LONDON — In 1997, in the newly democratic South Africa, a black female psychologist met a white male convict in Pretoria Central Prison. The psychologist, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, had just completed a doctoral fellowship at Harvard and had returned to the country to serve on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The man she had asked to meet was Eugene de Kock, a former policeman nicknamed “Prime Evil,” who had led a covert counterterrorism unit dedicated to the torture and killing of anti-apartheid activists.
Why did Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela want to talk to Mr. de Kock? Why did he agree to see her? What happened when they were face to face?
Those are the subjects confronted in “A Human Being Died That Night,” a play by Nicholas Wright, directed by Jonathan Munby and based on the book Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela subsequently wrote. Playing at the Hampstead Theater here, it charts the conversations that took place between this pair over five years, giving vivid life to a part of recent South African history that still remains shrouded in mystery and surmise.
The unlikely story of the play is underpinned by the equally unlikely story of the man who brought it to the stage. He is Eric Abraham, a former South African journalist and activist targeted by the same secret service that Mr. de Kock later led. His reports on conditions for black people in his country, and on police atrocities and torture, led to his house arrest in 1976, when he was just 22. Mr. Abraham was not allowed to work, have visitors or to leave his house between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Anonymous midnight phone calls would whisper death threats; security police sat outside his door.
In January 1977, he escaped over the South African border to Botswana, then made his way to London. (Later, he discovered that it was his father, an officer in the South African Navy, who had first contacted the authorities about his activities.) Initially penniless, Mr. Abraham became a successful film and television producer; one of his movies, “Kolya,” won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1997.
But in 2003, his life took a new turn, when he married Sigrid Rausing, an heir to the Swedish Tetra Pak fortune, and, since 2005, the publisher of Granta magazine. Today, Mr. Abraham, who once thought he would never see his homeland again, has founded the Fugard Theater in Cape Town, and is again intensely involved in telling South African stories.
“In the 1970s, in my journalism, I focused on black politics and human rights, and was able to give an opportunity for certain black voices to be heard,” he said in an interview over lunch in the improbably large garden of the west London house he shares with Ms. Rausing. “And in a way, I am doing the same thing now: creating an opportunity for people to be heard and seen.”
Mr. Abraham first came across Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela’s book on a trip to South Africa in 2007, soon after he had begun to support a local opera company there. He commissioned Mr. Wright, the South African-born, London-based playwright perhaps best known in the United States for “Vincent in Brixton,” to make a play out of it.
“I thought the message of it was fantastically right,” Mr. Wright said in a telephone interview. “I felt like I’d been waiting for something like this for a long time.”
But Mr. Abraham found it difficult to get the play produced. “I couldn’t get any subsidized theater interested here,” in London, he said. “And I offered money. It’s a different system. They develop their own work, and it’s a closed shop.”
By 2010, he had his own theater — named for the eminent South African playwright Athol Fugard — in District 6, notorious for the forcible evictions of some 60,000 mixed-race residents in the late 1960s, and still a politically contentious area.
The new theater, created by renovating and merging two warehouses and an adjoining church, was conceived as a home for Isango Portobello, the opera company that Mr. Abraham had brought on much-applauded tours to the West End of London.
But less than a year after the theater’s opening (for which Mr. Fugard wrote “The Train Driver”), Mr. Abraham fell out with Isango’s director, Mark Dornford-May, and ended their association.
Since 2011, he has run the theater with an in-situ manager, Daniel Galloway, and has pursued a policy of musicals on its main stage, and mostly South African theater pieces in its smaller studio. (The annual budget is about $650,000; production costs are extra and paid by Mr. Abraham.)
After a two-week trial run at the Hampstead Theater in London last year, “A Human Being” moved to the Fugard in March, then the Market Theater in Johannesburg, before returning for another run in London.
Critical responses have been glowing: “Raising complex, painful questions about responsibility and reconciliation, this 80-minute piece is unmissable,” Paul Taylor wrote in The Independent, the British newspaper.
The play traces the wary understanding that develops between its characters, as Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela questions Mr. de Kock about his role in the atrocities that led to two life sentences plus 212 years for “crimes against humanity.” The reasons for his complicity slowly emerge to complicate the issues of intention, guilt and forgiveness. (Last month, the High Court in Pretoria ordered South Africa’s justice minister to consider parole for Mr. de Kock.)
While in South Africa, the actors playing the two roles — Noma Dumezweni and Matthew Marsh — visited Mr. de Kock in Pretoria Central Prison.
“Pumla’s thesis, her take on forgiveness and redemption is pretty important, and my belief in the power of the play was endorsed by meeting him,” Mr. Marsh said in a telephone interview.
Despite his commitment to the Fugard Theater and to South Africa, Mr. Abraham said there has been no storybook reconciliation to his own past.
“Like exiles the world over who are forced to leave under traumatic circumstances and never envisage returning, I think my connection to South Africa and my family was fatally severed. It remains ruptured and will forever be so,” he wrote in an email.
He is nonetheless energetically involved in forthcoming Fugard projects, which include Mr. Fugard appearing in his new “Shadow of the Hummingbird” in July and a production of “King Kong,” a near-mythical 1959 South African musical, which ran for two years and ignited Miriam Makeba’s career.
In an email, Mr. Fugard said the theater has emerged “as a potent force on the South African cultural scene.”
“I have always said that it is harder to live in South Africa now than it was when I was younger — it is not anymore a question of yes or no, it is a world riddled with maybes,” he added. “However, the role of theater remains the same — to open people’s eyes to what is happening in the world around us.”