My Life is unlike any of Athol Fugard’s other plays. With this workshopped production, he told Mark Gevisser, he, like this country, has started again
FIVE teenage girls on stage, filled with adolescent hope and naivety, play out a parable for racial reconciliation simply by telling their stories. What on earth is Athol Fugard up to? Has the new South Africa watered the harsh Karoo hinterlands of even his imagination? Has our own cultural doringbos turned into a Namaqualand daisy?
In the old days, Fugard workshopped anguished explorations of apartheid’s consequences: Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island. More recently, he has offered us well-wrought allegories of racial conflict: Master Harold and the Boys, My Children, My Africa, Playland. Now, with My Life, he has gone back to the workshop, but this time with a quite uncharacteristic beatitude.
This moment in Fugard’s creative life — like all moments in Fugard’s creative life — is cataclysmic, apocalyptic: “I’ve come to realise,” he says, “that maybe I got a little bit straitjacketed by theatre conventions, by the concept of the well-made play, the whole question of illusion. And so My Life has had a hugely liberating effect on me. It has taken me back to the essentials, to the value of the word and the honesty of true storytelling. That’s the very provocative, very energising reconnection I’ve made at this point in my life. Here I am, in my 60s, and I’ve started again.”
Does this rebirth, by any chance, have anything to do with the bigger renaissance taking place in South Africa? “Listen! My 40 years as a writer have coincided perfectly with the 40 years of official apartheid, and I’ve ended up like a conditioned rat with a series of responses to bells and sounds, to uniforms and to government; and these conditioned reflexes are of no use to me in the future. Political and social reality in this country has changed totally, so if I want to go on functioning as a truly living writer, I’ve got to start again, in the same way this country is starting again.”
Fugard’s next play, which he is writing, takes him back to the Karoo, to a “parable of our times about an old man and a young woman”. He admits, quite freely, that he has used the workshop experience of My Life as research for this play: he, after all, is the old man of South Africa theatre, brought into contact with the young hope of five teenage girls.
So whose life is My Life anyway? There is no doubt that the voices of the five young women on stage — two African, one coloured, one Indian, one white — are theirs and theirs alone. Not even Fugard could capture so perfectly that querulous adolescent mix of bravado and timidity, of awakening and romance. If these were Fugard’s own words, he would have excised the banality that makes them so charming and replaced them with his own acute and elegant poetic formulations.
Indeed, he speaks of the fact that, “unlike in workshops like The Island and Sizwe Banzi, where I took John (Kani) and Winston (Ntshona)’s material home every night and shaped it and worked it, I found myself more and more reluctant to muscle in on the material the girls presented me. I began to discover a responsibility to midwife it rather than shape it …”
But Fugard, South Africa’s great allegorist, must have been up to something. No Fugard work is without meaning. He admits that when he started the workshop process by getting the girls to write diaries, he was looking to “find things that I could open up and explore”. But his subjects confounded him, he says, and he compares the process of making My Life to that of the South African elections, which were happening in the background throughout the rehearsal process.
Just as the world thought South Africa was going to explode “into another Rwanda, another bloodbath”, Fugard looked at the five young women sitting round the table at the first rehearsal, “and I thought: `Shit, we’re gonna get it! I’ve got all the ingredients for dynamite here.’ And I got excited for all the wrong reasons. I saw the suspicion in all five of them and I even tried to stir up the shit a little bit, like a `third force’ in that room. But, just like the bloodbath that didn’t happen during the elections, these girls too were just not interested in fighting. It completely upset every preconception I had.”
So Fugard does see an allegory in My Life; one that exists not in the narrative of the drama but in its making; one that he subtly allows to breathe as the five girls tell their stories.
Fugard is clearly a father-figure to the five young women, and the fact that they are not professional actresses raises difficult ethical questions. Has he put them through gruelling rehearsal and exposed them to strangers simply so that he could drink from the fountain of youth and offer South African theatre-goers a parable for reconciliation? When these girls speak the private musings of their diaries out aloud, are they just being manipulated or do they know what they are doing?
Go and see My Life and it’s clear that they do. The brilliance of the production is that the voices and the personalities on stage perpetually resist allegorisation: they are who they are, emphatically so; there is such integrity to the stories that they assume that unadorned “truth” Fugard claims to be seeking. And so strong is their desire to share that the experience never once falls into the traps of either prurient voyeurism or maudlin sentimentality.
But the fact that Fugard has tapped into such romantic, adolescent desire does not mean that he is abandoning his more characteristic harsher landscapes. He is frequently asked by unwitting foreigners, he says, what he is going to do as a writer now that apartheid is dead. “As if I’ve lost my capital, as if I’ve lost my subject, my material. I’m a storyteller about desperate people, and God knows there are going to be enough desperate people in South Africa to keep me in business for a long time to come.”
* My Life runs at the Tesson at the Johannesburg Civic until August 27.