Fugard masters the code

MORRIS: It's difficult to play something you haven't seen. (The Blood Knot 64) "Critics are poisonous snakes," Athol Fugard told William B. Collins in 1982, placing a comforting hand on his arm: "you just need to be bitten once and you develop an anti-venom in your system" ("On Stage").(1) If I had read such a statement fifteen years ago I might have hesitated to send the playwright a copy of my earlier Hollins Critic essay on his work, but his response was amiable (perhaps the anti-venom was working), even when he reaffirmed his faith in Dimetos, a discussion of which had brought my celebratory article to a sadly muted finish. "I am confident that it will prove itself with time," he wrote. If so, its time has not yet come, since Dimetos must be Fugard's least produced play. I bring up this ancient critical history not to applaud my fifteen-year-old response and not--not simply, in any case--to make a bridge between this essay and my earlier one. Not even to initiate a new consideration of Dimetos, except to indicate certain things about it that mark it as an anomaly in his work. "My other work has been spawned by people, incidents, or images I knew rather than by something I read," Fugard told Russell Vandenbroucke (149), commenting on the passage from Albert Camus' Carnets which haunted him from 1961 until 1975, when he exorcised it by writing Dimetos. Recording his acceptance of a commission from the Edinburgh Festival in February of 1975, he said he had "decided finally to take up the idea of Dimetos" (Notebooks 215). "Idea," as his notebooks often indicate, is a word that bedeviled Fugard as playwright. "Boesman's hatred and abuse of Lena," he wrote in a notebook entry dated July 4, 1968, quoted in the introduction to Three Port Elizabeth Plays: "Easy enough to formulate this as an 'idea' but a struggle to reveal the full carnal reality of it in incident and dialogue" (xx).(2) When he was first working with the characters who would eventually appear in A Lesson from Aloes, he wrote, "I need to locate Piet, Gladys and Steve in a world of real things, not ideas," and when he discarded--or thought he did--the work the next month, he explained, "Cart before my horse--consciously evolved my 'idea' and then tried to embody it in a place, a time, a man. It is no good, I just don't work like that" (Notebooks 140, 143). His method in Dimetos was even less characteristic. There he tried to embody the idea in a man, but one who lived in no recognizable place, no identifiable time. Still working with the play after its first production at Edinburgh, he indicated that he was thinking of the time of the play "without letting any specifics creep onto the page" but that he had "two specific settings in my imagination" (Notebooks 219). Working tools, presumably, for they never moved from his imagination to the stage. Certainly the New Bethesda that became the "remote province" of Act One of Dimetos (4) has none of the substantiality of the New Bethesda outside Miss Helen's door in The Road to Mecca. Dimetos is one of only three plays that Fugard set outside of South Africa. The Drummer, the five-minute mime piece he wrote for the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1980, grew out of an image he found in New York--a derelict playing with drumsticks--but it is set not in New York or any American urban city but, as all mimes are, in the performance space where the action takes place. A Place with the Pigs ostensibly began with a newspaper story about a Russian deserter, but the pigsty setting, despite an occasional word or two ("cabbage soup and dumplings" [79], for instance), is in a village that is not in Russia but, according to the play's stage directions, "somewhere in the author's imagination" (53). Most of Fugard's work belongs to South Africa. The rain of place names that falls on us as we watch--listen to--Fugard's plays is not evidence of regionalism. They give a geographical reality in which his characters can find their emotional truth and their stories can be told, and although we may not know Cradock from Noupoort--to use two of the traveling amusement-park stops in Playland--we have no trouble recognizing them and recognizing ourselves in Gideon and Martinus, as in Morrie and Zach, Boesman and Lena, Hally and Sam. …