When this modern classic first appeared at the Royal Court in 1973, with John Kani and Winston Ntshona then as now playing the prisoners, South African apartheid was at its apogee. The notorious Robben Island gaol, where those who opposed the apartheid regime were chained in pairs and subjected to hard labour, was a microcosm of the gaol that the whole of South Africa felt like to its non-white peoples. Dispossessed, deprived, discriminated against, treated as kine rather than kin, the black and coloured people of that supremely beautiful and otherwise fulsomely promising land had no weapons to fight back with – except themselves. Some (along with white South Africans who could not accept apartheid either) did it literally, with their bodies, as at Sharpeville. Others went into exile, wrote, protested – and took risks, as Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona did, by voicing dissent and opposition through the traditionally powerful means afforded by theatre.
    "The Island" is the product of their co-operation. It begins with a protracted mime, in which Kani and Ntshona pretend to dig sand to fill wheelbarrows which they then wheel over to fill each other's holes in the sand – showing us labour for its own sake, punitive, repetitive, quelling, exhausting, aimed at keeping prisoners occupied and too tired to resist. But the two cell-mates, quarrelling affectionately like a married couple, are preparing their revenge: a production of "Antigone"– a drama of resistance to tyranny – for the prison concert later in the week.
    The action of "The Island" is confined to the pair's cell and their preparations for the playlet, which are in danger of stalling until one of them learns that his appeal has been successful and that he will be freed in three months. This unexpectedly good news comes at a mighty cost: the beneficiary will have to leave his cell-mate to continue with his life sentence. It is a cruel victory, a tragic piece of good fortune, because the two have used their comradeship to save themselves from feeling the agony that too naturally attends being an impotent victim of injustice.
    Theatre's weapons of wit and poignancy are powerfully deployed here by Kani and Ntshona, whose personalities are now indistinguishable from this play and its outstanding commentary on the sufferings of wronged humanity. When they first performed "The Island" their purpose was to raise the world against apartheid. Now the play is an act of witness, of historical record, of keeping very green the memory of what racism and injustice can do. The great changes that have taken place in South Africa in recent years alter one's perception of the play in two ways. One is that they distance it, transforming it from an indictment into a summation of what it meant for a whole nation to be in prison. The other is that they allow us to see how vital a thing theatre is, for this play was assuredly one of the things that helped to bring apartheid down, just over twenty years after it was first staged.
    Kani and Ntshona might have changed in appearance since 1973, and the growth in their stature as actors and South African cultural icons has been enormous. But they still have – have even more, it seems – the energy, the flair, the sense of timing, the engaging wiggle of their rear ends, and the cheerfulness, which in their mixture in "The Island" turns the grimness of a prison cell into a monument of freedom.
AC Grayling