A Bit of South Africa’s Ugly Past Comes to the Stage (original) (raw)

Theater|Interview With a Torturer

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/theater/a-bit-of-south-africas-ugly-past-comes-to-the-stage.html

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Interview With a Torturer

Eric Abraham, a former South African journalist and activist, commissioned a play, “A Human Being Died That Night,” starring Noma Dumezweni and Matthew Marsh.Credit...Jesse Kramer

June 6, 2014

LONDON — In 1997, in the newly democratic South Africa, a black female psychologist met a white male convict in Pretoria Central Prison. The psychologist, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, had just completed a doctoral fellowship at Harvard and had returned to the country to serve on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The man she had asked to meet was Eugene de Kock, a former policeman nicknamed “Prime Evil,” who had led a covert counterterrorism unit dedicated to the torture and killing of anti-apartheid activists.

Why did Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela want to talk to Mr. de Kock? Why did he agree to see her? What happened when they were face to face?

Those are the subjects confronted in “A Human Being Died That Night,” a play by Nicholas Wright, directed by Jonathan Munby and based on the book Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela subsequently wrote. Playing at the Hampstead Theater here, it charts the conversations that took place between this pair over five years, giving vivid life to a part of recent South African history that still remains shrouded in mystery and surmise.

The unlikely story of the play is underpinned by the equally unlikely story of the man who brought it to the stage. He is Eric Abraham, a former South African journalist and activist targeted by the same secret service that Mr. de Kock later led. His reports on conditions for black people in his country, and on police atrocities and torture, led to his house arrest in 1976, when he was just 22. Mr. Abraham was not allowed to work, have visitors or to leave his house between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Anonymous midnight phone calls would whisper death threats; security police sat outside his door.

In January 1977, he escaped over the South African border to Botswana, then made his way to London. (Later, he discovered that it was his father, an officer in the South African Navy, who had first contacted the authorities about his activities.) Initially penniless, Mr. Abraham became a successful film and television producer; one of his movies, “Kolya,” won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1997.

But in 2003, his life took a new turn, when he married Sigrid Rausing, an heir to the Swedish Tetra Pak fortune, and, since 2005, the publisher of Granta magazine. Today, Mr. Abraham, who once thought he would never see his homeland again, has founded the Fugard Theater in Cape Town, and is again intensely involved in telling South African stories.

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