‘You call laughing at me Theatre?’ the big man exclaims, resentfully.
Moreover, our reactions have been anticipated by an earlier scene in the play, during which Winston’s first assumption of Antigone’s wig and padding has his cell mate John - and us - falling about with laughter. For what we are watching is a play-within-a-play: a two-man version of Sophocles’s classic work performed by convicts before a prison audience in South Africa’s maximum security centre for political offenders, Robben Island. Nor do we laugh when he goes on to deliver Antigone’s famous speech, defying the law which has condemned her. The apartheid-era drama, inspired by a true story, is set in an unnamed prison clearly. He is pretending to be the ancient Greek princess Antigone. The Island is a play written Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona. Towards the end of The Island, the second of the three plays published in Statements (1974), a large, clumsy black man appears on stage in a wig of frayed rope, a necklace of nails, and a shirt stuffed with false breasts.
