Defiant Survival

WHEN THE FOUR black South Africans who wrote and act in Survival performed the play in their own country, the government disbanded their company. That fact is not particularly surprising: even though the South African regime claims to have lifted some of its restraints on artistic expression in the last few years, Survival's message was so clear and explosive that it could not have stayed open.

It is hard to imagine a more explicitly political play. Using skits, songs and pantomimes, the four actors protray the struggle of staying alive in Soweto. The picture they present is not exactly entertaining.

For South Africa's black majority, apartheid is a system of laws imposed arbitrarily by whites, and it is designed to crush blacks in spirit as well as to exploit their labor. In the end, the play suggests, apartheid manages to make the people who suffer under it as brutal as the laws themselves; by making every normal human need criminal, apartheid has created its own criminals.

The lines of character and desperation are simply and painfully sketched. A young boy watches his mother become a prostitute in order to get a work permit she needs to feed her family. A man tries to participate in an illegal strike. Another watches his father die because he couldn't call an ambulance--there are few telephones in the black townships. They are stories that ring true, stories that have been told often enough by black South Africans. But they are still powerful, dramatic episodes; the audience is forced to come to terms once again with what systematically imposed injustice feels like. So it is not surprising that it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between the episodes that take place in prison and those that are on the outside. One cannot call the police; the police are the people who impose the injustice.

Sometimes the play slides into fantasy, too: the apartheid rules are so ridiculous at times they can only be treated as a bitter joke. An episode with a talking toilet that is reserved for whites only is funny, but there is an acid note somewhere not too far in the background.

WHAT IS SURPRISING is the amount of very real humor in Survival, if humor can be broadly defined as those things that keep life from becoming too bleak. There are songs (performed by the Jailbird Quartet) and moments of friendship; survival requires emotional as well as physical effort in a place like Soweto. These moments of beauty underline the basic structure of life there: the songs predict the day of liberation, and friendships are based on recognition of a common struggle. But they also keep the play from becoming a simple polemical statement. politics and art usually do not mix well: often, the individual stories overwhelm the politics, or the politics overwhelm the subtleties. South Africa is not all that subtle a situation; the problem that artistic efforts to describe it must avoid is that they can become completely flat, presenting the situation without involving the audience. Soweto has been in the news a great deal, after all, and the work-authors of Survival have to avoid boring the audience with mere rhetoric.

One of the reasons Survival is so effective is that Workshop '71 has obviously experimented with a number of dramatic techniques. Survival is more like a collage than a narrative play, with a political thread tying it together instead of a plotline. It works, far better than one could have expected. Survival constantly shifts its focus, requiring the audience to stay involved with the play as a whole.

If the play's portrayal of the present depresses, its vision of the future does not. At the end, we see the growing militancy of the younger generation of South African blacks, informed by American black writers like James Baldwin and by the anger produced by apartheid. As they move forward singing, there can be no doubt that the struggle that has begun will not end, as the actors in Survival put it, until South Africa's blacks have claimed their rightful share, their place in the sun.