Not so black and white: South Africa on stage

Theatre at its best throws out moments of rough magic: a line, a stage effect, even a wordless gesture that can linger in the memory for years and still send a shiver through you. There is such a spark in Solomon and Marion when a world-weary, lonesome divorc?e, played by Dame Janet Suzman, is forced to confront anew the death of her son. Suzman stares and stares as if into a?bottomless pit, her mute stillness more profound than any scream, and it feels as if the room temperature has dropped to freezing.

The 74-year-old plays alongside rising star Khayalethu Anthony, almost half a century her junior: it is a meeting of opposites in age, gender and race. In that sense the brisk two-hander strikes a hopeful note for South Africa at a time when the prospect of a future without Nelson Mandela leaves many wondering if the?audacious, damaged and fantastical national experiment he bequeathed will long?outlast him.

But at the heart of the play is a brutal violation, a reminder that South Africa remains a?febrile place where, on average, 42 people are murdered daily, teenage girls are raped and stabbed to death, foreign nationals and striking mine workers die at the hands of the police and twitchy middle-class suburbs are fortified by high walls, electrified fences and security patrols. Suzman, born in Johannesburg but living in Hampstead, north London, her career oscillating between Britain and South Africa, is both audience and actor in that tragedy.

"The play is built on a murderous premise ? that's what makes it very South African," she says, relaxing one afternoon at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town. "This society lives on the edge and people shrug it off because they have to. A lot of shoulder-shrugging has to go on. 'Well, that's how we live here,' they say. One's shock level changes. I come here and for the first week I'm back in South Africa, I'm constantly shocked ? and then you, too, start shrugging as you get on with your day. Death is a daily diet, and then you get used to it ? that in itself is shocking. I find myself being shocked at myself, at swallowing this myth that we must accept it."

It is often said that everybody here knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone, who has been a victim of violent crime. For Suzman it was only one degree of separation. In 2006 she was in Cape Town directing Hamlet when one of the actors, Brett Goldin, along with his friend Richard Bloom, was shot in the head execution-style after a night out. The rest of the cast was "completely traumatised", she recalls. "I've worked in a play with someone who was murdered, which just doesn't happen in England. It doesn't happen that someone turns up for rehearsal one day and then isn't there for the next because they've been wiped out. It's like Chicago in the 1930s or something ? it's ludicrous." Goldin, 28, was supposed to get his big break when the production transferred to Stratford-upon-Avon. With a nod to Hamlet's lines: "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/ That he should weep for her?", Suzman laments: "A boy murdered for nothing, for Hecuba, one Saturday night in Cape Town. He had been due to meet his mother for brunch on Easter Sunday, and nobody doesn't turn up to meet their mother for brunch. He didn't, and so she knew instantly something was amiss."

Now Suzman is back in this beautiful yet scabrous city on an intensely personal journey: Solomon and Marion, written by Lara Foot and heading to the Assembly in Edinburgh in August, was directly inspired by Goldin's killing and hinges on a?similar incident. "I live every single night that unspeakable few seconds before you, too, are going to be cast into everlasting blackness," Suzman says. "It's not really copable with. Since there were two of?them, I?can't help imagining who was first, and we will never know. That knowledge in the remaining second of your life must be? I have no words for it."

'Your shock level changes. Death is a?daily diet?: Janet Suzman and Khayalethu Anthony in Solomon and Marion

Born in 1939, the daughter of a well-to-do tobacco importer, Suzman was raised on a?farm in Natal province. At 20 she emigrated to Britain, lured by its reputation as a liberal "nirvana" free from the suffocating limits of the racial apartheid state. But even while her acting career flourished with the Royal Shakespeare Company, she kept going back. "I never lost my fascination with this land that I was born into," she reflects. "It is irritating, enormously flawed, a very lively place. It?has some of the best and the worst people in the whole world inhabiting its boundaries."

She is related to South African struggle royalty: her aunt Helen Suzman, an MP for 36 years, challenged discriminatory legislation and security laws introduced under white minority rule. She met Mandela once, at Helen's lunch table. "They were old sparring partners. She's one of the few people who could ring up and say: 'Nelson! What do you think about this or that?' He liked her audacity and her waywardness very much."

Suzman brought her Shakespearean pedigree to bear in 1987 by directing a multiracial Othello at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. "A black man is humiliated by a white thug: it was the perfect apartheid metaphor, it seemed to us. We did it as it was written." That included an interracial kiss just two years after the Immorality Act, outlawing sexual relations between black and white people, had been repealed. "There were seats banging up as people walked out. But it's a very sexual play ? there's no point in mincing matters, really. The wonderful thing about a person with a proper black skin playing Othello is that it doesn't smudge, so you can come to grips with each other. The Victorians had a big problem with make-up, as did the great Olivier: he couldn't really embrace Desdemona in case he got smudges on her like that. So we have the advantage there."

Just seven years later, apartheid was dead and Suzman voted for the first time in her life, at the South African High Commission in London. But as the 20th anniversary of that epochal election approaches, a tang of disenchantment is in the air. An underclass still lives in impoverished townships or informal settlements, often without proper sanitation; the number of shack dwellers has risen in the past decade to nearly 2 million. A third of the labour force is unemployed and schools are often compared unfavourably to apartheid education. South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world, and race still matters: white households' average income is six times higher than black households.

"What hasn't been done is terribly disappointing," Suzman says with a flash of her aunt's brimstone. "You come away from Cape Town airport and you think: no, please, those shacks ? I?mean, what are they doing? All that is going to take time, but it's just not fast enough for any of us. I don't suppose all this violence will ever be alleviated while people live such shit-awful lives. So the poverty gap is terrible, and worst of all, as it's so disappointing, is all?the corruption."

From politicians with their hands in the cookie jar to police routinely asking for bribes, corruption is widely cited as the greatest betrayal of Mandela's values. The unseemly scramble for government tenders has even given birth to a new word, tenderpreneur. Such is the rot, with protests over the non-delivery of everything from textbooks to toilets, that newspaper columns brim with Cassandras who claim to foresee the?foundations of the republic collapsing.

Suzman says bleakly: "That idea of a rainbow nation really slowly has dribbled and tarnished itself, a?little too fervently for our tastes. Nothing can ever stay that brilliant, of course not, but there is a terrible fear of its decline, there's no question. You don't know who to be angry at. The only thing about the old regime, which had the most overpopulated civil service in history probably, was that it seemed to be terribly efficient. Maybe they weren't, maybe that's also a myth, but things seemed to run better: potholes were filled, Eskom [the national power supplier] didn't have so many outs. But maybe that's rubbish."

For some, criticism of South Africa's black government by white citizens remains politically loaded. Race remains a distorting prism here. The death of Goldin, who was white, deservedly figured prominently and often in the media, including in a documentary by actor Sir Antony Sher, but thousands of black people are murdered each year with no memorial. Arguably Solomon and Marion, conceived by a white writer in Cape Town, a?city frequently labelled a bastion of white privilege, has a white character at its centre, with a black man as a mere satellite in orbit around her ? though Suzman strongly disagrees with this reading of the text.

Suspicious of political correctness, she is unapologetic about her race ? "I know more white people here who are doing good things for society in general than I do anywhere else on earth" ? and believes that Mandela's legacy of racial reconciliation is alive. "Kids in schools don't really see colour now. It gives me such a kick to see that happening. The mixing of races here is?pretty total: you see it all the time. Much more so than in Hampstead in London, where I?live, frankly. I had been used to other colours in my street since birth, but I think there is an awful lot of those British islands where that is not so."

Perhaps all is not lost, then. A black middle class is slowly but surely emerging. Even as the nation prepares to tell sad stories of the death of kings, the show will go on for South Africa's liberal constitution, robust judiciary and ebullient media. Just as it did for Suzman's Hamlet after the death of Goldin. "You realise, of course: the king is dead, long live the king. You say to yourself: why should the show go on? Well, because it must, because life has to assert itself over death, always. The show had to go on because the defeat of not doing it would have remained with all of us forever. There is that desire for life in everybody."

Solomon and Marion runs from 1-26 August at the?Edinburgh Festival Fringe in the Assembly Hall. To?book tickets, go to assemblyfestival.com

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2013/jul/21/south-africa-janet-suzman-theatre

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