It's impossible not to warm to John Kani. As we know from Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island, he has an immense stage presence that combines gravitas and passion. And, even if his first 100-minute, solo stage play is overly schematic, it offers a vivid, first-hand account of the tensions within the new South Africa.
Kani's structure is classically simple. Sipho, a 63-year-old Port Elizabeth librarian, is preparing the funeral of his activist brother, Temba, who died in English exile. But the first of several shocks for Sipho and daughter Thando comes with the arrival of his niece from London: instead of the expected coffin, she comes bearing her father's cremated remains. And this is just the prelude to a series of cultural conflicts, exposures of family fissures and revelations about Temba's moral and political defects.
The message is clear: truth and reconciliation is a process that has to begin at home. Sipho burns with sibling rivalry towards his privileged brother who had the education, fame and sexual success he was denied. But, just as his daughter argues that revenge against whites is no solution to South Africa's problems, so Sipho has to learn to acknowledge, and then forgive, his brother's sins.
At its best, Kani's writing is full of throwaway insights. "I hate going to the airport - a lot of white people and policemen" is a line that says a lot about the surviving divisions inside modern, enfranchised South Africa. But the play's big flaw is that the home truths about the tarnished Temba are too overtly signalled. From the moment Sipho tells us that, even as a child, Temba pinched his toy bus you can foresee the climax.
Kani's political honesty, however, overcomes his technical defects. And, in Janice Honeyman's lovingly detailed production, Kani himself massively and expertly embodies his hero's contradictions. His Sipho is an emotional conservative who demands radical progress, an angry revenge-seeker who learns the need for forgiveness. But this is a play that moves one as much for what it says as the way it says it: that progress is only possible once you confront the wounding ravages of the past.
· Until February 24. Box office: 020-7722 9301. Then touring
