Content provided in partnership with
Fugard masters the code - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Gerald Weales
Fugard was one of the artists interviewed by Samuel G. Freedman in an article on the connection between creativity and instability. After describing the way he worked in pre-AA days, Fugard said, "I had to ask myself, could I still get into my dark side? . . . Maybe my art now will be more about light than dark" ("Inner Torment" 22). The first play he wrote in his new sobriety was The Road to Mecca (1984), and it was a play obsessed by the conflict between darkness and light. Miss Helen is a widow in her sixties who has spent the last fifteen years--since the death of her husband and her turning her back on her church--building her Mecca, a gallery of grotesque statues on her lawn, and filling her house with mirrors and bits of glass designed to catch the light of her many candles. Elsa calls it "your little miracle of light and color" (23). Now, however, she is unable to work, is assailed by darkness ("It's got inside me at last and I can't light candles there" [37]), is suicidal. There is a lot of Fugard in Miss Helen, both in her way of working and in her despair. "It's still only just an idea I'm thinking about," she tells Elsa, explaining why she has not begun work on her moon mosaic. "I have to see them very clearly first" (26). Shades of Dimetos. "This must surely be the darkest night of my soul" (29), she says in a letter to Elsa, who conveniently reads it for us, and such a darkness has often assailed Fugard. There is a painful passage in Notebooks in which he fears "that total extinction of my creativity. Without it I find living a pain I can only describe as intolerable. I have feared for my sanity" (229). There is a remarkable passage in Mel Gussow's New Yorker profile of Fugard--very uncharacteristic of that decorous genre--in which he describes the playwright's turning up at his house, heavy with drink and despair. "Christ, I'm hurting," Fugard cries, and Gussow adds, "He pronounced the word 'hoorting'--it sounded like a wail" (80). The playwright's "dark side" is still in evidence in Miss Helen's pain.
- 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
The play is a struggle between Marius, the clergyman, and Elsa, the liberal teacher, both of whom love and want to save Helen, but neither of whom really understands her. For Marius, Helen's art has never been more than an eccentric hobby, and he wants to rescue her from her home, which recently caught fire perhaps not exactly by accident, and tuck her into a cozy, colorless, church-run old-folks home. For Elsa, Helen's art is a revolutionary gesture, an act of defiance to the proprieties of her village, and Helen is "the first truly free spirit I have ever known" (61). Although Helen at first elicited Elsa's help, she finally must defend herself from both of them. "You're not allowing me to say anything," she says to Elsa, and later to Marius, "Please can I talk for a little bit now?" (35, 51). When she finally gets to talk--her last long speech--she is neither Elsa's heroine nor Marius's victim. She does not need rescuing, for she has rescued herself with her vision of Mecca and then, hardly a "free spirit," she is driven by her creativity once idea is replaced by image. "There is more light in you than in all your candles put together," Marius says, retreating, and Elsa later repeats the line (70, 71). At the end, Helen says, "Just as I taught myself how to light candles, and what that means, I must teach myself now how to blow them out . . . and what that means" (75). It is a richly amorphous line, particularly when one knows that the original of Helen did commit suicide. Onstage, however, it is an indication that she has once again taken control of her life, and the positive quality of its delivery is underlined by Elsa, who gets the last line.
