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Some problems of a playwright from South Africa - Athol Fugard Issue - Transcript
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993
I followed The Road to Mecca with a play which I haven't been able as yet to share with a New York audience. Its called A Place with the Pigs. That was a special experience for me because, about seven or eight years ago, I confronted and for the first time tried to deal with, and I'm still in the process of trying to deal with, a problem involving the use of alcohol. A Place with the Pigs was based on a story of three or four inches in the New York Times, about a Russian deserter from the Second World War. This immediately baffled all the critics. They couldn't understand why I wasn't writing about South Africa anymore. This item about a Russian deserter who had hidden away in a pigsty for forty-two years, until circumstances had forced him out into the light of day, gave me a magnificent opportunity to make a statement about the fact that we as human beings make and crawl into pigsties. We make them out of all sorts of things. I made a pigsty out of a bottle of Jack Daniel's whiskey. I have known people who have made pigsties out of a lot of money. I know of people who have made pigsties out of food. I know of people who have made pigsties out of their bed. I wrote the play because I had an experience. The experience was that I had left the pigsty. I had discovered that to get out of a pigsty you just have to stand up and get out of it. That shattering revolution climaxes this play. The man realizes that judgment is waiting for him outside, but nothing can be worse than the nightmare he has been living. He's been living in pig shit for forty-two years, and he's hated it. Suddenly he realizes his hell is self-inflicted. It's not God's punishment. He just has to leave it. I wrote the play for that reason.
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My most recent play, My Children! My Africa!, will give me an opportunity to strike the final note in these few words to you, and then open myself to questions you might like to ask. Again, I wrote My Children! My Africa! because I was vain and conceited and wanted to show the world I could still write a play. I wrote it because I wanted to make some money. I wrote it because I was appalled at certain things that were happening in my country. And I wrote it because it had come time to do two things which again involved my sense of an appointment. One was to come out of my faith in the power of the spoken and the written word. That's a faith that has been sorely tested during the thirty-two years I have been making theatre in South Africa. There were times when I have truly doubted whether, as a response to the appalling things happening around me, writing a play, and then in some cases doing it underground (because the authorities wouldn't allow us to do it publicly), was an adequate response to that situation. Perhaps I would have been better advised to make bombs. Believe me, I'm not trying to be melodramatic in making that statement. There were times in South Africa when I really had doubt in what I was doing as a man of theatre. I think my faith must have hung on by a silken thread at times. I can thank my lucky stars it did, because if you ever break faith with something like that, I don't know that you can put it together again. Anyway, I never lost faith. In fact, as time passed, my faith in the power of the spoken and the written word has grown in strength. I stated that faith through one of the characters in my play, My Children! My Africa!
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