John Kani, one of South Africa’s most celebrated actors, posed the questions rhetorically, with characteristic gravel-voiced resonance, while Antony Sher, another celebrated actor born in South Africa, looked on.
The subject: Kani’s new play, “Kunene and the King,” which opened at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, on April 3.
In “Kunene,” directed by Janice Honeyman, Kani, 76, and Sher, 69, reincarnate the black/white divide under apartheid that dominated their youth.
Kani, who grew up in a township outside the city of Port Elizabeth, began to act in 1965 with a group that included Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona. The three men began working on material together and wrote “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” and “The Island,” a pair of one-act plays that helped bring the realities of apartheid to the world; it won Kani and Ntshona a joint best actor Tony Award in New York in 1975.
When they returned to South Africa, they were arrested and placed in solitary confinement for several weeks. Ten years later, Kani lost an eye (he wears a prosthetic one) after a beating by police. He continued to write, and played South Africa’s first black Othello in a contentious 1987 production.
In post-apartheid years, he became the director of Johannesburg’s Market Theater, and he has recently appeared in “Captain America” and “Black Panther,” among other movies.
Sher grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Cape Town, and left South Africa at 19 to train as an actor in England. By the early 1980s, he was performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company; his breakthrough came in the title role of “Richard III” in 1984. He was awarded a knighthood in 2000.
“Kunene and the King,” produced by the RSC and Fugard Theater in Cape Town, is set in the present, 25 years after the end of apartheid — which did not, Kani suggests, mean the end of racism or injustice.
It tells the story of the relationship between Lunga Kunene, a black nurse taking care of Jack Morris, a famous white actor, who is terminally ill, but nonetheless preparing to play King Lear.
It’s the second time Kani and Sher have performed together; in 2008 and 2009 they played Caliban and Prospero in “The Tempest,” also directed by Honeyman.
Following a preview performance of “Kunene,” Kani and Sher talked about their relationships to South Africa, and Shakespeare as a unifying force. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: How long have you known each other?
Antony Sher: In 1995, I was part of a workshop run by the National Theater studio at the Market Theater in Johannesburg, and I remember many conversations and meals. We had known one another a bit before, but that was the real meeting.
John Kani: Tony was well-known in South Africa because he was this famous English actor. We were proud of him! Then in 2008 and 2009, we had the chance to work on “The Tempest.” During that time, I had an idea about a two-hander for us, and we talked about it. Life went on, I didn’t think about it, and then last year, the idea suddenly came back to me. I felt: We need to look at South Africa’s democracy. We are littered with incidents, issues and geographical segregation that prevent us from becoming a united society. I wanted to write a story about two men who seem to be happy with what’s going on, but when you bring them together, the rifts quickly surface.
Sher: Sorry to embarrass John, but he is one of my heroes, both as an actor and an activist during the bad old days. When he called last year, and said, “We once talked about this, would you read it?,” I was very excited.
Q: Do the different experiences of the black and white characters in the play have parallels with your own lives?
Kani: A good friend of mine, Barney Simon, once said you can’t write a play “about.” You must tell a story from personal experience. When that’s in front of you, all these things come in. How many times do we pretend to one another with a Colgate smile? I decided to put Lunga in Jack’s house, and see what surfaces.
Sher: John and I went in completely different directions. I left South Africa and my South African identity behind. My family was typical of white families at the time, almost ignorant about apartheid, which sounds impossible, but it was true. When I became politicized in England, I couldn’t believe that a Jewish family had made no comparisons between what had happened to them, with pogroms in Eastern Europe, and what was happening to black South Africans.
Life is a dangerous business and if it works out well, you mustn’t regret. But I celebrate the way it has come full circle, that John and I can be in this play together, marking a moment in South African history.
Q: Mr. Kani, what did you want to convey in the play? Is there a specific idea about what is happening as South Africa celebrates 25 years of democracy?
Kani: I was 51 when I voted for the first time in 1994, and I look at South Africa through those spectacles. I see a lot of progress, a lot of good. When I talk to my son, who was born in 1994, he sees so many things that were not fulfilled in the promises that were made. There are still many South Africans who think they had nothing to do with apartheid. But I am trying to talk about collective responsibility here.
Sher: What is clever in John’s writing is that making my character an actor lets you assume he will be a liberal man. But he lets seep through a lot of old apartheid views, and he isn’t overjoyed at sharing his home with a black man. Yet he depends upon and needs him so completely.
Kani: Shakespeare is the link between them, what brings them together, even if South African history and politics divides them. The kingdoms that Shakespeare writes about have their parallels in the kingdoms of Africa.
Q: What role can political theater play in South Africa today?
Kani: I still remember the moment when my teacher, Mr. Budaza, walked into class and said, “Today we are going to study ‘Julius Caesar,’ one of Shakespeare’s most important plays.” That moment, and [hearing] Mark Antony’s speech in Xhosa, are in this play. Shakespeare examines how democracy is built. In South Africa, now is the time for protest theater once more!
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.