It seems fortuitous that Woza Albert! has been restaged at a time when our political landscape is often perceived to be lacking a leader of moral integrity. The title isn’t only a call for a Struggle stalwart to rise from the dead but a moral regeneration of the leadership. This is articulated via the fantasy, and then realisation, of the emergence of a powerful saviour who promises to overturn and eradicate a pervasive immoral system. Naturally, at the time the play was written, it was the apartheid government and its devotees who were the corrupting forces that needed to be defeated.
The name given to this omnipotent power is Morena, though with biblical allusions he is a latter-day Christ. The less Anglicised name helps evoke an African figure – though when Morena is rumoured to have arrived at Jan Smuts Airport a British tourist is mistaken as the hero.
At first there is a sense that Morena is simply a mythical being created to engender hope in the hearts of a downtrodden community with seemingly no reprieve from the oppressive apartheid laws that dictate their movements and keep them immured to menial positions under abusive white bosses.
Mncedisi Shabangu and Hamilton Dlamini appear as a variety of characters and it is through a number of lively – and humorous - vignettes that the two players establish the dire conditions of life under apartheid.
In one scene they are two unemployed men hustling to secure work from white people in passing vehicles. Desperate to make money, they undermine each other and expose each other’s willingness to be subservient, showing how racist laws eroded their dignity as well as relationships between people.
The subjects featured in these vignettes hail from the lowliest echelons; a young boy selling rotten meat at the side of the road, a woman who rummages through dustbins for sustenance and a barber who plies his trade in the street. All of these characters are approached by an invisible journalist who quizzes them about Morena. What would they ask of him should he appear? The little boy would like Morena to improve his sales.
The people on the ground aren’t convinced that Morena exists – or will deliver them from the evils of apartheid – so this mythological figure operates as a device that allows people to imagine what deliverance from the shackles of apartheid would mean for them. For those who live on the bread-line, their concept of freedom is modest – confined by the very conditions which imprison them.
By positioning this Christ-like figure as someone who would oppose apartheid, the playwrights quite obviously show how at odds racially-biased laws were with Christian doctrines.
Conversely, when Morena does finally appear and is fighting off an army of apartheid police one of his followers is appalled when he urges him to “turn the other cheek”. This points to a pertinent conflict: how do you defeat immorality while retaining the higher moral ground?
The Morena character is a conflation of a religious and political figure.
He is an amalgamation of Struggle heroes – a Steve Biko/Nelson Mandela hybrid who survives a tumble from the 10th floor of John Vorster Square and escapes Robben Island by walking on water.
In this way the playwrights use theatre as a vehicle to reimagine history through a kind of magic realism lens.
Conferring religious qualities on political figures or entities is dangerous, warned Simon Gush in his exhibition Representation, which was staged at Stevenson gallery last year. Through a series of films probing faith, Gush intuited that tolerance for moral corruption in political entities was connected to the notion that religious belief was akin to political allegiance. In such a context, facts about wrongdoing simply have to be overcome (suppressed as unwarranted doubts) to maintain faith.
Woza Albert! is a valuable historical document which allows us to trace the connection between political and religious rhetoric, but it is not a musty old text in the hands of director Prince Lamla.
He has injected a new kind of energy into it. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Lamla’s interpretation is the emphasis on the lighter, humorous aspects of the play, which he turns up to full blast.
Some prefer recollections of the apartheid era to be explored through a sombre lens so as not to undermine its impact, but allowing humour to punctuate these narratives confers a kind of agency to subjects; the limits the laws placed on people’s lives didn’t corrupt every aspect of them – or their humanity. It also makes such material easy for audiences to receive, particularly when viewing degradation remains so painful.
Lamla squeezes this classic text further, exploiting its latent aural aspects. Every invisible machine or instrument is given life through sounds made by the actors, who move energetically across the stage as they slip into the guises of ordinary men and women struggling to survive in this brutal world. In this way it’s almost as if we can hear the machinery of the system that is closing in on them.
The lively attitude of Shabangu and Dlamini’s performances, however, suggests that the spirit of their subjects will never be crushed.
l Woza Albert! is showing at the Market Theatre in Joburg until February 19