Feature: Theatre - Actress Janet Suzman discusses football, Aids and democracy
Published: 10 June, 2010
by JOSH LOEB
DESPITE not liking football, Janet Suzman is looking forward to the World Cup. “I like watching people flinging their arms round each other and having a good time,” says the South African-born actress, who lives in South End Green, Hampstead.
“I don’t really give a stuff who wins, but I think people running around kicking balls is kind of sweet. My father was a great sportsman and he always thought sport joined people together. So do I.”
Joining people together is a theme close to the actress’s heart. The niece of legendary anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman, she is currently starring in Dream of the Dog by South African playwright Craig Higginson – described by one reviewer as “a reminder of unhealed wounds as the world’s sporting focus shifts to South Africa”.
The play examines what happens when a black former labourer returns to the white farmstead where he once worked to confront the old couple living there about a bloody event that occurred more than 15 years earlier.
It is a play about memory and the impossibility of total reconciliation and forgiveness.
“In the end I suppose it’s about black and white not ever quite joining hands,” says Suzman. “It’s a slightly pessimistic view of South Africa. I think maybe Brazil is the only joined black and white nation because it’s coffee coloured. At the moment in South Africa there is a black-white divide, it has to be said – except in the most enlightened areas like the theatre.”
The 71-year-old, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in the film Nicholas and Alexandra and has had spells as a director, says it is surprising there is not more violence in the notoriously crime-ridden country.
“In some senses it’s a miracle that blood didn’t flow after democracy was introduced,” she says. “I think enormous advances have been made in the idea of democracy. The practice of democracy is probably more vexed, but we’ve discovered that all over the world where people have tried to import democracy. It’s not a simple thing. The dreams of the people haven’t been fulfilled – the dreams of the people on the street, the dreams of the people who are poor.”
But her severest criticisms are reserved for former president Thabo Mbeki’s attitude to the Aids crisis which has ravaged the country: “The criminality of Mbeki in attributing HIV and Aids to not eating enough fresh beetroots is gone now, thank God. But we don’t have a president in whom resides a model of probity in respect of sex and marriage. That in itself is a difficulty.”
Part of the problem, she says, is that Nelson Mandela was “so glowing that everyone who followed him was going to be dimmed by his light. The great grief is that he didn’t stay on for another term.
“My aunt Helen always said that he should have stayed on for another four years.”
But, despite its problems, Suzman loves her mother-country, which she tries to “dip her toe into” annually during the cold English winters.
“In many ways it’s a glowing country,” she says. “I love it. I’m moved by it. But it is a traumatised country.”
• Dream of the Dog is at the Trafalgar Studios, 14 Whitehall, SW1, until June 19. 0845 505 8500