“The Island” is one of the finest anti-apartheid plays ever penned and, some 50 years after its very risky premiere in Cape Town, this work by Athol Fugard and South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona now functions as a cautionary tale about the potentially devastating human consequences of incarceration.
In this intense 105-minute play, now in rare Chicago production at Court Theatre under the direction of Gabrielle Randle-Bent, two men named John (Kai Ealy) and Winston (Ronald Conner) are imprisoned on an unnamed island for the respective crimes of belonging to a banned organization and burning an official government passbook.
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The authors, of course, did not need to spell out for their original audience that the location in question was the notorious maximum security prison on Robben Island, four miles off the coast of South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was held between 1964 and 1982. It’s worth noting that when “The Island” first was produced at the Space Theatre in Cape Town (Fugard’s artistic home), Mandela was still there.
The play famously begins with a wordless series of Sisyphean actions as the two actors, answering to a whistle, perform a series of pointless physical tasks, moving sand and stones from one pile to another, indicative of authorities’ desire to engage in brutal psychological torture and break the will of the incarcerated.
We listen to the two men talk and go about their business and then plan a prison production of Sophocles’ “Antigone.” Their choice of material is driven by the Greek tragedy’s exploration of whether Creon’s insistence on the law of the state trumps Antigone’s determination to obey only a higher moral power. The two prisoners, of course, are sympathetic to the young revolutionary, grasping that their survival requires their belief in a superior kind of moral justice than the one under which they find themselves so profoundly repressed.
“The Island” has influenced a lot of subsequent plays; Antoinette Nwandu’s Broadway play “Pass Over” is just one example of how a younger writer has taken its blend of Beckettian absurdism and radicalism and applied it to contemporary American issues. But the mother play still holds up; it is about a specific set of circumstances in the early 1970s, for sure, but its metaphors of inequity, power and oppression are timeless.
On a set from Yeaji Kim that depicts the sun-stroked starkness of Robben Island (now a museum), Court’s production captures the requisite intensity. Ealy and Conner both dive courageously into the quotidian lives of their characters and their relationship is strong enough here to explore one of the play’s most important themes: the skill of the apartheid regime at turning one prisoner against another. In this case, Winston not only has to deal with the reality of his political imprisonment, likely for life, but he also has to maintain his happiness that John’s sentence has been commuted and he is getting out soon. The play understands how these men have to tend to their own intimate relationship, a key to their mutual survival and their strongest potential counterattack against the regime.
The note of hope in this play, and it is rightly centered in this unpretentious and powerful production, is that the human spirit is far harder to defeat than the body. This was a prescient theme, given that this prison’s most famous resident went on to become president of a changed South Africa.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “The Island” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Dec. 4
Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Tickets: $40.50-$82.50 at 773-753-4472 and courttheatre.org