I first saw a production of Athol Fugard’s incendiary play The Island at the National Theatre in 2001, starring the two original (and now legendary) actors and co-writers, John Kani and Winston Ntshona. It had a deep and lasting effect on me, and remains one of the theatre-going highlights of my life.
The action is located on an unnamed prison island, based on the real-life South African Robben Island prison, where prisoner number 46664 – Nelson Mandela – spent twenty seven years of his life. It draws heavily on real events, giving the play a palpable sense of veracity; and it must surely have been very, very dangerous for everyone involved in the play for it to have debuted (under the pseudonymous title Die Hodoshe Span) in Cape Town in 1973, when apartheid was still very much in force. In this Elysium Theatre Company production at the Lowry, Ewen Cummins and Dan Poyser take on the roles of prisoners John and Winston, and from the outset portray their pointless hard labour with such truth you can almost taste the dust in the air, and smell their sweat.
Their captors and tormentors are given form in the sounds of sirens and whistles, and the voice of the unseen guard Hodoshe (which translates as ‘carrion fly’), his brutality causing the pair serious injuries that are – like John’s method of tending Winston’s wounds – all too believable regardless of the lack of stage blood and make-up.
Conflict arrises from two sources. The first is the artistic disagreements between the pair over the two-handed production of the greek tragedy Antigone they plan to stage for prisoners and guards in less than a week. In the play-within-a-play, John is due to play Creon, King of Thebes, who sits in judgement on Antigone, who has had the temerity to bury the body of her brother, when that rite has been forbidden due to his opposition to the State in the Theban civil war. As with staging The Island itself, putting on the play is an incredibly risky venture, an act of defiance that must surely have consequences; though Winston’s objections are more due to the feared consequences of fellow prisoners seeing him in costume.
The second threatens to do more damage to the evident love felt between the two prisoners: John hears his 10-year sentence has been significantly reduced, leaving the at-first-elated Winston facing the possibility that his own life sentence might in the end rob him of his sense of self.
Despite the heavy subject matter, there are plenty of laughs along the way, though never simply as cheap light relief. Instead, humour in the face of extreme adversity is one of the many facets of our shared humanity on display in this tour-de-force production of one of the most important plays of the 20th century.
Indeed, Director Jake Murray, Cummins, Poyser, and everyone else involved in this production have managed to walk a very narrow tightrope, honouring as they do what has gone before, without ever being trapped by it.
It would have been very easy – and still of significant interest – to present us with something preserved, a relic from a museum, like an insect in amber. Instead, they turn the specifics of the play into something palpably universal and eternally relevant: a heartfelt cry for justice and freedom, wherever they are needed.
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The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
