Killing the divider

The assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, is a curious one: Demetrios Tsafendas maintained, until his death in a psychiatric hospital in 1999, that a tapeworm in his head told him to knife the Prime Minister in a parliamentary meeting.

It is this strange psychology that Antony Sher places at the centre of his first play, taking the part of the mixed race Tsafendas himself, with Alex Ferns as the tapeworm, or if you like, his own personal Gollum. This is not the bestwritten piece of theatre: apartheid itself is given little wider treatment, beyond Tsafendas's own unstable racial identity. Sher plays with this metaphor too heavily while satirising rather too light-heartedly the atrocities of apartheid.

Dramatically it is often weak too, with Ferns's crass, spivlike-tapeworm at times behaving like a master of ceremonies and in doing so weakening any sense of anticipation or tension. Nancy Meckler, however, directs with the flair that is her trademark, while Sher is fabulous as the bewildered Tsafendas.

I. D.