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Encounters with Fugard: native of the Karoo - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Mary Benson
At Yale for a semester during 1980 Athol directed A Lesson from Aloes. His characters were all ultimately survivors--in South Africa's harsh political landscape aloes symbolized that survival. In his notebooks Athol had written of the play's "dark ambiguities." Two characters, Piet and Steve, were "victims of a system . . . which they have tried to resist, . . . something man-made," whereas Gladys was "God's victim" (Notebooks 230).
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Those notebooks: for years I had tried to persuade Athol that they should be published, but he doubted that anyone would be interested in reading them. Eventually he agreed, and a dilapidated bag crammed with photocopies of barely legible handwritten journals was delivered to me in London. Now, whenever he had time, we went through my edited version of his notes that were so rich in insights and images--about his work and his family, about the landscape and its bird life, about the tragedies and comedies of life in South Africa.
In New Haven it was again fascinating to be on the fringe of one of his productions. Ever since he had brought Sizwe Bansi and The Island to the Long Wharf Theater, Kavanagh's had been his favorite bar. Friends, actors, and admirers orbited around him as, lunching or dining at his special table, we listened enthralled to his stories.
During 1984 Athol was at work on a new play. It marked his return to roots even deeper than those in Port Elizabeth, for it was set in the village of New Bethesda in the Karoo of his birth. He had even bought an old house there. He seldom spoke to me about his plays until they were completed but, passing through London, he described the woman who had inspired the leading character whom he called "Miss Helen." He had not actually met her, only glimpsed her in New Bethesda, where she had lived and died. Approaching the end of her life, she had created a fantastic world of beings and creatures, camels and owls, facing toward an imagined Mecca from her yard in the dorp. And when he remarked quietly that, just as all seemed lost, a vision had lit her life, I realized that "Miss Helen" was himself--the clue lay in a note he had written during May 1977, recording an "inner agony," a "death in life," a crisis of "the total extinction" of his creativity (Notebooks 229). From that descent into darkness he had triumphantly surfaced to write The Road to Mecca.
In the 1980s police and army rampaged against communities throughout South Africa and death squads roamed unchecked. From within the cauldron of violence Fugard forged My Children! My Africa!, also set in the Karoo (as was his earlier play, Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act). At the heart of the play was the bitter conflict between black youths' angry demand for "Liberation Before Education!" and a black schoolmaster's warning to "Be careful!" which expressed Fugard's passionately held credo: "Don't scorn words. They are sacred! Magical!"
After directing the play in South Africa, in America, and in London, Fugard, native of the Karoo, eagerly returned to his home there, to his work on Playland. The printed text starts with the stage direction: "A small traveling amusement park encamped on the outskirts of a Karoo town" (3). And because once again his play is rooted deep as the aloes of the landscape, its truth about the characters inhabiting the region he loves so profoundly touches us, wherever we may be.
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