The Blood Knot Reborn in the Eighties: A Reflection of the Artist and his Times

The Blood Knot Reborn in the Eighties: A Reflection of the Artist and his Times KIM MCKAY Twenty-four years after its first performance in South Africa, The Blood Kllot re-opened on Broadway in 1985, starring the original cast of two - Athol Fugard and Zakes Mokae. The same kind of tense quiet tilled the theatre as that invoked by accounts of the original show. But the New York audience of the eighties, with thirty and forty dollar tickets, wore designer clothing, furs, or fine overcoats, and many audience members had clearly come directly from their Manhattan offices. The experience moved those viewers, however, almost as strongly as it moved the 120 people in the makeshift room in Port Elizabeth, 1961 , during the play's initial performance. Athol Fugard and Zakes Mokae played their roles with an urgency that grabbed at the audience; they embraced New Yorkers with their skill but also with desperation. Fugard explains, "The play was written 25 years ago and there was a kind of prophecy in it that if the South African people didn't sort things out, something terrible would happen. And it has."1 The audience felt that terror, as the play's first viewers probably did not. In Fugard's words, "The experience of these brothers, the journey of self-discovery, the terribly dangerous game they play is not as innocent as it was 25 years ago. Because South Africa has lost its innocence. All its innocence."2 The 1985 stage set looked similar to the one in early performances of The BloodKnot. Photographs from both sets show the same corrugated metal walls, the single window, the stark reality ofthe room in which Zach and Morrie live. The poverty of this setting needs no period cues, no changes in style or the characters' clothing; with hindsight we might say that the twenty-four years might not have passed at all. Athol Fugard has witnessed the lack of change in South Africa, and his extensive cutting of the play mirrors his evident frustration. Since he has not added to his script, any textual analysis must focus on the effect of the excised material. We find less interest in the world outside their shack, either in the imagery that served to bring the characters out of it or The Blood Knot Reborn in the Eighties 497 in factual references to Morrie's life outside it, less difference in the brothers' ability to articulate their problems and to hold their own in discussions, and less emphasis on the power of language to help them deal with their problems. By de-emphasizing these once powerful divisions between the two men, Fugard has created a more political play and a more realistic one, in line with a tendency that characterizes much of his later work. Listening to the two brothers in the 1960s, one heard the language of beauty, dreams, hope. It fluttered through the play like the creatures upon whose wings Fugard placed it - butterflies, moths, birds - but mostly the butterflies. That imagery formed the principal beauty in the lives shared by the audience twenty some years ago. Now it is gone. The images that take its place are not as lovely, nor as ephemeral;instead, they bring an economic dimension, asensual reality. and astartling sound to the chaos ofapartheid. The butterfly's color, then, fades to the bright pigments ofthe umbrella that Zach used to beat Morrie at the end of the 1985 production. And in the 1982 "Master Harold" .. . and the boys only a remembered kite, which unlike a butterfly, a moth, or a bird needs Sam's and Hally's hands to make it airborne, flies above the rain drenched town. The imagery that prevails Over that of flight more often is voiced by Zach than by Morrie. For example, the exclusion of references to the lake and the birds in the 1985 production gave fuller significance to Zach's footsalts. We no longer hear about the wind and the smells from the lake, but we do find a concern with economics. And economic considerations soon lead to aesthetics - color, texture, and smell. Unlike Morrie's poetic reverie about the lake, however, Zach...