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Fugard masters the code - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Gerald Weales
There are a great many set pieces in Aloes--Piet on aloes, Piet on the drought, Piet on the bus strike and his conversion, Steve on his father's fish and his decay after losing his home, Steve on his prison experience, even Gladys on the diary and the raid. Sometimes these appear to be information-giving speeches, for the audience not the other characters, but at their best they work dramatically.
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Piet uses his to deflect Gladys's anger, Steve uses his to elicit Piet's presumed complicity, and Gladys's are both weapons against Piet and indications of her increasing instability. Fugard has always used such devices, although at times he seems to disapprove of them. In 1970, commenting on text and subtext, stating versus showing through action, he sees Boesman and Lena as an improvement over The Blood Knot: "Morrie and Zachariah speak out almost all that happens to them, they articulate in detail; Boesman acts."(4) His recurring distrust of The Blood Knot ("That play is well and truly buried. I now only talk about it when I am drunk," he told Notebooks [61] as early as July 1962) surfaced in 1985 when he prepared the text for the twenty-fifth anniversary presentation of the play by cutting extensively, most of it from Morris's speeches. The shearing of Morris aside, Fugard continued to give his characters long speeches whether they were used to set up a context of intimacy ("Master Harold" . . . and the boys), to provide a final character revelation (The Road to Mecca), or as direct address to the audience (My Children! My Africa!). He told Christopher Wren that the latter were not soliloquies but "confidences" (36), speeches to an understanding audience by characters who cannot speak honestly to one another. One of the most attractive uses of this device, particularly to someone whom performance artists have taught to distrust the monologue, comes in A Place with the Pigs, in which the practical Praskovya regularly undercuts the verbal flights of Pavel. At the end of a typically eloquent, angst-ridden, self-dramatizing speech, Pavel cries out, "Is my soul now nothing more than a pigsty?" Praskovya--bless her heart--responds, "That sounds like a theological question, Pavel. I don't think I know enough to take it on" (71). Fugard's ability to make fun of himself in Pigs does not lessen the necessity for, and--in many cases--the excellence of, the arias he lets his characters sing. Considering Gideon in Playland, in a notebook entry for October 1990 (528, this volume), Fugard says, "The desperate need to talk, to tell, to ask for forgiveness." The remark might serve as a comment on all of his characters and on the playwright himself.
