Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
Kunene
And The King
Ambassadors
Theatre
January-March 2020
The primary attraction of
this Royal Shakespeare Company production is the opportunity to watch two
personable and accomplished actors – John Kani and Antony Sher – operating
with the ease and assurance of polished veterans. The play itself is
involving and thought-provoking, but not especially original.
Kunene And The King falls
into a recognisable sub-genre of two-character plays, that might be called
the Patient And Carer Odd Couple. Typically a curmudgeonly invalid is
assigned a carer that seems totally inappropriate – too young, too cheery,
too provocative of the patient's prejudices. And then, with the
inevitability of a romantic comedy, they bridge the gap and develop a
friendship that benefits both of them.
This variant on the pattern,
written by John Kani, sets the white patient and black carer in modern
South Africa, with both old enough to remember and have been shaped by the
apartheid era. So one new element Kani adds to the formula – race, and
specifically race in the South African context – inevitably gives the play
political and social resonances.
But these larger issues keep
pulling the play away from its natural focus on the personalities of the
two men, and there is a constant tension in Kunene And The King between
what sometimes feel like two separate plays vying for our attention.
Somewhat more successfully
integrated is a thematic and metaphoric invocation of Shakespeare. The
patient, who is dying of liver cancer, is an actor (not a particularly
good actor, judging from occasional demonstrations, contributing to the
play's underlying good humour).
He keeps himself alive with
what he half-knows are impossible plans to act King Lear, and the two men
spend various moments in the play studying and discussing the text.
This takes them and the play
in two resonant directions. The black man's cultural inheritance makes it
difficult for him to understand or accept some characterisations and plot
points (He shouldn't give away his inheritance), forcing the white man,
and us, to consider why we do accept them. And the parallels of a man
facing the waning of his powers serves as a guide to the dying actor.
For all this, the play is
still bound by the conventions of its genre and simply has little room for
originality. We know from the moment the two men meet where the play is
going, and it goes there with only the occasional slight diversion.
What is not inevitable, and
what is therefore particularly satisfying for an audience, is the smooth
authority and confidence each of the actors brings to the play, in roles
that may very well have been written with them in mind.
Antony Sher is an actor of
broad effects and emotional nakedness, who movingly conveys the anguish,
heroism and occasional ridiculousness of the man fighting physical pain
and decay while trying desperately to deny his own knowledge of the
inevitable.
As a performer John Kani
brings a quiet authority and dignity to his roles, while allowing the
glimpse of a tension within. His strongest moments in this play are not
when the man's accumulated anger at his patient's insults or racism in
general bursts out, but when we watch the character will himself to regain
control and become calm.
Racism is evil. The fact that South Africa's escape from one evil only opened it to others is tragic. But this is a play about two older men finding a friendship as they face the death of one of them.
And it is that personal story, and the skill with which the two actors bring it alive, that Kunene And The King is really about.
Gerald
Berkowitz
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