A Place with the Pigs: Athol Fugard's Afrikaner Parable

A Place with the Pigs: Athol Fugard's Afrikaner Parable JEANNE COLLERAN In a span of three years, Athol Fugard directed the world premieres of his two most recent dramas at the Yale Repertory Theatre: in 1984 he staged The Road to Mecca, and in 1987 he produced and acted in A Place with the Pigs. Mecca has been extraordinarily well received; after being performed at Yale, it played at Britain's National Theatre in 1985, atthe Charleston, South Carolina Spoleto Festival in 1987, and on Broadway in 1988. As the fourth major New York production of the decade, the success of Mecca confirmed, in the words of one critic, Fugard's "standing as the greatest active playwright in the Englishspealdng world.'" A Place with the Pigs, conversely, has been considerably less successful;the Yale production received rather mediocre reviews, and the play has since garnered no critical attention. While there are a number of reasons for the drama's failure to attract favorable notice, the most obvious cause is that this play, a "personal parable" set "somewhere in the author's imagination" and concerning the forty years spent in a pigsty by Pavellvanovish Navrotsky, a Red Army deserter, simply does not conform to the audience's expectations of what a work by Athol Fugard should be like. As one of the foremost internationally-recognized spokesmen against apartheid, Fugard has been called, among other things, a "South African visionary."2 Pigs, however. seems to have little in common with either the angry indictments made in early works, such as The Blood Knot or Sizwe Bansi is Dead, or the agonized confessions of later dramas, such as Master Harold ... and the Boys. Despite the fact that A Place with the Pigs, as both Allan Wallach and Frank Rich have pointed out, has obvious connections to the South African situation, Fugard's parable, like many other works of art that are purposefully indirect, has been more dismissed than deciphered.' Thus, for many theatre-goers, Rich's remark that Pigs is an anomalous work that may play better in the classroom than it does on stage is an apt one. A Place with the Pigs Such a dismissal is, in my estimation, most unfortunate. Certainly! Rich is correct in claiming that the play is flawed; both he and Wallach have focused accurately on the too-small part played by Praskovya, Pavel's wife and the play's only other character. Similarly, both have recognized that the drama's primary images - flies and butterflies - bear too great a symbolic weight. Despite its problems, however, Pigs is an important play for at least three reasons: from an historical perspective, it speaks to the altered position ofthe white liberal in South Africa; as part of contemporary South African literature, it fits into what Nadine Gordimer has called the "cryptic" mode; and within Fugard's own canon, it represents anew kind of dramatic enterprise. For these reasons, as well as forthe play's own considerable merits, itis vital that the play not be reduced to some kind of twentieth-century closet drama. Perhaps the most striking way of realizing the changes that have taken place in recent South African theatre and, consequently, Fugard's place in it, is to compare Fugard's recent plays with two other South African exports: the 1980 production of Woza Albert! and the dramas that comprised the Woza Afrika! theatre festival performed at Lincoln Center in September 1986. WozaAlbert! , written by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon, introduced a "new kind of theater" to South African audiences, new because it moved beyond the two dramatic models previously available to South African playwrights .4 Until recently, South African theatre was dominated by two very different writers, Gibson Kente and Athol Fugard. To the makers of revolutionary theatre, neither model was acceptable: Kente's energetic musicals over-emphasized spectacle at the expense of political commentary, and Fugard's eloquent, dilemma-ridden dramas, though more explicitly political, seemed to focus too narrowly on the situation of white South Africans' The authors of Woza Afrika!, strongly influenced by the Black Consciousness Movement of the seventies, chose instead to forge a "new theatre" which continues to...