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Playwrights => Athol Fugard discussion => Topic started by: Iain Fisher on February 12, 2009, 05:09:07 PM

Title: John Kani
Post by: Iain Fisher on February 12, 2009, 05:09:07 PM
In The Telegraph, 11 Feb 2009, Dominic Cavendish talks to John Kani.

Cavendish describes Kani as " key figure in the protest movement of the Seventies, he co-authored, with Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona, the anti-Apartheid classics Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island."

John Kani "... rattles off just a handful of shows he participated in down the years that got him into hot water, among them Euripides’s Bacchae, Camus’s Les Justes and Othello in 1987, when he became the first black actor to play the Moor in South Africa. He was hauled in for questioning.
'You kissed Desdemona on the mouth,’ the policeman said. 'Where did you get that from in the text?’
'I said, 'In England a very good actor called Laurence Olivier wore black polish on his face for the part – and if he touched Desdemona, it would smudge. I don't have that problem.’..."

"...In 1985, Kani’s brother was murdered by police while reading a protest poem over a grave, and Kani himself survived an assassination attempt that year. 'I had 11 stab wounds and was left for dead...'"

The link is here
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/dominiccavendish/4589941/The-Tempest-How-a-legend-of-African-theatre-was-stabbed-11-times.html (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/dominiccavendish/4589941/The-Tempest-How-a-legend-of-African-theatre-was-stabbed-11-times.html)