Lent Day 11: People are still living there

 

This week a great theatrical light went off. Athol Fugard had a very good innings. 92 years at the crease, and I have no idea how he feels about cricket, but I would say he's 92 not out. 

Most Drama teachers can probably recite a Fugard backwards - 'Master Harold', 'Road to Mecca', 'The Island', 'Victory'... his repertoire spans decades and reflects intimately the lives of every day people surviving in both the Apartheid and post-Apartheid world. Any Drama student who has been around since the 1960s will be familiar with the quote synonymous with Fugard - 'he gave a voice to the voiceless'. And, as a Drama student, if that quote didn't end up somewhere in your final examination paper in your essay on Fugard did you even study?

There is something deeply humble about someone who devoted their lives to the plight of everyman. About someone who processed, through theatre, his own victories and betrayals in life, something that must happen when you're in a relationship with South Africa. Being in a relationship with South Africa will break your heart and set you free at the same time, it will hijack you and send you armed response. It is so intensely complicated. It was before 1994, and it certainly is now.

And that's where Athol found his voice. He held us on an existential knife point always throwing us a bone of hope at the end of his plays. Thank goodness, because some of them were pretty rough. I remember watching 'Master Harold' as a teenager. Broke my heart. I have now been teaching the play once a year for ten years. The end still breaks my heart. Please fly that kite one more time Master Hally. 

The same goes for 'The Island' where Winston 'honours the things to which honour belongs' tearing off his Antigone costume and confronting his jailers, his audiences, his world. I shudder to think how audiences would have responded to this statement in the 70s. The play was first staged three years before children in Soweto marched against a language, and were killed for it. 

And then many years later Fugard still highlights the plight of the voiceless in his plays like 'Victory'. When two children of the new South Africa are forced to turn to robbery and gangsterism to survive because you cannot find 'hope in a matchbox' (RDP housing) we are again forced to question how 'victorious' our new South Africa has been.

Fugard was never actually political, his plays were political, but for me he was actually merely the barometer for the small part of humanity that he chose to focus on at any given point in his plays. If there was a story to tell, that would otherwise fall into oblivion, he would endeavour to tell it. And in South Africa most of our stories end up being political. 

I find it amazing that a man whose plays are so deeply entrenched in South African culture, colour, language and context are the most widely performed plays in the world. That says something about honesty and integrity. Fugard didn't back away from being completely authentic and unrelentingly South African. And as such, the truth of his humanness is what made him universal.  

To be honest I don't know how I'm going to teach 'Master Harold' and his various friends this year. There was always that knowledge that maybe, as I was teaching these plays, Fugard was seated at his table in Neeu Bethesda finding a voice for someone else who had been muted. There was such a comfort in knowing that someone out there was making sure that the stories got told. 

We always ask our students the question of relevance when it comes to a play. What can we still learn from this play a hundred, or thirty, or even two thousand years, after the play was first staged? How does it still resonate with us today. I would argue then that the voice in Fugard's plays will never be silenced. That people are indeed still living there.