Peter Viney's Blog

Kunene & The King
by John Kani

Directed by Janice Honeyman
Designed by Birrie Le Roux

Royal Shakespeare Company
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Tuesday 9th April 2019, evening

with

Anthony Sher as Jack Morris
John Kani as Lunga Kunene

Music sung and played live by Lungiswa Plaatjies

This is a co-production with the Fugard theatre in Cape Town. John Kani is a South African actor and playwright, co-starring in his own play, while Antony Sher was born in South Africa as was director Janice Honeyman. Sher and Kani have acted together in The Tempest, where Kani played Caliban to Sher’s Prospero.

What’s it about? Cancer. Ageing. African culture. Race relations. Failing memory. Alcoholism. Human bonding. South African history – good and bad about both sides – up to 2019. Shakespeare in performance. King Lear. Soweto’s ordinary people in 2019. Mortality. Death.

Scene 1

Sher plays Jack Morris, an ageing white South African actor in Johannesburg, who is dying of liver cancer. Kano plays “Sister Kunene”, his new African nurse and carer who needs to move in to Jack’s house to see him through his final stages, and no, he won’t take the maid’s room in an outbuilding. In the main house. Hospitals still call charge nurses sister regardless of gender there. Jack has been cast as King Lear in a Cape Town production, a part he has done before. As of course has Sher himself for the RSC in 2016 and 2017 to wide acclaim. Line learning is becoming a problem or Jack. He discovers that Kunene had a love of Julius Caesar, and they both do the Friends, Romans and Countryman speech, Jack in English and Kunene in Xhosa.

There are three scenes, played straight without an interval- it’s only 95 minutes long. The scenes are linked by astonishing singing from Lungisawa Plaatjies. The play sits on a fine line between comedy and tragedy, with deep discussions on mortality. There are also fascinating insights on actors performing lines on a midweek matinee with half a dozen blue rinses in the audience, while trying to keep their attention in focus. Coming from as stellar an actor as Sher they’re intriguing and very funny, and Kani as an actor too, wrote that part perfectly.

Jack explains the story of Lear to Kunene, allowing much cultural comparison – it doesn’t fit African culture, as daughters would not inherit, so inexplicable apart from the role of The Fool. There’s casual unintended racism from Jack talking about ‘you people’. Kunene is justly angered, then does the same the other way.

scene 2

Antony Sher is astonishingly real. He is somewhat glazed from medication of course, but this is a man in pain. He has degrading toilet dashes, in one returning to the room with shit spattered underpants in his hand. He looks awful, with greasy hair, stubble. He is slurred at times (yet always totally comprehensible). He swears and curses, rages against the world – and there is a storm, though when he recounts it in scene 3 in Kunene’s Soweto house, it was a under a concrete flyover rather than on a blasted heath. The Lear parallels keep coming.

John Kani  matches his co-star. Dignified, even when Jack throws the underpants in his face, slow to anger, but finally breaking too. Lungene has no illusions about a saintly ANC, and ‘the comrades’ destroyed his father’s home and business in Soweto. However, he also recalls Sharpeville, his inability to train as a doctor, years as a second class citizen.

It is unusual to see a two hander on the Swan’s large thrust stage, and there is a smaller stage set upon it for this play, and a back to the set which makes it feel proscenium theatre. Though the singer uses the balconies, they never utilise the thrust stage, and I guess  it will be going elsewhere. The RSC charged only half as much as the full cast Shakespeare productions this week, which is very fair. A West End commercial theatre would charge three times as much for this cast.

Kunene’s house, scene 3, the dance

Domenic Cavendish in The Telegraph said:

Though it’s a bit hackneyed to have an old actor lose his marbles while preparing to play Lear, it provides some ancillary psychological justification for the way Jack expresses an unpleasant residual regality and even downright distasteful flashes of racial superiority that contradict his surface liberal credentials as an actor; drawling and sneering, Sher’s performance is not an easy one to warm to and is therefore, in its way, brave.

That rings a bell, because the wonderful Canadian series about a Canadian Shakespeare Theatre, Slings and Arrows, does have an old actor losing his marbles while playing King Lear in its third season.

That doesn’t detract from these two great actors giving a performance which is indeed brave. It’ll be way more edgy in South Africa, and it’s definitely not PC whether black (or rather “bleck”) or white “Suth Efriken” – Jack talks about Africans raping babies as an AIDs cure. Kumene talks about whites raping maids … their mothers. It will offend some.

*****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID:

5 star
Michael Billington, The Guardian *****
Anne Cox, Stage Review *****
4 star
Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Sunday Times ****
SamMarlowe, The Times ****
Susannah Clapp, The Observer ****
Alice Saville, Financial Time, ****
Dave Fargnoli, The Stage ****
Michael Davies, What’s On Stage ****
3 star
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ***

If only that life-or-death sense of Shakespeare mattering was found on these shores (and even at the RSC) today. And in general, quietly engaging and gently touching in its valedictory way though the play feels in Stratford, I imagine it will land with more visceral, pointed force when it transfers to Cape Town later this month

LINKS ON THIS BLOG:

JANICE HONEYMAN (director)
Vice Versa, RSC 2017

ANTONY SHER
King Lear, RSC 2016
Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 RSC
Death of A Salesman, by Arthur Miller, RSC 2015
Hysteria by Terry Johnson, Bath 2012