Amaka Umeh proves she’s one of the best actors of her generation in ‘Sizwe Banzi is dead’ at Soulpepper Theatre

Sizwe Banzi is Dead

By Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu. Playing at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Tank House Lane, through June 18. Soulpepper.ca and 416-866-8666.

Last week, I saw three once-in-a-lifetime performances in the span of as many days, and two of them were by the same person.

Hot on the heels of Sean Arbuckle’s searingly funny, deeply moving performance as a dying AIDS patient in “Casey and Diana” at the Stratford Festival, I skedaddled back to Toronto to see Soulpepper Theatre’s production of the modern South African classic “Sizwe Banzi is Dead.”

The show features a jaw-dropping turn by Amaka Umeh in the roles of Styles and Buntu, a bravura doubling that’s prescribed in the script and which reflects the play’s focus on split identities.

Umeh’s performances are staggeringly good in their own right, and she is beautifully supported by Tawiah M’Carthy in Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu’s note-perfect production.

What makes Umeh’s presence in the show even more notable is that she’s a female and gender-fluid actor playing male roles, one of the best actors of her generation stepping up to an acting challenge and triumphing — as Umeh did last year when she played Stratford’s first Black Hamlet.

The play, created by white playwright Athol Fugard and Black actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, premiered in 1972 during the apartheid regime. It dared to critique, through a sometimes comic parable, the injustices of that regime — and to a mixed Black and white audience, no less, revolutionary for the time. The actors were arrested after the premiere performance and Kani was kept in solitary confinement for 23 days.

Tindyebwa Otu has staged the play in a traverse setting, with two banks of seating looking down onto Ken Mackenzie’s open-sided set. The play opens with Umeh as Styles opening up his photography shop for a day’s work, setting out his A-frame sign and chatting brightly to the audience. This Styles is an antic fellow, a showman with a rolling repertoire of anecdotes he delivers with a little hop and bow here, a knowing wink there.

He sits down to read the headlines, which prompt stories — about the hypocrisies of the white owners at the Ford plant where he used to work; about his battle to banish cockroaches from his studio when he first opened it. He points out photos on his walls and remembers the experience of taking them.

This material sets up, in an expertly light manner, a social context in which Black workers are called boy and monkey by their white bosses and held in place by opaque administrative and bureaucratic structures, in particular the identity book system in which all Black and “coloured” citizens had to carry a photo ID which severely limited their capacity for travel and work. Taking identity book photos keeps Styles’s business going.

M’Carthy enters, playing a hesitant customer in an ill-fitting suit who says his name is Robert Zwelinzima. In fact, he is the title character, Sizwe Banzi — and the reasons he’s changed his name and needs a photo are revealed in a series of flashbacks cued by bursts of light from Styles’s camera.

In the flashbacks Umeh reappears as Buntu, an enterprising neighbour who takes Sizwe in and, after a night of drinking, crafts the plan for the swapped identity. Tindyebwa Otu’s control of shifting mood and pace are superb: she stages this portion of the action around the exterior of the shop setting, with Rava Javanfar’s lighting effectively suggesting the yellow glow of street lamps. Buntu makes a grisly discovery which contains the potential for a liberating scheme, and the transition from woozy drunkenness to the two men talking themselves sober as the scheme comes together is brilliantly convincing.

M’Carthy’s portrayal of Sizwe, beaten down by the system but still hopeful for a better life for his family, is winning, his brilliant smile providing brief glimpses of the light still within.

Umeh’s playing of Buntu is as indelible as her Styles, deeply rooted in physical and emotional detail. There’s a sequence where Styles gets dressed for the evening out, buttoning his shirt, picking his hair, all the time chatting to Sizwe, and the thoughtful, suave confidence of the movement builds character alongside Umeh’s line readings and the text itself.

The connection and chemistry as Umeh and M’Carthy work together is profound. In Tindyebwa Otu’s hands the storytelling is crystal-clear and the tone always just light enough, trusting the audience to interpret the political commentary lying underneath.

And shining through it all are Umeh’s outstanding performances. Female-identifying actors playing big-name male roles in Shakespeare is not new, but casting across or without recognition of gender in other classic and modern plays feels more unprecedented, and opens up opportunities for non-binary and gender-fluid performers as well as traditionally gendered ones.

That’s a bigger conversation. Right now the only thing anyone should be talking about is this show and the great performances in it.

Karen Fricker is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @KarenFricker2