 'Best Play' in the London Theatre Critics Award and nominated for three Tony Awards during a triumphant Broadway run, this theatrical tour de force played in South Africa's townships before touring the world to massive critical and popular acclaim.

Our Review:

11 May 2007

Entrapment, oppression and injustice take a back seat in Peter Brook’s new staging of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, which proves a deceptively light and delicate show of guilty optimism during South African apartheid.

Written 35 years ago by John Kani and Athol Fugard as a protest play against the perverse apartheid regime, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead introduces us first to cheeky and exuberant Styles (Habib Dembele), a man who has escaped seven ugly years as a Ford factory groundling to become his own boss as a studio photographer. In a monologue that comprises half the play Styles gives us a detailed and buoyant account of his experiences under the thumb of fat-cats at Ford and the new pleasure he gains from recording on film the lives of ordinary black South Africans.

With an amicability non-existent in present-day London retail, Styles pulls out all the stops for his first customer of the day - the broad and proudly poised Robert ([...

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