Victory (Athol Fugard)

This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER 21st April 2007 View online here It was with some trepidation that I sat down to prepare a series of questions for Athol Fugard. After all, it’s not every day that you have the chance to correspond with a man described by TIME Magazine as “the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world”. Most South African theatre patrons and practitioners hold that opinion already, irrespective of (or, perhaps, despite) any honours bestowed by an American publication. Nevertheless, the USA has at least one advantage over us when it comes to Fugard: currently based in San Diego, he is not in the country while his new play, Victory, is showing at the Baxter theatre in Cape Town. My nerves were eased somewhat by the fact that Fugard and I have a mutual interest in the late Guy Butler, an influential but not widely remembered scholar, poet and playwright. It was Butler who, during his long tenure as Professor in the English Department at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, encouraged the young Fugard to “tell South African stories”. Specifically, this included the stories of the Eastern Cape; albeit in different generations, both grew up in and defined themselves relative to the perennially contested frontier terrain stretching from Graaff Reinet to Umtata, and from the Tsitsikamma Mountains to Aliwal North. The frontiers here are both political and geographical. Historically, the area was fiercely contested by those nineteenth-century combatants, Briton, Boer, Xhosa and so-called “Griqua”; in the twentieth century, the region was a site of continued foment, producing some of the greatest icons of the struggle against Apartheid. Underlying this is an older and more enduring frontier in the Eastern Cape – between coastal and desert landscapes, between fertile farmland and the arid Karoo.  Fugard’s deep attachment to the Karoo is evident in much of his work, but his attitude to it seems an ambiguous one. On the one hand, although the Karoo is sparsely populated by humans, flora and fauna, the very harshness of the place has its own beauty, as if years of heat and drought have burned it clean and made it a space for contemplation. On the other hand, the Karoo represents a kind of existential landscape in which people are lost and alienated – like Boesman and Lena, probably Fugard’s most famous stage creations, who seem to be eternally wandering through the mud flats around Port Elizabeth – and is a useful metaphor for the sense of displacement experienced by so many South Africans. In this environment, people cling to anything that makes them feel they belong; one of the characters in A Lesson from Aloes collects aloe specimens because “it makes me feel that little bit more at home in my world”. I asked Fugard if, in asserting the paradoxical nature of the place, I was pushing these oppositions too far. “Not at all,” he replied. “They create the tensions which generate power for my storytelling. I like your phrase ‘existential landscape’ but I don’t agree with you that the people are lost and alienated in it – exactly the opposite. Whether it is the Afrikaner sheep farmer or the humble labourers in Nieu Bethesda, it is their sense of being rooted, of growing out of and loving that world, that so fascinates me and with which I have a really deep empathy. When I return to the Karoo, as I will be doing shortly, I have a heart-lifting sense of going home.” Notwithstanding this sense of belonging, I put it to Fugard that the notion of the Karoo being somehow “pure” is belied by the real suffering of many people living in its towns/townships. After all, the promotional material for Victory describes it as set in “a dusty and deprived Karoo town”, “a world robbed of hope, existing at the mercy of senseless violence and drug abuse”. These problems are endemic throughout South Africa and are not unique to a particular locale, but does the generic Karoo town offer a microcosmic view of broader social issues? Fugard’s response was firm: “The issue of the ‘broader’ significance of my stories is one that has never and will never interest me. I write with my nose buried in the specifics of a particular story in a particular place at a particular time. The crust of bread and mug of black tea that Lena shares with Outa on that night on the Swartkops mud flats [in Boesman and Lena] are pure, and they are, simply, a crust of bread and a mug of black tea.  If they resonate beyond that moment then well and good but I did not try to engineer that resonance. I simply wanted to tell Lena’s, Boesman’s and Outa stories as accurately as I could.” Inevitably, however, South African audiences are acutely conscious of sociopolitical context – specifically our racial history – and telling accurate stories carries implications in terms of characters’ race(s). A number of Fugard’s plays focus on black-white conflict. But since his earliest days as a dramatist, he has shown a particular interest in and concern for the position of coloured people in South Africa. For many years, the coloured population in our country was used as a kind of political tool, a buffer zone, or even (by “liberal” whites) as a means of mocking the apartheid government’s horror of miscegenation. But Fugard has spoken about Boesman as a character in whom he recognises “[his own] bastardised identity”. I asked him to elaborate on this, particularly in light of the way that the issues facing South Africa’s coloured communities emerge in Victory. “I think I would be right in saying that what all storytellers look for in the first instance, either consciously or unconsciously, is desperation. Find a desperate situation or a desperate individual and you have the potential for a story. In my case the search is unconscious. All I am aware of is that most days the situations and characters that interest me are usually desperate in some way or another, up against the wall, in a tight corner. In Victory I did not write about ‘the issues facing SA’s coloured communities’; I wrote about characters called Lionel, Vicky and Freddie.” Still, even when Fugard eschews social commitment or ideological positioning, his choice of subject matter – along with the cachet, whether desired or not, of a protest theatre practitioner – means that he is typically praised for his “relevance”. Some of Fugard’s most popular work has emerged from workshop collaborations with actors, rather than by writing a script and presenting it onstage. This is in line with the kind of “poor man’s theatre” associated with the political struggle in South Africa. Yet, because his plays have become so well known and respected, there has been a demand for published versions that can be distributed, studied and performed elsewhere. Fugard has also followed Albert Camus’ example by publishing his own Notebooks, providing documentary insight into the play-making process. (Further prose works include Karoo and Other Stories and the short novel Tsotsi, on which the now-famous movie is based.) I suggested to Fugard that, in this way, his work has become more “literary”. He seemed taken aback. “More literary? I have never thought of my plays as ‘literature’. Others might but I most certainly don’t. I am a storyteller and theatre, by which I mean live performance in front of an audience, is the end result I aim at. The words I put down on paper are only a stepping stone to that magical event.” Many audience members will be enthralled by the magic of Victory during the course of its run. Under the direction of Lara Foot Newton, the cast (veteran actor Cobus Rossouw and relative newcomers to the South African stage, Ameera Patel and Wayne van Rooyen) maintain a taut energy throughout the play’s single act, drawing the audience into complicity with the uncomfortably familiar situation onstage. Vicky Klaas (Patel) is a coloured teenager haunted by her mother’s death and tormented by her father’s subsequent grief, which has been distorted by alcoholism into abuse. She turns to Freddie Blom (van Rooyen), whose rebellion against the conditions of his upbringing is both puerile and bitterly insightful: his dreams of escaping the Karoo to join a gang in Cape Town seem childlike in their naivety, but they are mitigated by an adult resentment towards the race-based power imbalances that persist in South African society. This makes Freddie violent and dangerous. As the play begins, on a half-lit stage surrounded by half-empty bookshelves whose contents are scattered across the floor – here it may be added that Mannie Manim’s lighting and Jaco Bouwer’s simple set design are particularly evocative – we find Vicky and Freddie robbing the house of Lionel Benson (Rossouw), an aged widower and ex-teacher. Lionel and his late wife used to employ Vicky’s mother as a domestic worker, and he has a vaguely paternal affection for her; by and large, however, he has lost his enthusiasm for life and, when he discovers the couple rummaging through his possessions for a non-existent stash of money, the last dregs of his optimism seem to evaporate. During the course of the play, Lionel’s battle against his own cynicism and indifference is set against the ambiguous relationship between Vicky and Freddie, who are, by turns, tender and hostile. Vicky manifests an adolescent confusion over what to do with her sexuality, at times resisting Freddie and at times deferring to him, when her loneliness as a de facto orphan combines with her regrets about the burglary and her fears for her own and Lionel’s safety. For his part, Freddie is thrilled by the experience of playing “master” – having Vicky (her head in a doek) serve him “like a white man”, while he taunts and beats Lionel – and yet he remains, despite his hyena laughs and nothing-to-lose bravado, a nervous and pitiable young man. The play pivots around a talismanic prop: the gun that Lionel has bought to defend himself and that, when it is snatched away by Freddie, develops a fatalistic and fatal significance. By the end of the play, the tragic irony of the title has been explained. Vicky/Victoria, born in 1990, was named in the atmosphere of celebration that accompanied Mandela’s release from prison; seventeen years later, however, widespread poverty, substance abuse and continued racial tensions threaten to turn this into a pyrrhic victory. In her director’s note, Foot Newton writes that she and the cast “debated whether this is a play of darkness and attrition, suggesting that hope in our country is dead and meaningless, or whether it is a ‘Be Careful!’ play – a warning: if you don’t wake up now it might be too late. Perhaps this is something that the production might provoke. Perhaps it is a call to be active, to protest, to reflect inwards.” It seems that Fugard, try as he may, cannot avoid the “broader” significance of his stories.

 

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