Statements: Three Plays

by Athol Fugard

(Sizwe Bansi is Dead; The Island; Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act.)

Genres: Plays, Drama, Africa, Fiction, South Africa, Theatre, Politics

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Athol Fugard was a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright. Acclaimed in 1985 as "the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world" by Time, he published more than thirty plays. He was best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system of apartheid, some of which have been adapted to film. His novel Tsotsi was adapted as a film of the same name, which won an Academy Award in 2005. It was directed by Gavin Hood.
Fugard also served as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.
Fugard received many awards, honours, and honorary degrees, including the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver from the government of South Africa in 2005 "for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre". He was also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Fugard was honoured in Cape Town with the opening in 2010 of the Fugard Theatre in District Six. He received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sizwe Banzi Is Dead is playing at McCarter and it is amazing. It is directed by John Kani who was one of the original actors when it premiered in Capetown, South Africa in 1972. The play subsequently won the London Drama Critics Award and 3 Tonys. The play is about Apartheid but also about identitity. The opening and closing scenes take place in Styles' Photography Studio where Robert Zwelinzima, nee Sizwe Banzi, is getting a photograph to send to his wife back in his home town. He tells the story of his change in identity as he writes a letter to his wife on the back of the photograph. The intervening scenes in this one act play re-enact that story. My favorite quote: "We own nothing except ourselves". This world and its laws allows us nothing except ourselves There is nothing we can leave behind when we die except the memory of ourselves."

[ML Character · Rating 4 out of 5]

not a surprise- but ugh, gut punch plays about the egregiousness that was Apartheid. Also, note to self: The Island has Antigone inside it as a sort of play within a play. Worth keeping in mind for teaching!? For some reason the lightest play is first and the most depressing one last. Bummer.

[Michelle Zhou · Rating 3 out of 5]

rating this book lower because i dont like being forced to read things i am initially bored with and i generally rate books on enjoyment. the first half of the book, with styles, was quite confusing and a bit boring but when sizwe was introduced, i found myself more invested. i also think the play was an extremely powerful, artful protest against apartheid in south africa and there were lots of important themes

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sizwe Bansi in Dead: This play is about the difficulties of having or maintaining an identity under apartheid restrictions, but simultaneously how the amorphous link between identity and the black or coloured body can allow a kind of self re-definition. In the second half of the play, we follow Size Bansi, who has come to seek work in the city of Port Elizabeth, but is being deported back to King William's Town where there is no work. He has to go because that's what the official stamped in his passbook, but he wants to stay in the city. When his friend Buntu finds a dead body, Buntu realizes they can steal the dead man's passbook with his permission to find work in the city, and they can paste Sizwe's picture in. All Sizwe has to do is become Robert Zwelinzima. In other words, in order to stay in the city and find work, he needs to give up himself, his own identity. At the same time, however, because white officials don't really look at black people, just at the passbook, this is a loophole opened by the system through which Sizwe (now Robert) can achieve his goals and support his family.
The problem with Sizwe Bansi is Dead is the structure. It really is a play of two halves, with all the action I've just described in the second half. The first half is set in Styles' photo studio, and he narrates some important events from his life, his photography career, and his life philosophy. While Styles is a really entertaining character and this first half does introduce some of the themes the second half will develop, the two halves are only tenuously linked.
https://youtu.be/Ke7OhLnyBWE

The Island: This is a very loose adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone, featuring two Robben Island prisoners--John and Winston, performed by John Kani and Winston Ntshona, respectively--who are preparing for and giving a performance of The Trial of Antigone. Across their rehearsals and discussions of Antigone, John and Winston establish a number of links between their experiences and hers. As political prisoners, they can identify with Antigone's resistance to an unjust state law. And in Winston's life sentence--the hopelessness of which is highlighted by John winning an appeal and getting the news he'll be released in three months--he identifies with the eerie space between life and death than Antigone occupies as she's sealed inside the cave. Winston's final performance of the character, with her defiant resistance to Creon is transfigured into Winston's defiance of the apartheid system and the brutality of the prison because he removes his costume to speak the final lines as himself, speaking not to Creon but to the South African authorities.
https://youtu.be/jdtjdfZZG24

Statements After an Arrest Under the Immortality Act: I'm not a big fan of this play. I see its political message and some of the formal experimentation it's trying to do, but for me it is just too fragmented to persuasively hold together as an artistic text. The basic storyline is about a white woman and a coloured man who are arrested for having a sexual relationship in 1960s South Africa. Under apartheid, interracial sex was prohibited, and so when a neighbor reports that the coloured man is going at night into the library where the white woman works, the police investigate and arrest them. The first half of the play--with just the man and the woman--is relatively naturalistic and realistic as the two lovers discuss their relationship, the situation in South Africa, the drought, his educational goals, etc. However, in the second half of the play, the form shifts to a kind of nightmare-dream sequence when the policeman enters the story. I see where this shift represents a rupture in the characters' lives that introduces a profound change, but for my money the dream sequence approach just doesn't really hold up aesthetically. There are a lot of bits and pieces, but I don't think they cohere well.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found "Statements", a collection of three one act plays, to be quite a rollicking read. During his career honours and awards poured down on Athol Fugard. He received honorary de degrees from Yale, Princeton, and the University of Witwatersrand. He was given a Tony Award for lifetime achievement and won many other theatrical awards. As the Apartheid regime of South Africa that Fugard spent his life attacking fell in 1994, his works no longer belong to any current political debate. Surprisingly they have lost little of their impact. Blunt instruments it would seen have a place in literature.
Fugard was a strident polemicist who took a Brechtian stance towards the theatre; that-is-to-say, he wrote for those who agreed with his political stance. He stopped at nothing to provoke his adversaries and rigorously avoided any form of subtlety.
I was surprised as I began the third play, "Statements after an Arrest Under the Immortality Act" that the lead male role had been played by Ben Kingsley during the play's opening run in 1974 at the Royal Court Theatre of London. As the curtain lifts, Kingsley's character is lying naked on the floor of a public library in Bontrug, South Africa. A white woman, also naked, lies next to him. Kingsley's character will remain naked for two-thirds of the play until the police arrive to arrest him for having made love to a woman of a different race. The impact on the audience in 1974 must have been tremendous. I personally am glad to have read this play rather than to have attened a performance.
For those who feel as I do that in the third decade of the 21st century he one reads Fugard's works for what they say about an historical era, the opening play "Sizwe Bansi is Dead" is probably the most valuable of the three works in the volume because it provides a very detailed description of the "pass" system used to control the movements of blacks during the time of apartheid.
Those looking for literary qualities will probably prefer "The Island" where the inmates of a prison stage "Antigone" by Sophocles. This play describes the despair of incarceration and raises questions about the pertinence of literature in a world of political injustice.

[Scarlett Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

W: Why am I here?

J: You put your head on the block for others.

W: Fuck the others.

J: Don’t say that! Remember our ideals…

W: Fuck our ideals…

J: No Winston…our slogans, our children’s freedom…

W: Fuck slogans, fuck politics…fuck everything, John. Why am I here? I’m jealous of your freedom, John. I also want to count. God gave me ten fingers, but what do I count? My life? How do I count it, John? One…one…one…one…Help me brother!...one…

[John has sunk to the floor, helpless in the face of the other man’s torment and pain. Winston almost seems to bend under the weight of the life stretching ahead of him on the Island. For a few seconds he lives in silence with his reality. then slowly straightens up. He turns and looks at John. When he speaks again, it is the voice of a man who has come to terms with his fate, massively compassionate.]

[Jimmy Kindree · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are three great plays, each quite different. I read these because colleagues where I teach often do "The Island" with students. After reading it, I can see why - the play uses the tools of drama really creatively to comment on a really serious subject matter. But I also really liked "Sizwe Bansi Is Dead" and "Statements." I don't know enough of the historical context to understand all the significance, especially in "Statements," but all three of these plays show the oppression Black people faced under Apartheid rule, its terrible consequences, and possible modes for maintaining dignity and humanity under that oppression. I might do one of these with students sometime. Regardless, though, I'm glad to have read these!

[Kefi · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Say what you want but you NEVER say it with violence!”
― Gerard Way

Athol Fugard is a South African playwright and author who is well known for writing protest plays that shine a spotlight on the injustices and effects of racism within South Africa.

Statements: three plays is a collection of two workshop productions (Sizwe Bansi is Dead; and The Island) that were devised by Fugard in conjunction with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, and also includes a ‘new’ play, Statements After an Arrest Under The Immorality Act, which was first performed in 1974.

The common theme that runs through all three plays is their portrayal of the unrighteous system of Apartheid that plagued South Africa during 1948 and 1994, as well as the impact that the system had on the lives of the people of the country. Each play looks at the lives of ordinary South Africans living under this system of racial oppression.

Sizwe Bansi is Dead features three characters: Styles (who, ironically, is in the memorial business – i.e. photography), Bantu, and Sizwe; and it deals with the impact that the Pass Laws, that were implemented in South Africa to limit the movements of black people, had on their lives. Certain areas, in South Africa, were earmarked as ‘white only’ areas and any black person who was in these areas had to have permission to be there (the permission was indicated in their pass books - which plays a critical role in this play). More often than not, the reason for a black person being in a white’s only area was to perform labour, which is the situation that the eponymous character finds himself in… until he loses his job and is faced with the problem of having to return home (where there is little to no work and a family that needs to be fed, or break the law and remain in an area where he is legally not permitted to be and face fines and imprisonment).

“’I’ve got wonderful news for you,’ he says. ‘Sizwe Bansi, in a manner of speaking, is dead!’”

The scene where Bantu and Sizwe leave the shabeen is rather odd in how it is introduced and it is easy to feel annoyed while reading it, but it is perhaps one of the most important scenes in the play. There is no (in your face) violence in this play, but the play relies rather on humour and moral questioning (i.e. what makes an action morally reprehensible) to illustrate the horrors that many of the oppressed people had to endure. It illustrates poignantly the bureaucratic nuisances that black people had to endure just to survive. Apartheid was essentially a system that forced many people to make the choice of dying in order to live.

If you’ve ever read Long Walk to Freedom you can’t help but smile at the parallels between Mandela’s experience, and John and Winston’s experience in The Island (first performed in 1973)! This is a dual character play and it focuses on the lives of two political prisoners who are cell mates (Winston and John) on Robben Island. It highlights the mundane existence of the lives of the prisoner’s – digging holes in the sand, as a form of physical labour, and then emptying the wheelbarrow full of sand into the other man’s hole; arguing or sleeping in their cell. But the characters also seem to share a bond beyond a physical sense as they constantly provide each other with moral support and keep each other sane (to an extent). Then one of them receives news that they will be released soon as a result of a reduced sentence… now the other prisoner must learn to survive without the other! This all takes place amidst preparations for a play that they must both put on for the other prisoners and warders – Sophocles’ Antigone. Many more parallels can be draw between the situation that Antigone finds herself in (defying the law to do what she believes is morally just) and the situation that the political prisoners find themselves in (doing what they believe to be morally justifiable but illegal). A play within a play, many lessons to be gleaned from that!

Statements After an Arrest Under The Immorality Act, as the title suggests, focuses on the Immorality Act (an Act which prohibited adultery, attempted adultery, or related immoral acts between non-white people and white people). After spending what seems like an eternity engaged in an impassioned dialogue about life, love, and everything else that’s unfair, a mixed race couple are caught, lying naked, together, by the Apartheid police, in the comfort of their own home (the horror of it all)! The last part of the play reads like a tragic poetic epilogue. I had to read it more than once to truly grasp the essence of what was being communicated (I still don’t know if I have). The language, and the constant repetition of words and sentences… it was all very dramatic. I found the play a bit boring to read, but the message of the absurdity behind outlawing love between two consenting adults is one that reigns true even today and cannot be ignored.

Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona are literary geniuses, so reading the plays like you would read a novel is manageable. But the plays are better suited for the stage. It’s like Fugard says, “In all three of these plays the writer provided us with a mandate in terms of which the actors then went on to work”. These plays aren’t meant to be read but experienced. But until you can experience any of these plays at a theatre near you, grab a copy of Statements and enjoy!

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very, very strange. The play within the play is by far the most interesting part of the book.

[Elly Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Massive artistic potential and creativity allowed.

[JuditCli · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Waiting for Godot and Of Mice and Men had a child in South Africa so he could talk about Apertheid, this would be it.

[Ciarán · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three beautifully illustrative and depressing stories.

[Gabriel Weaver · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I was too tired when I read these, but they felt much less concise than "Master Harold . . ."

[Simon Levy · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of his best

directed for One Act Theatre in San Francisco

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 plays about Apartheid:

'Sizwe Bansi is Dead' is a bit obvious plot-wise, but seems more significant for the small theater as a medium: while posing for a picture, a character narrates what he will later write to his wife on the back of the photo, then acts out the events in the letter, which includes he and another "acting" out what they'll say if/when questioned. Then unwinds its meta rabbit hole, ending somewhat abruptly.

'The Island' (Antigone) is a pretty powerful piece about two prison cellmates, with a play within a play. Also ends somewhat abruptly.

'Statements' is about a forbidden cross-race affair, with strobe light effects to simulate incriminating photos taken at the arrest, amid the voice over of their testimony, which pretty well describe the first intimate contact of any/every relationship, despite the pride/shame of the cultural imbalances between them. Also a strong piece, and one might say this too ends a bit abruptly.

[Brendan Cheney · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are three Athol Fugard plays here. Sizwe Bansi is Dead is amazing. I saw it performed at the BAM. The performance was really good - although a little slow at times. Reading it after having seen it was amazing. It is such a powerful play.

I read The Island in undergrad and re-read it recently. It is an intense play - and the tie in to Antigone is great.

The weakest of the three is Statements. Since I don't have any history with this one, maybe I just need to read it again to really get it. But first time through, it was only okay.

In general, these works show the power of Apartheid South Africa art.

[Garrett Zecker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plays about identity and place in society. These are interesting texts, of which it was Sizwe that I focused on the most. The imagery of the camera and the interaction of the two forces on the two different parallel characters is interesting. One is a man who wanted to change his life in search for a better experience with his fellow man, and the other is a man who is in search for change so he can survive. The man he was is dead, and now he is something new, pure, and is excelling in a society where there are none of the other boundaries that plagued his life. Interesting approach, albeit a bit old fashioned for today's audience...

[Rachelle Urist · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a powerful play, but the sustained nudity still bothers me - though not as much now as in the old days, and it's less assaultive on the page than on the stage. I'd forgotten that Ben Kingsley created the role of MAN in STATEMENTS. He played opposite Yvonne Bryceland, whom I never got to see on stage. Haven't re-read the other two plays in this collection yet. I remember seeing SIZWE BANZI IS DEAD in NY in 1968. It was powerful, though it needed a bit of pruning. THE ISLAND is a fabulous play. I look forward to re-reading it.

[Pamela J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had the great fortune of being able to see John Kani's direction of Siwe at Princeton in January 2015. His son had a leading role.
What a powerful play. A moving adaptation for the 21st century, which shows it is still relevant.

[AmyKBell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read the collaboratively developed play "The Island" from this book and loved it.

[Mags · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense and absolutely brilliant. Fugard really strikes at the core of humanity with his plays.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Demolishes apartheid laws with gentle humor and warmth, quintessentially South African.