Thirty-four years after they first appeared at the Royal Court, John Kani and Winston Ntshona are back with the famous play they co-devised with Athol Fugard. If anyone questions whether this graphic portrait of apartheid South Africa now feels like history, I would say that is precisely its value: it offers a living testament to the bureaucratic inhumanity of a peculiarly vile system.
It starts, with deceptive gaiety, with a brilliant monologue by Kani in which he plays a Port Elizabeth photographer called Styles. Harking back to his days on the Ford factory floor, Styles recalls preparations for a visit by the company's American owner. What this superbly evokes is the false image of South Africa often projected to the outside world: the hands are expected to sing and smile as they work at the specially slowed-down assembly line.
Fugard has admitted that he supplied the basic dramatic structure; and in the second half, as we learn how a visitor to Styles's studio has exchanged his identity with that of a corpse, the play acquires an overly carpentered neatness.
What the piece specifically evokes is the permanent sense of entrapment. When Ntshona's character questions the plausibility of assuming a new identity, he is reminded that "your number is more important than your name". Whether he goes to school, church, work or hospital, he will always be a walking set of numerals; and, without his Native Identity number, he ceases to exist.
But, though the play attacks a dehumanising political credo, the paradox then and now is that its two actors brim with eccentric life. Kani switches easily from the buoyant photographer of the first half to a pragmatic survivalist in the second. And Ntshona movingly asserts his unquenchable individuality in defiance of the reductive pass-laws. The highest tribute one can pay to Aubrey Sekhabi's Baxter Theatre Capetown production is that its two performers reveal an energy undimmed by time and their own experience of apartheid.
· Until April 4. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
