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Writing about Athol Fugard’s Dimetos in 1985, Russell Vandenbroucke characterizes the play as “Fugard’s densest and most ambitious work to date.” That description continues to be apt. Dennis Walder comments, “Dimetos’s first audiences did not know what to make of the play” and describes the disapproval of the play by those who had come to see Fugard as an agitprop, political activist playwright.1 Indeed, Dimetos, which had its world premiere at the 1975 Edinburgh Festival, was not like anything Fugard had written before. It is not set in South Africa, nor is it clearly about South African apartheid politics, as its immediate predecessors Sizwe Bansi, The Island, and Statements had been.2 It is not about the kind of family relationships depicted in Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena, Hello and Goodbye, or People Are Living There. Not surprisingly, audiences and readers alike have had difficulty with the play, which challenges easy characterizations of Fugard as a playwright. Also not surprisingly, very little has been written about Dimetos, for it is a dark and recondite work that does not open itself easily to conventional literary analysis. Dimetos can be written off neither as an aberration nor as a dramatic runt in Fugard ’s litter of otherwise exemplary plays. It is a haunting play that inspires rapt attention . The force of the play is one that enters our understanding through our primal ways of knowing located in our reserves of instinctive feeling rather than in our ratiocinative faculties. In this way it shares much in style and effect with plays like Pinter’s The Room and A Slight Ache. Appropriately, the idea for Dimetos came to Fugard through his own instinctive feelings as he read a short disembodied passage in the first volume of Albert Camus’ Carnets: Dimétos eut un amour coupable pour sa nièce qui se pendit. Sur le sable fin de la plage, les petites vagues apportèrent un jour une merveilleuse jeune FOUR Dimetos: Fugard’s First Problem Play femme morte. Dimétos qui la vit tomba à genoux, éperdument amoureux. Mais il assista à la décomposition de ce corps admirable et devint fou. Ce fut la vengeance de sa nièce et le symbole d’une condition qu’il faudrait définir. [Dimetos had a guilty love for his niece, who hanged herself. One day, the little waves carried on to the fine sand of the beach the body of a marvelously beautiful young woman. Seeing her, Dimetos fell on his knees stricken with love. But he was forced to watch the decay of this magnificent body, and went mad. This was his niece’s vengeance, and the symbol of a condition we must try to define.]3 Revealingly, Fugard describes his coming across Camus’ remarks, in an interview with A. Christopher Tucker: “I read this . . . about 14 years ago, and was immediately possessed” [italics mine]. Likewise he says to Russell Vandenbroucke, “I was immediately possessed and am still acutely conscious of that moment” [italics mine].4 Dimetos works as theatre by possessing the audience in much the same nonratiocinative way that Camus’ notebook entry possessed Fugard. The play’s origin in Camus’ remark about a little known episode in Greek mythology, Fugard’s epigraph for the play from Blake, and the fact that the play is about an artist/scientist figure have led critics to center their comments on generally useful comparisons with other writers and works. Richard Whitaker compares Fugard’s Dimetos narration with Camus’ and with Camus’ probable source (one unknown to Fugard), Parthenius. To his study, Vandenbroucke adds an appendix , “Literary Ancestors of Dimetos,” in which he draws connections between Dimetos and Ibsen’s Solness, Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s Prospero, Aeschylus’ Prometheus, and Blake’s Newton. Dennis Walder also invokes The Tempest as well as Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People and the generalized landscapes of J. M. Coetzee.5 Most of the reviews of Dimetos from the time of the Edinburgh Festival onward have been largely dismissive. Dimetos is not an easy play, and opening-night reviewers are not likely to be immediately enthusiastic about such a problematic, abstruse play when they are in search of a quick take and an immediately recognizable issue they can report the following day to their newspaper readers. Typical of opening-night reviews impatient with Fugard’s style in Dimetos is the one by Dieter Bachmann commenting on the German-language premiere of the play in Basel: “Bitte, man kann auch...

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