Next month marks 25 years since South Africa’s heady first democratic elections, which means there is a raft of plays about that fine but troubled country around at the moment. The dramatic laureate of apartheid-era South Africa was Athol Fugard and Blood Knot (1961) is one of his earliest works. An opening note would flag up that this is a two-hander, which is a lot to sustain for two and a half hours; too often this is slow-moving, rather heavy-going stuff.
We’re in Fugard’s customary setting of Port Elizabeth, where half-brothers Morrie (Nathan McMullen) and Zach (Kalungi Ssebandeke) live out repetitive, circumscribed, almost Beckettian days in the shack that they share. It’s a frustratingly context-free room but what defines and divides the brothers is their respective skin tones: Morrie is light-skinned and Zach dark. When the restless Zach acquires a white female pen friend, long-simmering fraternal tensions slowly emerge.
Matthew Xia’s production, beset with wavering accents, fails fully to navigate the nuances of the rigid — yet often ridiculously random — rules of apartheid-era South Africa, in whose tortuous classification the brothers would be labelled “Coloured”.
This is a crucial hindrance to our full absorption in the very specific set of dilemmas the play delineates; Morrie can “pass as white”, which offers him possibilities that are deemed forever closed off to Zach.
McMullen and Ssebandeke give committed performances, without ever quite matching up to the characters as described by Fugard in his diary: he talks of “Zach’s envy and hate, Morrie’s crippling sense of guilt and responsibility”. Designer Basia Binkowska clads the auditorium in corrugated iron panels and scraps of fabric, to evoke a world where every cent, let alone rand, is hard won.
Until April 20 (020 8940 3633, orangetreetheatre.co.uk)
