I still remember the moment when my teacher, Mr. Budaza, walked into class and said, 'Today we are going to study 'Julius Caesar,' one of Shakespeare's most important plays.'Collection: Teacher
All over the world, there is someone sitting in a cell because he or she is not allowed freedom of expression.Collection: Freedom
We've got the right to vote, but what does it mean? People now want to have the right to a job, the right to education, the right to medical services.Collection: Medical
I want my work to contribute toward creating a better society, toward bringing people together. That is always the first consideration, not the money.Collection: Society
Theatre has had a very important role in changing South Africa. There was a time when all other channels of expression were closed that we were able to break the conspiracy of silence, to educate people inside South Africa and the outside world. We became the illegal newspaper.
Before 1994, many South Africans used theater as a voice of protest against the government. But with the end of apartheid, like the artists who watched the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe, theater had to find new voices and search for new issues.
Protest theater has a place again. It's not against whites or apartheid. It is against injustice and anything that fails our people.
It is a troubled soul that forces the human being to act. It is some kind of gangrene within you, inside of you, that eats your soul, that forces you to save your soul.
I was 51 when I voted for the first time in 1994, and I look at South Africa through those spectacles.
When I tried to do 'Waiting for Godot, it was such a controversy. I was tired of political theatre. All I wanted to do was 'Godot.' You know what happened? We were told we had messed up and politicised a classic that has nothing to do with S.A.
'Sizwe' is the beginning of protest theatre; 'Nothing But The Truth' is post-apartheid South Africa.
Our job as artists, we believe, is not to make changes in society. We don't have the ability to do that. We reflect life. We are the mirror of the society to look into. Our job is to raise questions, but we have no answers.
'Captain Marvel,' whereby the steel trap is challenged, where the hero is a heroine, where the most powerful person who has the welfare of the future of the human race is a woman. What else can it be? Because that was the role of my mother when I was a kid.
My stories are about humanity, about the challenges of surviving and the constant fight against ignorance, inhumanity and complacency.
In 1990 there were about 300 scripts being written demanding the release of Nelson Mandela. And suddenly we watched Mandela walking out of prison. So those scripts had to be destroyed.
I write about the human condition, as a South African. I sometimes see South Africa with the spectacles of the past and there will then be a political content in my writing.
This is the problem I have: I write a play and I give it to a director and they say, 'I'll do it one condition: if you play the role.'
Someone once asked me what I missed most. I said, 'My youth.' I've never been a boy who could run around, go crazy, do this, try that. There wasn't time for that.
In South Africa in 1987, apartheid was still going strong. Some of the most brutal race laws had been relaxed, but they hadn't yet been repealed. There was still a lot of tension.
I'd read Shakespeare in school, translated into isiXhosa, and loved the stories, but I hadn't realised before I started reading the English text how powerful the language was - the great surging speeches Othello has.
In South Africa, we've been watching these movies all our lives - 'Batman,' 'Superman,' 'Captain America' - and every time the mask comes off it's a white man.
When I first encountered Shakespeare as a boy, I read every word this man has written. To me, he is like an African storyteller.
Shakespeare's words paint pictures in glorious colour in my language. They were written by a man whose use of words fits exactly into Xhosa.
When I'm abroad it's almost like I'm in a transit lounge. I'm only comfortable when I know the date of departure.
It is ridiculous to think we can erase racism in South Africa, but through theater there can be a genuine attempt to move on with our lives and build a better country.
I had to look at white people as fellow South Africans and fellow partners in building a new South Africa.
In Australia, I almost became a counsellor. At the end of each performance there would be a queue of sobbing people backstage. They all wanted to explain why they left South Africa.
Other theaters exist here solely to entertain the white audience and keep South Africa on a par with what's going on in the West End or Broadway. The Market concerns itself with theater of this country, for this country.
Yes, we have the judiciary, the Constitution, we're fighting racism on a daily basis, but these are all state efforts and are not the efforts of the individual. The individual has to commit to change, the individual has to look at the past and take accountability of the past; for the wound to heal we have to dress it together.
Any older actor knows the last great mountain to climb is to play King Lear and now, if I ever play Lear, I will have done the pre-preparation because I had to go into the play and read it over and over again.