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Encounters with Fugard: native of the Karoo - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Mary Benson
"Warning ignored, prophecy fulfilled," he said to me about this play. The warning was The Blood Knot, in which Morrie and Zach were a metaphor for black and white: unless they accepted their brotherhood, they would destroy each other. They, Fugard points out, were innocents and were linked by brotherhood. Now, after more than thirty years of escalating violence in his country, Martinus and Gideon in Playland are strangers who have broken the sixth commandment. The play's gestation began in December 1966 when Fugard took his small daughter Lisa to Playland, an amusement fair traveling the Karoo. He watched the attendant of the "happiness machines," an African in faded overalls, behaving oddly, "muttering darkly to himself," his eyes with an "abstracted intensity" (Notebooks 145). That man is now incarnated in the character of Martinus. The catalyst for Fugard in writing the play was a photograph of white South African soldiers dropping the corpses of black men into a crude hole. In the play a black woman stands, watching--a sorrowful mother?--an image inspired by Pergolesi's Stabat Mater.
Now in his sixties, Fugard remarks that his true nature as a man of the desert is getting stronger. He recently spoke to me of the Karoo as beautiful, pure, spare, "a landscape where man is always the right size."
COPYRIGHT 1993 Hofstra University
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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