Content provided in partnership with

Fugard masters the code - Athol Fugard Issue

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Gerald Weales

<< Page 1 Continued from page 1. Previous | Next

"A man's scenery is other men," Fugard wrote in November 1966 (Notebooks 141), contemplating the final image of the Piet-Gladys-Steve story that would become A Lesson from Aloes in 1978. The men and women on Fugard's human landscape are necessarily South African. "I stand on a street in Port Elizabeth or Johannesburg or a small South African town, and in terms of the life that passes me I've mastered the code," he told Mel Gussow, and he gives a sample portrait of a black woman carrying shopping bags. "If I stood on a corner in London or New York, I couldn't put that sort of biography behind any of the people walking past me. Mastering the code of a place has been necessary to me as a writer" (51). The three characters in Aloes--distantly based on people mentioned in Notebooks as early as 1961--are veterans of the struggles in a cause that--for two of them at least--has come to seem false, a kind of ideological self-delusion that made their idealism and their sense of community appear to be politically important. Piet, the Afrikaner, driven by drought from the farm he loved, found new meaning as a political activist. He still believes that man-made inequities "can be unmade by men" (35), but he is isolated, shunned by his old colleagues, who think he is an informer. There is a kind of stolidity in Piet which allows him to withstand the attacks/demands on him by Gladys and Steve and which incidentally makes him a difficult character for an actor to play. Gladys, in response to a police raid in which her private diaries were read ("They violated me, Peter" [28]), has been in and out of mental hospitals. Even though she knows better (her hysteria frequently breaks through her quiescent mask during the play), she blames Piet for what has happened, for luring her from the safety of her middle-class English home with his siren song, "Trust, Gladys. Trust yourself. Trust life" (27). She not only accuses him, but tries to punish him by destroying the no longer existing closeness between him and Steve, the "coloured" friend whose eloquence brought him into the movement. "There was nothing left to wreck" (77), Piet says. As for Steve, just out of prison and on his way to voluntary exile in England, he has come to Pier because he believes, with the others in their group, that Piet is an informer, and it is a flawed Piet that he needs. The most interesting thing about Steve is the way in which he transfers his own feelings onto Piet, at first attacking him for accusations that Piet never makes about his decision to leave South Africa and then, presumably in search of a fellow sinner, by revealing that he turned informer in prison.

More Articles of Interest: A tribute for Athol Fugard at sixty - Athol Fugard Issue; Realizing Fugard - Athol Fugard Issue; Introduction: Fugard, women, and politics - Athol Fugard Issue; Some problems of a playwright from South Africa - Athol Fugard Issue -...; Encounters with Fugard: native of the Karoo - Athol Fugard Issue

At the end of the play with Steve gone and Gladys inside packing for her return to the hospital, Piet is left alone in the backyard with his collection of aloes. The metaphor of the aloes is explained, perhaps too obviously, in the exchange between him and Gladys in Act One, in which he describes the power of aloes to withstand drought, but the lesson is somewhat ambiguous. "Is that the price of survival in this country?" she asks. "Thorns and bitterness." Those words do not describe the Piet we see in the play, but he does find "some sort of lesson" in aloes, insisting, "We need survival mechanisms as well." The aloes in the play, however, are not "the veritable forest of scarlet spikes" he remembers from the farm, but captive plants, and "An aloe isn't seen to its best advantage in a jam tin in a little backyard." Gladys rejects the survival lesson. "If that's what your expectations have shrunk to, it's your business, but God has not planted me in a jam tin" (15, 14, 16). That she may have a jam tin of her own--her recurring madness--does not alter the validity of her statement. God may not have planted Piet in a jam tin either, but at the end he crawls into one, joins the other potted plants in the backyard. "I wasn't writing about a hero," Fugard told Gussow. "I was writing about a victim. I've never written about a hero. I don't understand heroism. Piet is a very simple man, saying, 'I've lived through one drought. I'll try to survive this one as well'" (90). Of course, he lived through the drought by leaving the land which, in the present context, would be a Steve solution which is impossible for Piet. A positive negative end, then, in the best Fugard tradition.

Fugard masters the code - Athol Fugard Issue

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Gerald Weales

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Business

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts