THEATRE: Mark Gevisser
THERE is a wonderful moment in Valley Song when Athol Fugard, playing himself, turns on his audience and explains that he moved to the Karoo village of Nieu Bethesda because ”I wanted to return to essentials, to the real world” where, away from the chimerical world of theatre, of ”actors and producers”, he would be able ”to write prose” — as opposed to, say, dramatic verse or poetry.
On the surface, Valley Song offers unbridled optimism: the fecundity of the earth that the old coloured man, Buks (played by Fugard), tills on his akkers in Nieu Bethesda; the song of his granddaughter Veronica (played by Esmeralda Bihl) and the power of her dream to become a star; the conclusion in which the characters — previously in conflict — reconcile themselves harmoniously to each other, the land and the
But beneath all of this, there is a terrible sadness to Valley Song; it is the sadness of an ageing man’s longing — of Fugard’s longing — for the simplicity of vegetables, of youth, of prose. There is, for example, only the most occassional flourish of characteristically Fugardian metaphor (pumpkin seeds are ”a handful of miracles”); for the rest, the language is, well, prosaic: sometimes stripped down, sometimes sentimental, always everyday.
The story-line, too, is simple: an author (Fugard playing himself) comes to Nieu-Bethesda and buys the land on which Buks is a tenant, causing the old man to worry that he might lose his livelihood and inheritance. Meanwhile Buks is in conflict with his granddaughter, because she wishes to leave the valley for the big city. It is rendered in a story-telling way, with a wry earthiness reminiscent of Bosman.
At times, in the narrative, Fugard becomes the story- teller, and plays himself playing Buks; at other times, he plays Buks directly. In the former case he is compelling; in the latter, he veers close to caricature. Bihl as Veronica brings with her all the ups and downs of inexperience: she has a tendency to ham — to find things to ”do”, like hopscotch, as she talks — but she also offers, for the most part, reach- out-and-touch-it authenticity, an acting style so unadorned it goes beyond naturalism. Her anger is quiet and firm; much more interesting than her sing-song girlishness.
At times, when Fugard is in the familiar dramatic territory of allegorical conflict, both his writing and the performances are incandescent. When, for example, Buks and Veronica are at war because she says she does not want to become an ”arme ou kleurling” like her grandparents, he responds with the rousing indignation that only a Fugard can muster, articulating a complexity that undermines the conflict of aged servitude versus liberated youth.
There is also the seed of a brilliant dramatic exposition on land, with all three different characters expressing their conflicting relationships to it: for Buks it is a livelihood, for Veronica it is servitude, for Fugard-the-author it is the fantasy of some Thoreau-esque return to pastoral basics. But this seed does not germinate, because Valley Song is ultimately a very personal work; an exploration of Fugard’s own maturation rather than, as in the past, a dramatisation of political conflict or social change.
One gets the sense that a play was the last thing he wanted to make — Fugard, remember, went to Nieu Bethesda to write ”prose”. There is ultimately something desultory and incomplete about Valley Song, as if at this point in his life Fugard was searching for a new form, a new way of being, but got terrified in the process and returned — only halfheartedly — to what he knew best: theatre.
Perhaps Fugard — writer, director and actor — needed the perspective of an outsider to help fashion this into a dramatic work. But I was perpetually reminded of his last work, the brilliant and moving My Life, in which he put five girls on stage and empowered them to tell their own stories, because he felt he didn’t have the words, yet, to articulate the rebirth of South Africa’s transition.
Fugard remains our greatest humanist, but there is a thin line between humanism and sentimentality. In Valley Song he crosses that line — perhaps because he has still not, yet, found the words. That is the sadness of his latest play, and I would venture to guess that, beneath the optimism, it is a sadness he quite consciously intends to telegraph to us.