Playing presidents

Two great minds spar it out with a war of words

To play the parts of former presidents FW De Klerk and Nelson Mandela is no easy feat, but before they could even think about the mammoth responsibility that would rest on their shoulders the minute they stepped onto the stage,  Eric Nobbs and Owen Sejake had to get their heads around the intense legal arguments in The Prize Of Peace’s weighty script.

Sejake jokingly calls the back and forth dialogues an “intellectual gymnasium”, while Nobbs  says that director Clare Stopford and writer Les Morrison’s ears must have burned in those first few days of rehearsals. 

Jokes aside, however, both actors say that they feel honoured to be performing such a well-researched script, one that has been carefully compiled from various books and texts and rare face-to-face interviews with De Klerk himself and Mandela’s lawyer George Bizos.

When Nobbs met with De Klerk, he laughingly confides that the former president’s only request was not to play like the “apologist fool” Michael Caine did, but from the start of rehearsals, the cast and crew decided not to have Nobbs and Sejake mimic the accents or gestures of the real people.

“The script is factually 100% correct, but because all we have are their public speeches and so on,  we still don’t know how they would have behaved in private. So in honour of them, we decided not to try and give them mannerisms that they don’t have,” Nobbs explains.

Ultimately it is words, dialogue and great themes that still ring true today that give The Prize Of Peace its power on stage. For Sejake, the power of the compromise that De Klerk and Mandela strike resonates today in terms of a need for the new leaders to “go back to the basics”.

“I think we’ve lost that connection with our ancestors,” he says. “We are intellectualising all of our arguments and we’re not going to the root cause; we are not looking at what we could have achieved if we all agreed to disagree.”

Nobbs echoes Sejake’s sentiments, saying that South Africans should see the play to see how the compromise that De Klerk and Mandela found within themselves has been somehow lost over the last 17 years.

“Despite all of the fights they had, they still stuck it out and   kept pushing forward,” he says. “That’s really the miracle, that none of these two men let their egos take over. They always kept the goal of a better South Africa in sight. And I think our present government needs to realise that it’s not about me, or Zuma or Malema, it’s about the people,” Nobbs says.

This article was first published in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Wednesday 7 September 2011.

The Prize Of Peace is on at the Old Mutual Theatre on the Square (www.theatreonthesquare.co.za), Sandton, until September 24.