Odd couples are a durable storytelling device. Who better to outline one character’s particulars than their total opposite? With 'Kunene and the King', playwright and star John Kani aims to demonstrate far more than the mere differences between two men.
The 82-year-old artist, whose legacy of activism onstage stretches back more than half a century, attempts to coalesce broad, thorny arguments about the fraught history of apartheid South Africa into this two-hander now running at Shakespeare Theatre Company. It’s a noble undertaking and an unwieldy one, not least because the old timers he imagines butting heads aren’t just stubborn but impervious to change.
One of them, it spoils nothing to say, is approaching his final exit. Jack is a career Shakespearean actor (played by longtime STC company member Edward Gero) with stage-four liver cancer. His dying wish to play King Lear comes as no surprise. True to type, he’s self-absorbed and prone to bluster and reverie.
Kani’s character, Lunga Kunene, is a would-be doctor diverted into nursing when forces of national conflict plunged his family into misfortune. He’s everything Jack isn’t: deferential by profession, strict and practical yet lighthearted and easily amused. He’s been dispatched to provide palliative care to a lion refusing to accept that his winter is coming to an end.
Kunene has his work cut out for him. Gero’s Jack is petulant and self-destructive, squirreling liquor bottles away in his miserable clutter (the handsome but slovenly living room set is by Lawrence E. Moten III). And Jack’s sneering attitude toward the one soul offering him a lifeline is rooted in more than just fear of mortality.
Kani frames the conflict between the two men as one across the color line, an identifying trope of South African drama and literature. Kunene calls out Jack’s tendency to use the phrase “you people", thereby casting his live-in nurse as a stand-in for an entire race. Even as Kunene cautions against the impulse, Kani’s play takes up that tricky endeavor - imbuing arguments between individuals with the weight of history.
It befits the intractable nature of racism that neither man is susceptible to much convincing. That obstinance is evident in the jerky, uneasy rhythm of their exchanges, which director Ruben Santiago-Hudson navigates with dexterity if not finesse. The two are liable to flip from playful noodling to furious outbursts, often with disjointed suddenness. Each is their own kind of headstrong king, and the pair is stuck together as long as Jack continues to draw breath, a necessity that trumps every squabble.
Fortunately for them (and for us), they find common ground in reverence for the Bard. When Jack recites Mark Antony’s 'friends, Romans, countrymen' funerary speech from 'Julius Caesar', while Kunene echoes in his native Bantu language of isiXhosa, it’s a rare and marvelous moment of synchronicity.
The play, which is set in 2019, when it premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company before transferring to the West End, works best when focused on the personal rather than the historical. Kani, who starred in that original production, gives Kunene a near-regal demeanor, presenting a man of grace and dignity who’s also deeply silly and frank. It’s a magnetic performance. Gero has a tough task in playing an egoist who’s despicable at nearly every turn, except when he’s suffering or lets down his guard. When he recalls the actor’s nightmare of approaching a line he’s about to forget, we get a rare (and hilarious) close-up on Jack’s psyche.
But as it becomes clear that neither man is going to evolve, it also grows obvious that Kunene’s lessons - in the atrocities of apartheid and their enduring stains - are not for Jack’s benefit but for ours. This relationship between the story and the crowd replicates the one onstage, which riffs on another old-fashioned setup: A Black server of White needs with a side of wisdom to impart.
The education is undeniably worthwhile, whether it confirms the audience’s existing values or encourages further enlightenment (from the murmurs of affirmation on opening night, I suspect the answer is a bit of both). The king may not be willing to grow, but there’s hope for the rest of us.
And there is a measure of poetic justice that the dying man defending his mount has almost nothing to leave behind. Just a plaster bust of the greatest playwright and a vacant spot for the next generation.