Sizwe Banzi is Dead @ the Stephen Joseph Theatre

With scare stories about identity theft rampant, it's interesting to see a case in which the theft is not only portrayed positively as a crime that harms no one, but also offers one man's only hope of a future worth living.

In our more enlightened, liberal times it's hard to understand how – or rather, why – a system like South Africa's Apartheid worked. The restrictions imposed on the nation's black population by the white minority back in the seventies (when this play is set, though the restrictions go back decades) seemed to ignore the basic fact that black people were, in fact, people.

They are treated instead like children or common property of the white man – shown especially in moments when black adult men in Sizwe Banzi is Dead are called 'boy' by white children. Every movement of Banzi himself and other black South Africans is carefully monitored and logged in their all-important reference book – which is like a passport but much more restrictive. Banzi is banned from leaving his home town for more than three days unless he has a work permit elsewhere, and having failed to return to his dump of a home in time will be in trouble with the authorities whatever he does. On the evidence of this play, Apartheid (specifically the reference book system) seems to have been set up purely to cause more problems for South Africa's black population. Thinking about it, that probably was the plan.

The difficulties are effectively, if comically, explained here by Buntu – a curiously camp South African played by Louis Emerick (of Brookside fame) – when he runs through the tortuous steps Banzi will need to take in order to work in the town Buntu lives in. Emerick's other character, photographer Styles, spends the play's first half setting a context for the later privations. He tells of his past in a Ford car factory which was clearly no Equal Opportunities employer, instead using black men as cheap, abusable labour while the white men stayed in management. It's a vividly performed monologue, but Emerick takes his time to get warmed up.

There's a certain anger this piece keeps bottled up and repressed until Emerick finally unleashes it all in a furious speech persuading Banzi into an illegal choice, but the only one that offers him a future. It is in Banzi's 'death' and subsequent re-birth as another man that writers Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona raise their key issues. What's in a name? as has been asked before. Or rather, what's the value of that name? Is it worth keeping if it can be exchanged to feed a man's children? What does a man own that he can take with him? In the case of the black South African of the early seventies, not very much at all. In fact, even the freedom Styles' father fought for in WWII looks pretty suspect. Bunto's father was left without even his dignity every time a white man passed him in the street.

Thankfully, this play avoids laying into the white population of South Africa – and indeed of everywhere else for not intervening – for Apartheid. Instead, it concentrates on how that system restricted the lives of countless black people for the decades it was in force. The two-man cast brilliantly convey the sheer hopelessness of the situation, the desperation that leads a man to steal the identity of a corpse.

What the Stephen Joseph Theatre presents is a rousing appeal to the individual to react against state oppression, to not knuckle under and drown. It urges circumvention of measures set up to restrict individual dignity, humanity and freedom. Every individual has to fight a system like apartheid, that way – as the production's final seconds highlight – one of them might just get himself out of prison and elected President.