Valley Song
If Athol Fugard didn’t exist, to paraphrase Voltaire, it would be necessary to invent him. Western theater needed a clear voice to help sort out the muck as the leaders of South Africa’s National Party sank their country into a cesspool of hatred, intolerance, and militarism. Fugard fit the bill. His plays are perfectly straightforward: the problems are unambiguous, and an audience rarely needs to wonder where its sympathies should lie. For a country like ours, with its own shameful legacy of racial injustice, Fugard’s velvet-gloved theatricality goes down easy, like Pepto-Bismol soothing our national dyspepsia. Fugard doesn’t challenge half so much as he reassures.
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Over the past three decades Fugard has distilled the many pathologies corrupting his countrymen’s souls in accessible plays plotted out in simple, even schematic form. He rarely resists the temptation to haul out a transparent metaphor–the houseful of candles and mirrors that lights up the reclusive Miss Helen’s life in The Road to Mecca, for example. And if you wait long enough, one of the characters is bound to explain its significance. “Darkness…nearly smothered my life,” Miss Helen laments, finding in her infinitely reflected candles “such brave little lights! And they taught the little girl how to be that. When she saw one burning in the middle of the night, she knew what courage was.” At times it seems Fugard isn’t writing plays but offering lecture-demonstrations.
In essence, Fugard reiterates his central conflict a dozen times in needlessly explicit terms rather than let complications develop. The characters have almost nothing to do except stand around and worry, a fact reflected in Russell Vandenbroucke’s Northlight staging: stand up, say a few things, take a few steps, say a few more things, sit down, say something else, repeat. Fugard seems content to describe a situation rather than dramatize it. When the neighbor who owns the television dies, for example, we find out that someone named Sophie Jacobs found the woman lying on the kitchen floor with a glass of whiskey in her hand, thought it was a heart attack, and called an ambulance, which arrived too late to save her. None of this information matters a whit to the drama. The neighbor could just as easily have been stung to death by killer bees or eaten by rabid wild dogs. Her death matters only insofar as it complicates Veronica’s progression through the play. But since Fugard gives Veronica about six emotional inches to travel in an hour and a half, the death can have little impact. Such decorative descriptions do little but make a thin play seem full.
