Sizwe Banzi is Dead (Young Vic)

"What’s in a name?" asks Shakespeare’s Juliet faced with the prospect of a love denied because of feuding families.

In Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead this same question is at the heart of everything, not just young love. Your name is housed in your passbook, a document which gives you the right to live and work (or in Banzi’s case not live and work) in certain areas and thus, by extension, gives you or denies you access to a livelihood to feed your family and sustain your life. The wrong stamp in your passbook and you don’t have a chance.

Even without an interval this is a play of two distinct halves. In the first we meet Styles, played beautifully by Tonderai Munyevu. He’s a photographer and tells of his leaving work in the Ford factory to "stand straight in a place of [his] own". Munyevu’s performance is engaging and dynamic as he marches about the stage wearing a "mask of smiles" which he expertly deploys to highlight the real depth of his character who believes the "one thing you mustn’t do is interfere with a man’s dream"; something we understand, without being explicitly told, has been done to him. Playing a host of characters, Munyevu’s physical and vocal performance makes this one-man performance a pleasure to watch.

The second half introduces Sibusiso Mamba whose shrinking Sizwe Banzi is a good counterpoint to both Munyevu’s charming Styles and sensible Buntu. It is this second part however, where the pace drops and the play begins to drag. This is nothing to do with Muyevu and Mamba’s performances, which are both strong, but rather to do with the play itself which needs more aggressive editing – a point made and remade doesn’t necessarily become stronger for its repetition; if anything it becomes laboured.

This however is my only reservation about an otherwise very strong production. Hyemi Shin’s no-fuss set of plywood boards and corrugated iron sheets with spray-painted numbers works well and Ciarán Cunnigham’s lighting design, particularly his use of colour and shadow, really brings it to life.

You feel truly embedded in the world of the play and Munyevu and Mamba take you along with them even if, at the end, you wish there’d been just ten minutes less.