The play Kunene & the King is being staged in South Africa for the first time after a successful international run.
Penned by renowned actor and playwright John Kani, it premiered to a sold-out house at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in the UK in 2019. Described as “rich, raw and shattering” (The Times), the play has impressed critics and audiences alike, and is listed among the top 10 best plays produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
It is proving to be as popular on the local scene, as its stint at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town has shown.
Set 25 years after the country’s ?rst post-apartheid democratic elections, Kunene & the King tackles head-on the personal implications of the supposed new equality.
This rich and raw exploration of race, class and politics will also be staged at The Adam Small Theatre Complex from 14 to 16 July 2022.
How does one put a nation’s history on stage? Kani, as formidable a writer as he is an actor, does it through a confrontation between two men who represent polarised perspectives on the South African experience.
Michael Richard plays Jack Morris, a cantankerous old actor who hopes to overcome severe liver cancer and get to Cape Town to play King Lear. Kani himself is Lunga Kunene, a retired carer assigned by an agency to tend this querulous thespian.
While claiming to be apolitical, Morris embodies the reflex attitudes of white supremacy and consistently, when talking to Kunene, refers to “you people”. Although refusing to be a spokesman, Kunene recounts how his own dreams of being a doctor were thwarted, not so much by his Soweto upbringing as by the vengefulness of “comrades” towards his storekeeper father for seeking to transcend the divisions of the apartheid era.
