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The Island
Written and conceived by Athol Fugard, John Kani, Winston Ntshona
Directed by Athol Fugard
At the Brooklyn Academy of Music
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(718) 636-4100

Review by Denise Scala

Two men mechanically orbit around the stage in their bare feet. Sweating, panting, sometimes grunting, they wordlessly migrate, workmanlike, from start to finish, seeing to obviously appointed, labor-intensive yet meaningless tasks. Only the mimicked buzz of flies suggests the oppressive weather. Two tin cups, a bucket and otherwise-barren dais suggests the setting is a prison, though its whereabouts are never made clear. The year, too, is unknown, as are the two men's crimes and the length of their jail terms.

Thirty years after its debut, the apartheid-era drama The Island resonates all the more because of its deliberate lack of specificity. Conceived in 1973 by South African dramatist Athol Fugard in collaboration with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, there were of course some practical considerations behind such vagueness in the apartheid era. Fugard, Kani and Ntshona were all persecuted over the years by the South African government under apartheid (Kani and Ntshona were jailed, while Fugard, the lone white man among them, had had his passport revoked for a time). The Island, recognized by all as Robben Island (home to political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela) deliberately had no name. Deliberately, a play on an island without a name, about prisoners without a country, sentences without end and crimes unclear, hits its intended target in any country, in any place and any time.

Underscoring the endurance and relevance of its universal messages about justice and the abuse of power is Kani and Ntshona’s reprisal of their Tony-award winning performances as the play’s lone characters: cellmates, jailed together for indeterminate sentences, once strangers and now long-time friends. In their sixties, both actors seem impossibly youthful and indefectible despite the wear and tear of time. It is one of those rare occasions when aging actors are given the chance to revisit roles, giving performances possible only through the wisdom and distance of time. Like trapeze artists, they walk the tightrope and highwire with unrelenting trust in each other, never needing to check that the other is there.

This fast and loose chemistry is all the more crucial because the two prisoners’ survivalist’s humor, borne of desperation, is much of what propels The Island forward. The play’s creators knew it would be humor, and humor alone, that would rescue its universal message about the human spirit from being labeled merely a "political play"–undeniably important but grim and without hope. Through humor, we are willingly led to shed this story’s tears. The plot, on the surface, is deliberately bare bones: two cellmates, while rehearsing Sophocles’ Antigone, receive incredible news–one of them is to be set free. The actual story, however, is how the two men handle the news, which may or may not be true. The result is moot. Their friendship is all.

Restaged in part by Peter Brook in 1999, The Island remains more or less unchanged. Some wording has been updated but their meaning is intact. Its set is more or less bare. And its cellmates, too, are very much the same. Their last names aren’t given. Their crime, if any, is not made plain. Their sentences are of indeterminate length. Their exact whereabouts are unknown. Their fates are uncertain. Their faces, familiar. The message, unmistakable and timeless.