![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() With the blast of a second whistle, the transfer of sand concludes and a new mime commences. The extended mime of John and Winston's labours with wheelbarrow and sand shows the dehumanising, pointless tedium of life on Robben Island. The opening actions of The Island provide a painful, moving dumb show from which the drama that follows can be built. Improvisation becomes the means through which John and Winston understand and practice their humanity. Their humanity, however, remains intact and it does so because the two men continue to act as humans by using dramatic acting as the means for sustaining their humanity. They are dressed in shorts 'to look like the boys their keepers would make them.' But clearly the authorities wish them to be far, far less than boys, for the prisoners are treated with extreme brutality and are given the sorts of tasks meant to reduce them from men to beasts, to annihilate the last shreds of their humanity. In The Island, two black prisoners, John and Winston, are men whose political stands against the state have caused them to be incarcerated, sentenced without determinable end in Robben Islandprison. The Island is indeed an actor's play, for acting is its central metaphor and idea: acting as a means for the acting out of one's life, acting as a form of survival, and acting as a basis for (political) action. ![]()
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