My Children! My Africa!
Trafalgar Studios, London SW1
Written in 1989, as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa raged on, Athol Fugard’s play has a specific setting in one of the hated Bantu schools deemed suitable for the education of black children by the white government. Yet its great strength lies in the way that it still has urgent things to say more than 20 years after the end of the regime. It features Thami, a clever black boy, Isabel, an open-minded white girl, and Mr M, the teacher who hopes that bringing them together as a winning quiz team will strike a blow against apartheid. But this conflicts with Thami’s equally idealistic desire to fight for his freedom.
In this tense production for the Two Sheds theatre company, the directors, Roger Mortimer and Deborah Edgington, and the designer, Nancy Surman, set the action behind a cage of barbed wire. This is a war zone, with clearly marked doors for blacks and whites. But it is also a debating chamber, and within its claustrophobic space, the action and the arguments unfold with tragic inevitability. Fugard, as usual, scrupulously allows both sides equal weight.
In Nathan Ives-Moiba’s dazzling performance, you see all of Thami’s goodness and desperation. As Mr M, Anthony Ofoegbu powerfully portrays both the teacher’s lonely weakness and his belief that it is words, not stones or bullets, that get inside armoured cars and change people’s minds.
