The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World by Albert Wertheim (review)

318 REVIEWS WORK CITED Merriman, Vic. "Decolonisation Postponed: The Theatre ofTiger Trash." Irish University Review: A Journal a/Irish Studies 29.2 (Autumn-Winter, 1999): 305-17. ALBERT WERTHEIM. The Dramatic Art ofAthol Fugard: From South Africa to the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Pp. 273, illustrated. $39.95 (Hb). Reviewed by Martin Orkin, University ofHaifa In The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard, Albert Wertheim has produced a full and very detailed explication of Fugard's plays, drawing on Fugard's diaries as wen as on past criticism and supplying some interesting information resulting from his own researches. His introductory and summative approach will most certainly provide a useful supplement to undergraduate and college courses. Moreover, Wertheim repeatedly offers insightful observations, for example, on cross-dressing in The Blood Knot, role-playing in Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and the function of imagery of defecation in "Master Harold" ... and the Boys and Playland. Although in an incidental way, The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard is also more probing than previous work has been on Fugard's concern over the years with art, epistemology, and education. Granted that this study includes discussion of his most recent plays, do we, however, really need yet another careful, play-by-play explication/survey of Fugard? Wertheim's concern with the undergraduate population may well have inhibited discussion of issues that the book repeatedly glimpses but regrettably does not engage with sufficiently. Moreover, it is debatable whether the theoretical biases that inform Wertheim's investtnent in explication develop much further our understanding of Fugard. The unfortunately reilerative style in several of his chapters is telling. To take only one of many instances, Wertheim writes in chapter six that "nowhere does [Fugard] focus more centrally on art and the artist than he does in The Road to Mecca (1984), in which he writes a play, as his title page avers, 'Suggested by the Life and Work of Helen Martins of New Bethesda'" (153). On the following page, Wertheim reminds us that "Fugard returns to the theme of the reclusive artist" in the play and that "he knows and understands Miss Helen, the reclusive Afrikaner sculptor" (154). A page later, we are again told that the "sculptures and decor" of the stage set belong to Helen Martins (155), and then, yet again, two pages further on, he refers to "The Road to Mecca, about a sculptor" (157), as if this information might still be news. The frequency of such admittedly trivial repetitions, which in themselves might suggest merely lax editing, Reviews 319 seems to complement Wertheim's determined enactment throughout his study of a curiously Leavisite stance towards the texts as morally instructivelhealingllife -giving, with Fugard "teaching us how to be better and more generous than we are" (237). This stance is mixed with an almost nineteenth-century and romantic view of the artist (the book is shamelessly Fugardolatrous) and, again, an insistent presentation of the plays as forms of psychodrama entailing inner moral growth of dramatic characters that is, Wertheim repeatedly avers, full of didactic import for audiences as well. These assumptions often undermine the promise of the subtitle of his book, "From South Africa to the World," as well as the sometimes rich local detail he supplies; they may also account for the possibly deliberate imprecision or looseness with which Wertheim uses the terms "interpellation" (79, (83) and "subaltern" (64, 80, (93). Part of the problem is of Wertheim's own making in another way as well, as when, for example, within the context of his discussion of A Place with the Pigs, he counters critics "who think of Fugard purely as a South African playwright whose work is or ought to be strictly about South Africa and apartheid" by stating that "Fugard, throughout his career has written about human relationships rather than specifically South African apartheid issues" (169). Here, as he does elsewhere in the book, Wertheim sets up a dichotomy that he inevitably cannot help everywhere contradicting (see, for example, (87) and of which studies of Fugard would by now be well rid. In this connection, his attempt to gain credibility for the theatrically problematic if intellectually intriguing Dimetos by repeatedly situating aspects...