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

The affirmative function of criticism is dangerous terrain for the critic; it is the partisan nature of the project to be, in another sense of the term, uncritical. Paradoxically, the affirmative critic is most vulnerable at the moment of victory, e.g., when Brecht receives the hearing and esteem sought for his work. As Thomas Kuhn might put it, once the artist becomes a paradigm, his or her "problems" are transformed into opportunities for the "normal science" of institutionalized researchers to perpetuate them as an object of legitimate inquiry. I offer this introduction in order to make sense of two claims I need to make about Albert Wertheim's recent study of Athol Fugard: this is a magisterial book that will prove indispensable to theatre artists and scholars alike, and it is a book that frustrates the second-degree critic's necessary job of finding limitation, controversy, and occasionally even error in the playwright's body of work.

The book's subtitle neatly characterizes Wertheim's interpretive scheme for each of the eighteen plays that he examines in chronological order from No-Good Friday (1958) to The Captain's Tiger (1998). Drawing heavily on Fugard's papers (the recent acquisition by Indiana University he helped to orchestrate), Wertheim fulfills the "from South Africa" component of his study by situating each play in that dense historical matrix of Fugard's struggle with apartheid, artistic precursors, and personal demons. It is important to emphasize that Wertheim is admirably keen to discipline his ratio of context to text. A key scene or a loaded expression in Afrikaans is often the beginning of a detour exploration into the technicalities of apartheid era anti-miscegenation laws or the history of secondary school education in black townships. Stylistically, this pattern slows down the reader and compels attention to the multiple and, sometimes, tellingly miniature ways in which Fugard's plays are history drenched. This quality also gives the book moments of real narrative pleasure. Also, to paraphrase Will Rogers, Wertheim never read a Fugard play that he didn't like. Consequently, his descriptions of arguably minor works like Hello and Goodbye or Playland will whet your appetite to read and reappraise them.

The second movement of Wertheim's critical technique is to reframe Fugard as a "universal" writer with significance "to the world." This part of Wertheim's book is consistently tough to swallow whole for a complex set of reasons. As the following long quotation makes clear, one rhetorical motive for "worlding" Fugard is to canonize him as a traditional major figure of English literature departments. While Fugard "sets most of his work in South Africa," Wertheim stresses, a point that "cannot be emphasized enough" is that "he is not writing exclusively about South Africa, for his plays tackle common world problems: letting go of the past, finding paths to the future, and cherishing what is good from the past amid the frenzy of iconoclasm and of rapid and radical change." He also writes, "Although Fugard's plays are set in his native land and are often redolent with Eastern Cape and Karoo regionalism, they are as much about transcendent, eternal human issues as are Trollope's Barsetshire, Hardy's Wessex, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, or Narayan's Malgudi novels" (178). Theatre scholars have been long convinced of Fugard's importance, if for different reasons, and are liable to find this aspect of Wertheim's plea sometimes redundant. In a more positive light, we should read this as another confirmation of theatre studies' disciplinary imperative to defend the value of contemporary drama.

The other problematic feature of the above quotation is Wertheim's insistence on a phenomenological understanding of "the world." Thus, at this level of grand generalization, he suggests that Fugard's appeal outside of South Africa is predicated on...