You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

My guest today is one of the giants of South African theatre. John Carney is an actor and writer

who came of age in the apartheid era, when a young black actor

using the stage as a platform for political struggle was putting his life in danger. Sure enough,

John Kani experienced the reality of South Africa's violent racist system. As a collaborator

of the radical playwright Athol Fugard, he was an obvious

target. He was imprisoned, saw family members and friends killed, and in 1985 suffered a brutal attack

which cost him the sight in one eye. None of this deterred John Carney from writing and performing. In the quarter

century since the end of apartheid, he's won awards, performed in London and New York, made appearances

in Hollywood blockbusters, including the superhero movie Black Panther, and is currently

starring in his own play in London, which takes a frank look

at race, culture and politics in today's South Africa. So how hard is it to tell the country's

complex post-apartheid story? Well, John Carney joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you very much. Right now, here in London's West End, you have your own play on. Kunani and the King.

Yes, Kunene and the King. And I saw it last night, and it is, it's great. But it strikes me that it is full of ambivalence and doubt about today's

south africa is that a right way of seeing it yes indeed it's a critical review of the 25 years

of our democracy from two perspectives what would a black person say the 25 years have meant?

How would the black person measure the changes better or worse to his or against his own advantage?

And then you get a white South African who also has lived the same time.

And then what do they think has been the new South Africa?

What does this democracy mean?

So what I was trying to do was to find these two people

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