Lantern's "The Island' (4th review)

Why revive a prison play about a regime that no longer exists?

Athol Fugard answers the question in The Island, written in 1973 at the height of South Africa's Apartheid regime to describe its notorious Robben Island prison. The play's central incident— virtually its only one— is an inmate production of Sophocles' Antigone, the world's first play about judicial confinement. Sophocles' Athens is far removed from us, but the contest between private responsibility and public law, and, more broadly, between oppression and resistance, remains very much with us.

The trigger for Fugard's play, co-authored with John Kani (now chairman of South Africa's National Arts Council) and Winston Ntshona, was an actual prison performance of Antigone put on by Norman Ntshinga, who had collaborated with Kani and Ntshona in a 1965 production of the play in New Brighton. Kani and Ntshona were participants in a theater company founded by Fugard, and, although not imprisoned themselves, they gave their names ("John" and "Winston") to the play's central characters in solidarity with their colleague, who is himself referred to as the unseen occupant of an adjoining cell.

You might say that this play almost had to be written, as a letter to Ntshinga himself. It was also, clearly, an act of moral defiance that could have resulted in imprisonment for all concerned.

Dumb show

The play's single long act takes place, in proper Aristotelian style, in a single day; it's as bare as possible in every respect except language. John (played by Frank X) and Winston (U. R.) are the only characters seen; their ragged prison uniforms are identical; the space of the play is almost entirely confined to a square platform representing the cell they share; the only props— apart from a mop-like wig, a pair of weights, and Creon's "uniform"— are the bare mats on which they sleep.

Even language is spared for the play's first ten minutes (rather longer, I thought, than necessary), during which John and Winston perform their backbreaking physical labor in dumb show.

John is seized with the vision of performing Antigone, despite his lack of professional theater experience. Certainly the younger (and, in this production, the physically larger) Winston has none, and the assignment of the role of Antigone to him provides some of the play's few notes of humor.

Amusing the Nazis

Nor is it clear how a play performance fits into the prison's administrative regimen, although we may remember how it amused the Nazis to organize musical performances in the concentration camps.

A more serious issue appears when John is unexpectedly informed that his sentence has been commuted on appeal to three months. This stroke of good fortune necessarily transforms his relationship to Winston. But it also suggests the extreme dubiousness of performing the play.

John should clearly comport himself as a model prisoner from this point on unless he wants to jeopardize his release. It is equally clear that, nearly broken by his labor, he's not a good bet to survive his full term of imprisonment.

Politically correct

John doesn't show much sensitivity himself in wondering why Winston has turned on him, and certainly less intelligence than is needed to think up a performance of Antigone. That the formerly reluctant Winston is now eager to see the performance come off should make him suspicious too. But Fugard's play hurries on without giving the issue further thought, and concludes with an affirmation of solidarity between the two men that is far more politically correct than dramatically convincing.

Frank X. and U. R. were both exceptional in their roles, and Janet Embree's lighting and Daniel Perelstein's sound enhanced the spare production. Blocking was a problem in so confined a theatrical space; and with both actors essaying South African accents, the dialogue was sometimes difficult to hear.

Nonetheless, and with all the unresolved script issues, The Island delivers not only historical significance but contemporary relevance— if not necessarily to South African audiences then certainly to American ones.

World's incarceration champ

As my BSR colleague Jackie Atkins points out in her review, Guantánamo Bay is the Robben Island of our day. Gitmo prisoners, held for the most part in indefinite detention with scant prospect of any trial, civilian or military, must at this point be accounted political prisoners under the standards of international law.

Closer to home, America as a whole has become the world's most conspicuous example of a carceral society, with more prisoners per capita than any other nation on Earth.

Disproportionately, too, these prisoners are persons of color. White-dominated South Africa never locked up more than a tiny fraction of the black population that now fills America's penitentiaries and constitutes one of its largest for-profit industries.

The Lantern audience stood to applaud the performers at the end of The Island, and deservedly so. But maybe it would have done better to file out silently in thought about what the image of two black men in a world where imprisonment is the norm for a sizable proportion of the African-American male population says about us.♦


To read another review of The Island by Alaina Mabaso, click here.
To read another review by Marshall A. Ledger, click here.
To read a related comment by Jackie Atkins, click here.