THEATRE: Andrew Wilson
WHILE some of Athol Fugard’s later works, like A Place With the Pigs, are mark ed by claustrophobic symbolism and metaphor, his earlier plays like Hello and Goodbye and People Are Living There are finely textured examples of dirty real ism, where action and character are not slaves to ethereal philosophies or did acticism.
Currently on at The Civic, People Are Living There sees the desperately lonely Milly and her Braamfontein lodgers grappling with urban life and each other i
n a way that pits their need for human contact against their revulsion for oth ers, themselves and their dead-end condition. It is from this dynamic that pro tagonists Milly and her angry young lodger Don attempt to resolve their relati onship to reality.
Milly’s lower middle-class pretensions to a better life run aground in her inn er-city boarding house, where she finds herself alienated from an uncaring soc iety and trapped by her bitterness at rejection by a former boyfriend. Despera te to announce and reaffirm her existence to the world and her former lover, w ho is still a tenant, she throws a tragic party where her guests are under ord ers to hav e fun.
In Notebooks: 1960-1977, Fugard’s stated intention with the play was “to catch life on the wing – to bring down a moment of it; a smell, a sound, a cry …”
. This he does by juxtaposing Milly’s dense, almost poetic dialogue with the r ational intellectualism of Don’s speeches, where both styles are firmly rooted within a character-driven framework, strengthening not only the play’s debate
, but also its realism.
Dorothy-Ann Gould’s production pivots around a towering performance by veteran stage actor Sandra Prinsloo as Milly. She paints the character with bold stro
kes of bitterness and false bravado, combined with the tenderness of a person at her most frail and vulnerable. Prinsloo rides Milly’s emotional peaks and t roughs with a remarkable sense of pace and timing, never relinquishing her gri p on the c haracter’s underlying tragedy.
Byron Mondahl as Shorty, the dullard with a heart of gold, gives a good perfor mance, along with Celia Steyn-Craddock as his discontented wife Sissy. Althoug h Shorty could have been verbally less refined, and Sissy a little less filmic , both Shorty’s confusion and Sissy’s frustration were well-defined and execut ed.
As Fugard’s intellectual mouthpiece, it is the character Don who has to concep tualise the issues, making him a problematic and difficult character to play, and while Justin Cohen is competent in portraying Don’s existential anger, his interpretation of Don’s intellectual pontifications is perhaps a little too g
lib and one-dimensional.
As a play, People Are Living There stands head and shoulders above many of Fug ard’s later texts, which saw him peddle concepts along a clearly-signposted ro ad, constantly reminding the audience of the weight and import of his themes t hrough the relentless use of symbol.
People Are Living There, however, with its brilliant dialogue and emotional re ality, stands as a timeless classic of South African realism.
People Are Living There is on at the Civic Theatre in Johannesburg until March 15