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Some problems of a playwright from South Africa - Athol Fugard Issue - Transcript
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993
I start telling my stories for other reasons. Once I was asked: "How do your stories start?" "What is the genesis of your plays?" "Is there any pattern to them?" "Are they random?" "What is the essential nature of the experience that leads to this event?" And I answered: The genesis of a play is complex, and it varies enormously from play to play. I can't pin down any one element as the reason for writing a play. I've written about eighteen plays of various shapes and sizes, and I can't point to any one of those and say, "That one I wrote simply because I wanted to . . ." "Simply because"--no! Every one of them involves a lot of factors, including the basic one that I earn my living by writing plays, and if I don't write plays I can't pay the rent. Also, vanity and conceit inform the writing of a play. I've got plays which critics have praised greatly in the past, and I get frightened now: is my next play going to be as good? Because I want to keep up the image of somebody who knows his craft and is doing a good job at it. It's a vanity and a conceit, and I would be dishonest with you if I denied that as a factor as I sit down and confront what I call the inquisition of blank paper.
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- The artist as an outcast and a mother in 'The Road to Mecca.' - Athol Fugard...
Believe me, it is an inquisition. A writer once asked me for a piece of advice. He asked, "How do you start, what's the best way to start?" I said, "When the paper isn't looking at you." That is what it feels like. I approach it like a crab: I sharpen pencils; I fill my fountain pens, because I write by hand in pen and ink; I make my little scratches on the side in pencil; and do everything I can to try and avoid meeting that paper eye to eye. When it's not looking at me I suddenly do that terrible thing, which is open the bracket for the first stage direction. I can't tell you how frightening a moment that is. So then, vanities and conceits.
Then I must add, in all fairness to myself, that I do passionately love my people, my country. Coming out of that love, I try to be as honest a witness as I can to what I see around me in South Africa.
Then also, an important agenda in my life as a writer is self-exploration. I don't just write because of an objective reality out there. I write because Athol Fugard puts me under pressure. I'll give examples from two plays I've done here in New York. The Road to Mecca is based on a story of an actual artist, a woman, in an isolated town in the arid heartland of South Africa, the Karoo, a semi-desert region. She lived in a small community cut off from the outside world. This woman at the age of fifty, meek, obedient, church-going little widow, shocked everybody in the community by doing two things: she stopped going to church and she started sculpting. For the next twenty-five years she transformed her little Gothic house with its Gothic darkness into a light-filled palace of the most unbelievable splendor. In the large yard around her house she created--self-taught--statues, all of them with an eastern theme. She called it the camel-yard. She was obsessed. Her inspiration came from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. She saw those last twenty-five years of her life as a journey to Mecca, Mecca not being the real Mecca of Saudi Arabia, but the Mecca of imagination, that golden city, that other place, that extraordinary world we all want to reach at some point in our lives. That sort of mythic goal was the Mecca she set out to reach by way of the sculptures and her transformation of her dark house into a light-filled palace. Then, when she was seventy-five years old, the visions stopped coming. After two years of being able to make nothing more, of seeing nothing more--a period of progressive paranoia, fear, terror--she committed suicide.
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