theatre
Guy Willoughby
Sorrows and Rejoicings, the latest in the astonishing treasure trove of South African experience that is Athol Fugard’s corpus, is centrally concerned with exile and its consequences for the artist a pertinent theme in a country whose best creators have so often, of choice or necessity, lived overseas.
Fugard’s hero is Dawid Olivier (played by Marius Weyers), an Afrikaner poet who rejects apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and who returns after years of fruitless exile to die in his Karoo home town.
Fugard offers a poignant portrait of a writer spent and broken and offers a moving apologia for his own position as a writer who, resident so much abroad himself, can voice with emotive power the terrible longing that Dawid, permanently estranged, cannot.
The action takes place after Dawid’s funeral as the three crucial women in his life his wife, crisply controlled Jo’burg-born politico Allison (Jennifer Steyn); his one-time mistress, the compliant, dreamy coloured servant Marta (Denise Newman); and his daughter by Marta, Rebecca (Amrain Ismail-Essop) meet to review past, present and future. In a series of vivid flashbacks they collectively conjure up the poet. Here Weyers is at his awe-inspiring best, moving as a restless, febrile ghost around and amidst the living characters, alternatively engaging and disengaging with each.
A focal nub of the drama is the relationship of the two rival women who battle, in a sense, for the memory of the dead poet. A touch too readily, they resolve their issues and join in a moving but dramatically flat descant to the dead.
More absorbing is the connection between Dawid and his estranged daughter Rebecca. Here, the device of the girl’s silent, glowering witness throughout much of the play is forcible warning of future strife.
Fugard’s story recalls the mature Shakespeare of The Tempest, whose magician-artist hero is likewise banished and must also repair a damaged relationship with his daughter.
Rebecca stands for all South Africa’s disaffected and orphaned children, the sins visited and the promises betrayed, and her biting denouncement of her father is harsh, unsparing and accurate. In this sense Ismail-Essop and Weyers are the true dramatic protagonists of the play. The scene in which father and daughter meet or fail to meet after a gap of 16 years, has an unbearable pathos that replays, indeed, the fateful rapprochement of Shakespeare’s Lear and Cordelia.
Sorrows and Rejoicings finds Fugard seeking in the drier reaches of the country and of human experience healing and renewal, and exploring in the ancient conflict of parents and children the grounds of a cross-racial and cross-generational future. The stately, contrapuntal eloquence of Fugard’s enquiry and the unflinching honesty of his search, make this play a timeous, rewarding theatrical experience.
The details
Sorrows and Rejoicings is showing at the Main Theatre, Baxter Theatre Centre, Rondebosch, Cape Town, Tel: (021) 6857880, until September 22.