Details

On 21st March 1960, outside Sharpeville police station, 35 miles from Johannesburg, panicked police officers fired at peaceful black demonstrators, killing seventy people and wounding two hundred more, including women and children. As a direct result of that atrocity, apartheid South Africa teetered on the verge of a racial bloodbath. Nagging Doubt shows us the events, the personalities, the pain and the ironies of that time - using mercurial changes of character and with a minimum of properties and costumes - as it tells the stories of twenty characters caught up in the tumultuous events before and after the Sharpeville Massacre, including the liberal journalist, Eric Lovell, his wife Marjorie and his young son Colin, as well as South African Prime Minister Verwoerd, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Albert Luthuli, Robert Sobukwe, an Afrikaaner policeman and Nelson Mandela. Jack Klaff revives his very first one-man show, Nagging Doubt at the Finborough Theatre for six performances only. This run of Nagging Doubt commemorates the 50th anniversary of a most significant year in South Africa’s history, 1960 – the year of the infamous Sharpeville Massacre. 2010 also marks the centenary of the establishment of the Union of South Africa as a country, and twenty years since the release of Nelson Mandela.

Cast/Performers

Jack Klaff

Creatives/Company

Author: Jack Klaff
Producer(s): Shebang, Neil McPherson (for the Finborough Theatre)
Director: Sophie Lifschutz