Athol Fugard's Hello and Goodbye

ATHOL FUGARD'S HELLO AND GOODBYE IT IS 1963. A table and four chairs stand in the kitchen of a small cottage in the Valley, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. They are lit by a solitary electric light hanging above. On the table is a bottle of squash, a jug of water and a glass. This is the setting of Athol Fugard's second published play, Hello and Goodbye, and it is more comfortable than the primitive shack of the earlier Blood Knot. Blood Knot, with its confrontation of a white man and his black brother, was a microcosm of South Africa's explosive racial situation, but the two characters of Hello and Goodbye are both white: Johnnie Smit, indeed, is such a respectable bourgeois that he receives circulars from the Providential Assurance Company. Johnnie and his sister Hester are therefore relatively free of the economic and racial restraints that limited the possibilities open to Morris and his black brother, Zachariah: they are free to travel where they like and to live separately or together, as white brother and sister. The Smits are certainly not rich but they are less shackled than the Pietersens; thus they can build their lives as they themselves choose, without being dictated to by society's laws and prejudices. Hester and Johnnie are as unfettered as are, in one sense, Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting for Godot. Nevertheless, the two characters of Hello and Goodbye are not fully emancipated since they are both dominated by the memories and guilts of their childhood. Hester and Johnnie were reared by a tough Calvinist father and, now that he is dead, are faced with the problem of constructing their adult lives for themselves. Hello and Goodbye examines the day of choice in the pair's lives and the emotional volcanoes that erupt when they seek to disentangle the past from the present and the future. Fugard has told us that he began Hello and Goodbye with a picture of two people: one picture "was of a woman holding a suitcase and facing a door and coming through it again and walking away a different person; this woman, Hester, is joined by someone behind her. But it was from a different direction that Johnnie came ... on a pair of crutches."l And so Fugard juxtaposed these two personalities and used his play to explore the results of their coming together. The characters talk, to themselves and to each other, and then at the end they choose to separate, to live their lives apart. But, between the 1 Robert Hodgins, "Interview with Athol Fugard," Newscheck (South Africa, July 21, 1967), p. 29. 139 140 MODERN DRAMA September "hello" of their meeting and the "goodbye" of their parting, Hester and J0hnnie, two lonely and at first uncommunicative people, are forced into revealing themselves to each other. Thus Hello and Goodbye has the same dramatic structure as Blood Knot: mutual disguises and pretenses are gradually broken down until the ~ouple are confronted, at the climax, with their real, naked selves; this new knowledge, achieved through debate and cross examination, is the basis for the play's resolution. Athol Fugard has compared his plays with Bach's unaccompanied violin sonatas, "one voice counterpointing itsel£."2 And he went on to say that he liked his plays "tight," with no diversions from the central theme. Thus the plot of Hello and Goodbye is remarkably free from complexities, and may be summarised quite briefly. Johnnie is the unemployed son of a man who has recently died; he lives alone in a small cottage, supported by the money left him by his father. Smit Senior had been crippled in an explosion but before this accident Hester, his daughter, had found the Calvinist home too oppressive and had run away to live the life of a prostitute in Johannesburg. Soon after the opening of Hello and Goodbye~ she returns home, ostensibly to get her share of the money that she believes her father possesses. Johnnie pretends that the father is still alive and asleep in the next room; and from this room he brings out all the family's old possessions for Hester to search through. Hester, however...