Justin Cartwright’s Diary

Too often, I go to South African theatre with a sense of foreboding: I anticipate something overwrought, tendentious, poorly acted and emotionally exploitative. So I arrived at the Hampstead Theatre last week without high expectations. The play, A Human Being Died That Night, was based on the book written by the psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, who conducted interviews with Eugene de Kock, the most notorious of the appalling state-sponsored killers of the apartheid era. De Kock and his comrades murdered and tortured hundreds of anti-apartheid activists. But in the course of her discussions with him, Madikizela came to believe that De Kock should be pardoned and released from Pretoria Central jail, where he has been held for years. Many other killers who made confessions were pardoned. Indeed the idea of forgiveness and reconciliation were enshrined in the concept of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

We were a smallish audience in the downstairs theatre at Hampstead. We found ourselves facing a shackled man wearing an orange jumpsuit, sitting in a sort of barred cage, open to the audience. It was the notorious Eugene de Kock, ‘Prime Evil’ of the dying days of apartheid, serving two life sentences plus 212 years. As I watched, the awfulness of the crimes committed by the police and particularly by the secret assassination units was on my mind: in April 1996, I spent a few days reporting on the Truth Commission from Port Elizabeth. It was a harrowing experience and my memories of the raw horror of that testimony welled up again. For all its emotional content, this is a good, nuanced play, well-directed and acted; it deserves, and will surely get, a much wider audience.