TV REVIEW : A TIMELY APARTHEID DOCUDRAMA

Apartheid has always been theater in a sense, a theater of the absurd, a condition so removed from rational thinking that many outsiders regard it distantly, as a racist tragedy on a hazy, far-off stage.

So it’s only appropriate that the theater of apartheid and the violence and oppression of apartheid should merge in “Bopha!” at 10 tonight on KCET Channel 28.

And it’s also appropriate that “Bopha!”--titled after the black South African word for arrest-- should air now: six days after the 23rd anniversary of the sentencing of Nelson Mandela and two days after the 11th anniversary of the Soweto uprising.

Narrated by Sidney Poitier, “Bopha!” is part documentary, part drama, weaving together footage of actual black-on-black violence and scenes from South African Percy Mtwa’s play, “Bopha,” in showing how black police are tools of apartheid and outcasts in their own communities.

The documentary sequences are striking and revealing, the dramatic sequences--portraying the internal conflicts of a black family in which the father and uncle are policemen and the son an activist--a powerful roar of seething energy and anger.

In addition, we see Mtwa and the superb actors, known as the Earth Players, collecting an oral history that forms the basis for the play, the tragedy of brother turned against brother and son against father, as the white minority government seeks to perpetuate black impotence through division.

More than half of South Africa’s police are black, we’re told, victims victimizing victims and themselves in danger of being “roasted in the fiery necklace of a burning tire” as punishment for collaborating with their white oppressors.

“Bopha!” also draws on the personal experience of Mtwa, whose father was a policeman, and cast member Aubrey Redebe, who not only portrays a policeman in the play, but was one in real life before becoming an actor.

Theater of the absurd, theater of reality.