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Research in African Literatures 33.3 (2002) 219-220



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Book Review

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


The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World, by Albert Wertheim. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. xv + 273 pp. ISBN 0-253-33823-9 cloth.

There is no concluding chapter to Albert Wertheim's detailed study of Athol Fugard's work, and, given that Fugard is still writing, this is understandable. [End Page 219] However, its absence should not be taken to indicate that Wertheim is in any doubt about Fugard's achievements. In his introduction, he puts Fugard "in a class with" Pinter, Albee, Chekhov, Brecht, Shakespeare, and Molière, and a page or so later we read "the reality is that Fugard is a world-class playwright" (xi). Through close critical analysis, in a book that proclaims it is not "politically theorized," Wertheim provides valuable insights into a challenging and uneven body of work.

Wertheim's book is strong on dramaturgical context. The author is steeped in theater studies, and the teachers he names in the introduction set him up as, shades of Kurtz, a product of the whole of the American theater academy. This background equips him to pick up the echoes of the playwrights Fugard admires. It is also, perhaps, responsible for the inward-looking phraseology that may earn ticks in graduate school essays but irritates elsewhere. On successive pages we encounter "petty pace" and "local habitation and a name" (44-45).

I can't be alone in feeling occasional irritation at Wertheim's phraseology and at the repetition of certain words. Books such as this can be written without recourse to "epiphanous insight" (39) and "Freudian perspicacity" (42), and there should have been a way of indicating Fugard's philosophical interests without constant recourse to the slippery word "existential." In three pages, we are subjected to "existential courage," "existential self-realization," "existential enlightenment," "existential Friday night martyrdom," and "existential heroism" (7-9). Furthermore, shouldn't an editor have cried, "Enough!" before reading "Beckettian" three times in four lines (20)?

Though florid, the study is patient, detailed, useful, enriched by recognition of the importance of plays in performance. But, to my reservations about language, I would add concern about some of the use made of audience responses and Wertheim's reluctance to embark on adequate discussion of Fugard's revisions. I am simply not convinced by such assessments of a play's impact as "The 1994 McCarter Theatre audience left in tears [. . .]" (55). And I think the revisions of The Blood Knot should have been subjected to close analysis. They are important because they introduce the notion that "world class" Fugard may be dissatisfied with some of his work. Wertheim appears reluctant to recognize the extent and significance of changes, and with this goes a failure to appreciate the unevenness of the output. The blind spot eliminates the light and shade from his assessment of the whole, masking the extraordinary development from the promising but pedestrian People are Living There to the powerful Sizwe Bansi is Dead. It has the effect of diminishing the exceptional power of those plays, notably Master Harold and the Boys, in which Fugard draws on his deepest experiences and uses situations with which he is genuinely familiar.

 



James Gibbs

James Gibbs teaches literature and drama at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

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