Artworks

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company is being featured in this year's Melbourne International Arts Festival. They've been to Australia twice before -- in Perth in 2001, and back in 1976 in Sydney, Canberra, and at the Adelaide Festival. And while Merce Cunningham was shocking audiences at the Adelaide Festival, a play by the South African writer Athol Fugard also featured on the program, a two-hander called Sizwe Banzi is Dead.

A new production of the play is back in Australia, this time at the Melbourne Arts Festival. It's directed by the world famous Peter Brook, and this version is performed in French, with English surtitles. Sizwe Banzi is Dead is the story of a young man set during the height of the apartheid regime -- when every black South African over the age of 16 had to carry an identity passbook.

Sizwe Banzi has got a problem with his, and in an attempt to get the required papers, he assumes the identity of a dead man. According to Peter Brook, with the number of refugees on the rise worldwide it's also a story for our time.

The play was written by Athol Fugard along with two black actors, Winston Ntshona and John Kani. They were in the first production, in 1972, that went on to tour the world. And it's recently been performed again in Johannesburg, with those two original actors. You can see the Peter Brook production of Sizwe Banzi Is Deadin Melbourne this week. Then it goes to Geelong and Bendigo; then it's got seasons in Adelaide and Sydney.

Guests

Malcolm Purkey
Artistic director, Market Theatre, Johannesburg

Pticho Womba Konga
Actor

Presenter

Amanda Smith

Story Researcher and Producer

Debra McCoy

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