AFRICAN DRAMA Athol Fugard: Sizwe Bansi is Dead Discuss two dramatic techniques in the play

Answer Details

Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi is Dead, devised with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, is a piece of experimental protest theatre, and Fugard uses several bold dramatic techniques to expose apartheid. Two of the most important are the dramatic monologue and the play-within-a-play (flashback and role-play).

1. The dramatic monologue and direct address. The play opens with Styles delivering a long monologue directly to the audience. Alone on stage, he reads from a newspaper, recalls his years at the Ford motor plant, and describes setting up his photographic studio. By speaking straight to the audience, Fugard breaks the "fourth wall" and draws the spectators into the black man's world, making them witnesses and confidants rather than distant onlookers. The monologue also allows one actor to conjure many characters and settings with minimal props, giving the play its intimate, storytelling quality and its sharp social commentary.

2. The play-within-a-play, flashback and role-play. The action shifts fluidly between times and identities. Styles' studio frames the story; then, through the photograph Sizwe is having taken, the play flashes back to how Sizwe came to assume the dead Robert Zwelinzima's name. The single actors double as several characters, Styles becomes Buntu, and Sizwe re-enacts the discovery of the corpse and the swapping of the passbook. This role-playing dramatises the central theme, that under apartheid identity itself is fluid and disposable, while the flashback structure lets the play move nimbly through past and present without elaborate staging.

Supporting devices. Fugard reinforces these with the symbolic use of the passbook and the camera, with humour and mime that lighten and sharpen the protest, and with improvisational, workshop-style dialogue that gives the piece its raw authenticity.

Effect. Together, the monologue and the play-within-a-play make the drama flexible, immediate and participatory. They allow two actors to stage a whole society, force the audience to confront apartheid at close quarters, and embody the play's argument about the instability of black identity.