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Fugard masters the code - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Gerald Weales
Elsa is something of a problem in the play. Like Gladys in Aloes, she has learned the dangers of trust. One can believe her anger and her sense of emptiness, for we see them in the cruelty she visits on Helen even as she tries to save her. Yet, her account of her broken love affair with the married man, of her abortion, even of her meeting with the African woman and baby on the road, lack the dramatic force of Helen's visionary speech. There is more information-giving than life in the motivational background for Elsa's distress. Yet, we have to accept the disappearing lover if we are to recognize the violation of trust for Elsa and its consequences--the aborted baby, who comes somewhat abruptly toward the end of the play even if Elsa's preoccupation with the African baby seems to have been promising some kind of revelation all along. Without Elsa's story there is no substance to the last line in which she reaffirms her love of Helen. Echoing her humorless joke about the father who, to teach his son a lesson, tells him to jump and then does not catch him, Elsa responds to Helen's "What about trust?" with "Open your arms and catch me! I'm going to jump!" (76). I would settle for Helen's line about learning to blow out the candles.
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Fugard's two most recent plays--My Children! My Africa! (1989) and Playland (1992)--seem somehow less substantial, less complex than earlier ones. Yet they contain familiar Fugard themes and recognizable South African characters, and I have watched audiences respond to them in ways that suggest that personal identification--not simply sympathy for the unfortunate other--is at work. My Children, which is set in 1984, when the boycotts against African schools were at their strongest, deals more directly with the racial politics of South Africa than is usual with Fugard. In part, the play is about the education of Isabel, the white girl who came to the location to debate and learned to be a friend to both Thami, her opponent in the debate, and Mr. M, the schoolmaster. For the most part, however, she is primarily an observer--if an outspoken one--of the conflict between Mr. M and his star pupil. She and we witness the slow revelation of Thami's distress with the causal paternalism of Mr. M (after asking Isabel to partner Thami in a contest, he says, "I haven't asked him Isabel, and I won't. I will tell him" 24), which Thami sees as an indication of the way in which Bantu Schools serve the white government, and the concomitant disintegration of Mr. M's faith in the power of words, of education to bring about change without violence. Fugard comments that "Mr. M is right. Some of the greatest souls the world has ever known have unlocked the floodgates with the words in that book" (Greene 8). That book is Mr. M's dictionary, which he offers to Thami in their final confrontation and which the young man rejects. Although Fugard prefers words to weapons, the play attempts to remain balanced, to understand all three characters, as their "confidences" indicate.
