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Fugard masters the code - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Gerald Weales
For the most part the characters seem to operate in separate worlds, ideational and actual, which is presumably one of the main points of the play. Yet the two best scenes are those in which the characters mix or almost mix. There is great exhilaration in the practice session in I.v in which Isabel and Thami make a tennis match of sorts out of the literary information they are accumulating for the contest that will never take place, and--appropriately enough, given the direction the play is taking--the game turns into a political argument over who or what overthrew the statue of Ozymandias. A stronger and more crucial scene is II.iii. Mr. M is alone in his schoolroom, ringing the bell defiantly, while outside his protesting students are ready to punish him, thinking quite rightly that he is an informer. Thami comes to save him, is even willing to lie for him, but he cannot bring himself to admit what he tells Isabel in the next scene ("I also loved him" [75]), and Mr. M, who might let himself be saved if Thami were doing it for him, refuses to accept Thami's supposed motivation, to protect the cause from embarrassment. He runs out to meet the mob: "Do you think I'm frightened of dying?" (70). In the final scene, Isabel goes up to Wapadsberg Pass, where Mr. M had his first vision of what words could do, and assures him that his children can still save his Africa, "The future is still ours, Mr. M" (78). The sentiment is admirable perhaps, but within the context of the play, with Mr. M dead and Thami in exile, it is too self-consciously uplifting. Customarily, Fugardian light only flickers hesitantly through the darkness.
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In Playland we are back to the tentative flicker. "Last night Lisa's annual outing in Playland and Happy Valley," he wrote in December 1966. His daughter's Playland may not have been quite as menacing as the one in the new play, but even then he was fascinated by an African attendant ("His eyes--abstracted intensity") and contemplated a play or film in which the attendant does not stop the ride--"Laughter turns to screams. The whites trapped in the Happiness Machine" (Notebooks 145). Gideon may not be trapped by the amusement park in Playland, but its abrasive bright lights and loud music fail to provide the joy--or at least the surcease from sorrow--that he is presumably seeking. The short play consists of the conversations/confrontations between him and Martinus, the park's night watchman, to whom he returns after each disastrous attempt to find fun on the midway. They seem to be complete opposites--the phlegmatic Martinus, the garrulous Gideon--but they share their inability to live among other people in the world. Martinus, who has served time for having killed the white man who raped his intended wife, has made a prison of Playland, in which he sits reliving the murder for which he feels no guilt. Gideon, on the other hand, is awash with guilt for the SWAPO guerrilla fighters he killed during the Border War at the edge of South West Africa (Namibia), and what he wants, it becomes clear as he taunts Martinus, is for the African to punish him. "Forgive me or kill me," says Gideon with typical explicitness in this too explicit play. "That's the only choice you've got" (44). Gideon is wrong, however. Martinus cannot kill him without the motivating hate that fueled his first and only murder, and he insists he does not know how to forgive. In the end, as dawn breaks, they advise one another. Martinus tells Gideon to rebuild the pigeon coop that he and his father once had, and Gideon tells Martinus, who has said he would like to see the pigeons fly as Gideon earlier described them, to "Get out of that little room [where the murder took place] man. Let old Andries spook there by himself tonight." With all that has gone before, this mutual purging is a touch too neat, but--perhaps because confession is cleansing or perhaps because it is the end of the play--"They walk off together" (47).
