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TWO: The Port Elizabeth Plays:The Voice with Which We Speak from the Heart
- Indiana University Press
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In 1959 and 1960, the Fugards spent a not very successful or happy time in Europe . Fugard’s attempts to find work in the London theatre were largely abortive. In 1961, Athol and Sheila returned to South Africa, where their daughter Lisa and Fugard’s new play The Blood Knot were born. Fugard did not return to the African Theatre Workshop but selected one of those actors, Zakes Mokae, for one of the two roles in The Blood Knot. Fugard himself played the other. It opened on 3 September 1961 at Dorkay House, a former clothing factory turned into a playing space, which Fugard had previously used to rehearse No-Good Friday. In his 1994 memoir, Cousins, Athol Fugard speaks of The Blood Knot (1961) as a “watershed play.” Robert King recognizes it as the gateway to a range of later Fugard plays, and Russell Vandenbroucke asserts, “The play was to the stunted South African theatre what O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon was to the American theatre in 1920.”1 These comments all bear witness to the importance of The Blood Knot not only for launching the playwright’s career as a highly regarded playwright but, beyond that, for acting as a significant marker both in the development of Fugard’s thinking and in the development of a theatrical style not divisible from that thinking . When Dennis Walder speaks of The Blood Knot as containing “a more transgressive urge than has generally been admitted,”2 he refers to the play’s daring presentation of a black and a white actor on the same stage in an apartheid-bound, Verwoerdian South Africa, where before The Blood Knot such a gesture would have been considered nearly unthinkable and daringly radical.3 Indeed, as Vandenbroucke reminds us, four years after the play opened, mixed casts were deemed illegal (fig. 3).4 As important and transgressive an act as having black and white actors —in this case Zakes Mokae and Athol Fugard—on stage may have been in TWO The Port Elizabeth Plays: The Voice with Which We Speak from the Heart 3. Review from unknown South African newspaper. Courtesy the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. [44.197.108.187] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:12 GMT) 1961, The Blood Knot is transgressive in other and equally important ways as well. And one must remember, as the original audience knew only too well, that the play’s transgressions came just a few months after the atrocities of the infamous Sharpeville massacre.5 A two-hander, The Blood Knot concerns two brothers living in Korsten, a coloured area of Port Elizabeth. The brothers share the same brown-skinned mother, but it is not clear from the playtext whether they have a common father.6 One of the brothers, Morris (played in the original production by Fugard), however , is light-skinned and Zachariah (played by Zakes Mokae), the other, is black.7 In the course of the play, we learn that Morris has tried in the past to pass, or in South African parlance “try,” for white, but that now he is trying on Zachariah’s clothes and Zachariah’s life to learn what it is to have a black skin in South Africa. Likewise, Zachariah comes to project himself into a white role through his correspondence with Ethel Lange, a white girl from Oudtshoorn whose address he has obtained through the personals section of a newspaper. As Zach and Morrie try on each other’s roles, as they try on and try out being white and being black, they transgress every which way across color lines. For the audience of the first production , there was the added transgression of a white and a black actor appearing on stage together playing the parts of light- and dark-skinned coloureds. And most subsequent productions have also cast a white and a black actor in the roles of the two coloured brothers. The play’s two characters and its two actors while on stage are, consequently, racialized bodies. Of course The Blood Knot is also transgressive in that the two coloured men are writing to a young white woman who has placed an ad in a newspaper personals column so that she can meet an eligible young man. Clearly dark-skinned Zach Pietersen of coloured Korsten is not eligible to court the fair-skinned Ethel Lange of Oudtshoorn. And in still another dimension, that of style, The Blood Knot is transgressive, for it deftly combines...