Sizwe Banzi is Dead

Young Vic

4 stars

A stoney-faced policeman looms ahead, segregating people according to their skin colour. “Blankes — Whites” are marshalled to the right. “Nie-Blankes — Non-Whites” to the left.

The officer makes one last check to ensure no-one has slipped through the racial net. Satisfied, the show is allowed to begin.

So starts the Young Vic’s revival of Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead, a powerful and overtly political commentary on apartheid-era pass laws that still dominated the lives of non-white South Africans when it premiered in Cape Town in 1972.

And, 20 years after the ANC’s momentous election condemned South African aparthied to the dustbin of history, the foul scent of racism under white rule is still tangible in this compelling two-man show.

Fugard’s script, ably directed by Matthew Xia, skilfully wraps a tale within a tale to slowly reveal the story behind the mysterious man who arrives at a photographic studio seeking its services.

The Vic’s Maria studio provides the perfect setting for this tale of jobless Sizwe Banzi’s (Sibusiso Mamba) desperate bid to stay and find work in Port Elizabeth after being ordered home by the authorities.

A chance encounter with a corpse on a drunken night out offers the opportunity to assume the dead man’s identity and, with it, the right pass to allow him to remain.

The studio space is deftly deployed. A few boards and corrugated metal sheets lean against its concrete walls, representing the township’s shacks. The central sheet-metal shack is at times just that, at others the focal point for the mockery delivered in a scathingly comedic masterclass by Tonderai Munyevu’s photographer Styles.

A read of his newspaper provides the prompt for impressions of the white boss class and the contempt of their black near-slaves at an industrial plant.

The light-hearted energy with which this anything-but-lighthearted situation is delivered in the first third gives way to a complete change of pace in the second, when in flashback style we are drawn into Banzi’s stark conundrum.

What could be a jolting transition is in fact masterfully handled and is a testament to both the production team and the actors themselves.

While South Africa’s pass laws may be a thing of the past, this gripping production stands as a reminder of both the poison of racism and as a universal tale for victims of economic discrimination.

Runs until March 15 (box office: 020 7922-2922) then tours.