"Greeks bearing gifts": Athol Fugard's Orestes Project and the Politics of Experience

"Greeks bearing gifts": Athol Fugard's Orestes Project and the Politics of Experience MERVYN MCMURTRY On 24 March 1971 , in Cape Town, Athol Fugard presented Orestes, an experiment in the essence of performance and the essence of existence: notions of justice and injustice, freedom and non-freedom, being and non-being, expressed in sixty to eighty minutes of imagistic action, the silence interspersed with non-verbal sounds, snatches of song and only three hundred words of spoken text. Orestes redefined Fugard's conception of dramatic process and theatrical product and signified an aesthetic that was to infonn alternative playmaking in South Africa in the 1970S and 1980s. He wrote that he "superimposed, almost in the sense of a palimpsest," a contemporary incident on a mytho-dramatic source. I Critical response ranged from acclaim to bewildernnent; the majority found the links between the two stimuli tenuous. Thineen years after the production, Fugard admitted that he still did not fully understand their relationship.2This article aims, with caution then, to suggest how various dramatic, historic and philosophic sources created the links between his stimuli and how the palimpsest functioned in the perfornnance of this counter-hegemonic. "genuinely mythopoetic experience,"3 The programme cover depicted Greek pillars. That, and the title, suggested the House of Atreus. Fugard supplied an explanatory note, the first two paragraphs of which read [fJrom Greek mythology comes the story of Clytemnestra. Her busband was Agamem· non. Sbe had two children, Electra and Orestes. Agamemnon sacrificed their third child, Iphigcnia, so tbat the wind would tum and the Greek fleet could leave Aulis for the Trojan War. Agamemnon returned to Clytemnestra ten years later when she murdered him. Orestes and Electra avenged his death by killing their mother.4 Fugard's summary indicated a cycle of retribution in which murderer is killed, Modern Drama, 41 (1998) 105 106 MERVYN MCMURTRY avenger becomes victim, as in the first two plays of Aeschylus's The Oresteia. The focus was on a family unit: husband, children, child, mother. Fugard regards his Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye and Boesman and Lena, with their biographical connections, as "a trilogy that ... should be called The Family.'" Significantly, the work that followed The Family was Orestes, which extended the nexus, trans-culturally and trans-historically: from the family to the Family of Atreus to the Family of South Africa. After completing Boesman and Lena, Fugard suffered "the most hellish" creative block he had "ever experienced as a writer.,,6 During this crisis he received a copy of Jerzy Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre. Fugard discovered in Grotowski a kindred practitioner. one whose manifesto confinned his own "pure theatre" aesthetic: "a play is an actor before an audience ... "[t)he 'moment of truth' needs nothing more.'" He realised, with Grotowski's provocation, that he could be regenerated by working in a collaboratively creative situation, where he could take "the writer into the rehearsal room to be on a par with the actors," thereby freeing himself from the confines of his conventional playwriting process. He could challenge the performers with images and ideas, "and out of their responses, their own inner sources and identities, ... [shape) the play.'" In 1970, the Cape Performing Arts Board provided the opportunity. The stimulus would be the Greeks. To complete Virgil, however: "I fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts" (Aeneid 2-49). As a source they would rejuvenate Fugard personally but they would also be the means to expose hidden truths about the violent structures present in his society. He knew The Oresteia; the three actors (Yvonne Bryceland, Val Donald and Wilson Dunster) were to read Grotowski and R.D. Laing. They had no preconception of the final product. As "director-scribe" he notated, in three large drawing books, the "scores" of the initial "praxis," the Cape Town production and a revised version for a short season in Johannesburg.9 A perusal of a page from the Cape Town "score" supports Fugard's claim that Orestes "defied translation onto paper in any conventional sense."'OThe page is headed by the title for that section, followed by the names of the three performers (Y an abbreviation for Yvonne) and, below that...