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Some problems of a playwright from South Africa - Athol Fugard Issue - Transcript
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993
I wrote a play based on the extraordinary story of this lady. I took all sons of liberties with it. It's in no sense a documentary. The reason I took liberties is that the story of Helen Martins--that was her name--gave me a chance to do something that I realized it was time in my life to do. I have lived my life and written my plays with a sense of having kept appointments with certain things. I have a mysterious sense of appointments come to me, and this was one of those appointments I suddenly realized I had to keep. The reason I had to use the story of Helen Martins was because it was time for me to understand the genesis, the nature, and the consequences of creative energy. I have some sort of creative energy. I'm not going to be falsely modest and not acknowledge that fact. I will leave others to deride what its significance is. I know that I am propelled, obsessed, driven to make things. That is all I understand in terms of creative energy. I think that every human being on God's earth has got a spark of that energy. Some people have great big conflagrations and furnaces burning away. (American music lost one of those blast furnaces, I think it was the day before yesterday, with the death of Leonard Bernstein.)
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The story of Helen Martins gave me an opportunity to try and understand this demon that has possessed me all of my life. The writing of The Road to Mecca helped a great deal. The play also gave me a superb metaphor for dealing with one of the things that I have been terribly frightened of. What am I going to do with myself if I can't write anymore? What am I going to do with myself if suddenly the appointment book is empty--if it doesn't come? This is a real dilemma, because I have fashioned my life around the fact that I am a storyteller. I tell my stories in the form of plays. There's nothing else in my life. From the writing of the plays I go to directing them, sometimes to acting in them. Then, as I said earlier, when that umbilical cord to the latest play is cut and I am free of it, there is a painful limbo period where I wander around feeling a little bit like a lost soul. Then, miraculously, the next appointment comes, and I get involved in telling another story, and it all makes sense once more. I've lived a life like that. What would happen to me if the stories stopped coming? The Road to Mecca showed Helen Martins's fear of darkness and her discovery of the miracle that lighting a candle means. Her life gave me the opportunity to use that symbol of what creative energy tries to do, light a candle. What happens when there are no more candles left to light? Athol Fugard the man could go on a lot longer than Athol Fugard the playwright. Writing that play has helped me to confront that possibility. I hope to die in harness. I'll make sure of that by giving myself three more plays and two prose works to write. I've planned them out. That will look after me for a few years to come. But anyway, this exploration of self was part of The Road to Mecca.
