Gotta love Shakespeare!
John Kani and Sir Antony Sher perform together again under the direction of Janice Honeyman in Kani’s new play, Kunene and The King, at The Fugard Theatre in Cape Town
A mutual love of Shakespeare is the only common ground John Kani (75) as Lunga Kunene and Sir Antony Sher (69) as John Morris find beyond a shared nationality when they are thrown together in a Joburg apartment for an indefinite time. Kunene is the unsuspecting carer and Shakespeare fan assigned to Sher, a high-status actor with a terminal illness who takes exception to being confronted not only with a male nurse but a black one in this most vulnerable phase of his life. Why should people see this play, which recently premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon? If Sher’s knighthood for services to acting and writing and Kani’s Tony Award, among many other accolades earned over decades in the arts, aren’t enough motivation, the draw of seeing Sher deliver lines from King Lear should be the incentive. It’s enough to make you a Shakespeare devotee for life. “First of all it’s not about apartheid. It’s only one of the themes,” says Sher. “It’s...
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