Fugard masters the code - Athol Fugard Issue

When the Fugard-Devenish films opened in New York in 1984, Fugard explained to Samuel G. Freedman that part of his fascination with Eugene Marais lay in "this dark side, this dark parallel to me. There is this addictive nature in my personality. . . . I did reach the point where I had to stand up at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New York and say, 'My name is Athol Fugard and I am an alcoholic'" ("Fugard" 1). It is not simply that the alcoholic Fugard felt a kinship with the morphine-addicted Marais, but he makes the connection within the script of The Guest itself. The fictional Marais, quoting the real Marais, speaks of "Habitual recourse to the use of a poison to induce a feeling of happiness as a remedy for the pain of consciousness" (105), and I am reminded of Fugard in despair at the way Boesman and Lena is going, "And drinking myself every evening into a wild, maudlin, emotional stupor so as to fool myself that I still feel!" (Notebooks 155). The Marais quotation comes in the scene in which, in the first positive indication of his temporary cure, he finds and rebuilds a still--an event that seems gratuitous compared to his finding the pipit nest for Little Corrie. At the end, as Marais shoots up again, Oom Doors, the farmer who is his host and his keeper, reads from Isaiah 28:7--"The priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink, they are swallowed up of wine, they are out of the way through strong drink" (124, 129n). Not that a provincial filmgoer like me, one who does not understand Afrikaans, would know what Oom Doors was reading without the notes to the printed script. Still, with a whole Bible at his disposal, Fugard chose these verses for the impressive sequence in which the film cuts back and forth between Marais in momentary exhilaration and the Doors family trying to temper their distress and disappointment with a Bible reading.

If The Guest is the only Fugard work to make an obvious allusion to his alcoholism, A Place with the Pigs (1987) is the only one to celebrate his drying out. Pavel begins the play with the hope--even the expectation--that he will be able to leave the pigsty in which he has been hiding, but when this proves impossible and when the excitement of a momentary walk outside ends with his hurrying back into his sanctuary/cage, he declines from the relative fastidiousness of the first scene to complete the filthy identification with the pigs. It is only after his wife has beaten him back into his manhood that he is able to release the pigs, and he and Praskovya can leave the sty. When I first saw the play in a small theatre in Atlanta, it seemed little more than an untidy farce--an unlikely play to come from Fugard. Contemplating it later, coupling the subtitle ("A personal parable") with the frequent references in the mid-1980s to his struggle with drink, made it obvious that, as he said in the New York University speech, "I made a pigsty out of a bottle of Jack Daniel's whisky." There are inescapable revelatory lines in the argument Pavel has with himself in the last scene before he makes his monumental decision to free himself. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I won't do it again," he says in the familiar rhetoric of the alcoholic, but he tramples on his pro-forma apology with "Don't waste our time with promises. We've had them from you before and they've all come to nothing" (93). So finally he acts and off they go to see "the sunrise you missed yesterday" (10), as Praskovya says. A victory for Pavel and, by extension, for Fugard, the man. But what does this mean for Fugard, the playwright?