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Fugard masters the code - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Gerald Weales
"A play gets written when the external specifics of a story run parallel to a very private need to make a personal statement," Fugard told Gussow (48). When his early plays first appeared, it was those external specifics that captured theatre audiences at home and abroad, but the private need was always there to fuel his creativity. In September 1968, talking to himself in the pages of his not yet published notebooks, he indicated that he and his brother Royal were hidden in Morrie and Zach, he and his father in Johnnie and the offstage crippled father in Hello and Goodbye, he and his wife in Boesman and Lena (Notebooks 174). There is something of him in Piet too, the Afrikaner who cannot conceive leaving South Africa, who both understands and does not understand why Steve is going. Fugard, whose passport was withdrawn between 1967 and 1971, and who could have left the country only on a no-return exit permit, said as late as 1990: "I identify passionately with my country, and the thought of any form of exile from it is to me a vision of living death". With "Master Harold" . . . and the boys (1982), the glimpses of Fugard through his characters gave way to something very close to autobiography. He used real names (his childhood nickname Hally, Sam Semela, the St. George's Park Tea Room, and the Jubilee Boarding House) and real relationships--his with Sam, with his mother, with his father. As always with Fugard, the personal elements are manipulated, polished, juggled for the sake of the play. Hally, for instance, is older than Fugard was at the time of the spitting incident, and it is here used dramatically, not as a gratuitous gesture of childish spite. Yet his spitting in Sam's face is presumably the impetus to the play because, whatever else the play is doing, it seems to be an act of penitence, an apology, an attempt to lay a restless ghost. He tells the story in Notebooks, on the occasion of an unexpected call Sam paid on him and his mother: "Don't suppose I will ever deal with the shame that overwhelmed me the second after I had done that" (26). According to Gussow, he wrote a poem that year which ended, "Come sit before me and like someone with Jesus I will wipe my spit out of your eyes" (87); but there is more mea culpa than art in a line like that. Presumably not a cleansing mea culpa, however, for references to the event
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continued to surface (for instance, in interviews with Smith and with Collins ["Blood Knot"]). Not until "Master Harold" did he manage to marry the private need to the external specifics, and to pay his debt not only to Sam Semela but to his drunken, crippled father. The play was dedicated to Sam and H.D.F. (Harold David Fugard).
"It's the portrait of the artist as a young fool," Fugard told Gussow (93). Although Sam may be a richer character and certainly the more appealing one to large audiences ("Master Harold" is Fugard's most successful play), his Hally is a remarkable creation, a word-obsessed youth, a child trying to be an adult. "I'm not going to waste my time again arguing with you about the existence of God," he says, rejecting Sam's choice of Jesus in the scene in which they vie to pick a great man. "You know perfectly well I'm an atheist . . . and I've got homework to do" (22). A lovely line, a teetering between man and boy. Elsewhere, he speaks with a comic pretentiousness which he recognizes and uses; when Willie learns that Sam and Hally purposely lost at checkers with him to keep him playing, he complains that they did not play fair, and Hally replies, "It was for your benefit, Mr. Malopo, which is more than being fair. It was an act of self-sacrifice" (28). It is this quality in Hally, as well as the student-teacher combination in Sam, that makes the first part of the play so effective--the education game they play, the memories they share about the old days at the Jubilee and the making of the kite.
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