Theatre review: Blood Knot

Probably South Africa's best-known living playwright, Blood Knot is one of Athol Fugard's earliest (1961) anti-Apartheid plays, and it's one in which the regime splits a family down the middle. Sons of the same black mother but with different fathers, Zach (Kalungi Ssebandeke) is black, while his brother Morrie (Nathan McMullen) can pass for white, but has lived most of his life on the black side of the divide. There was a brief period when Morrie went away, but he returned a year ago to their shared shack where, for reasons that are never explicitly revealed, he seems to stay 24/7. Zach goes out to work - as a gatekeeper making sure no black kids go into a white park - and does the shopping, while Morrie stays at home every day cooking and planning for the small farm they'll buy when they've saved up enough of his brother's wages. But after a year, Zach is also feeling trapped.

He no longer sees the best friend with whom he would go out meeting (and raping, the script isn't exactly ambiguous about this,) women. As Morrie can read and wrote, he suggests finding a female pen-pal in the paper, whom he can correspond with on Zach's behalf.

The plan works until they realise the illiterate Zach picked up the wrong paper, and his new pen-pal Ethel is a white woman - who wants to meet him. Now enjoying the fantasy as much as anything, he suggests his white-seeming brother takes his place.

Two and a half hours is a long running time for a two-hander, and some of Fugard's setup of the brothers' relationship and routine is overwritten, but Matthew Xia's production for the most part holds the interest. Morrie regulates when they wake up, eat, read bible verses and sleep by setting a loud alarm clock, and sound designer Xana incorporates its ringing into the background noise, giving another element of grim claustrophobia to Basia Bińkowska's ramshackle set.

Ethel is of course a McGuffin, leading to the brothers buying a suit which, in the shorter and better second act, becomes a symbol of white power as they play-act the outside world Morrie won't set foot in. In fact who he becomes in a world where he's perceived as white seems to be the cause of his agoraphobia. There's committed performances from the actors who persuasively show the brothers' complicated dynamic, and while offhandedly revealing one of the characters as a rapist marks the play out as very much of its time, its message about segregation feeding the bigotry that created it remains clear.

Blood Knot by Athol Fugard is booking until the 20th of April at the Orange Tree Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith.