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For many, Athol Fugard is first and foremost a political playwright.1 He is certainly that, but running rather prominently through his work as well is an abiding concern with art, the artist, and how the artist comes to be an artist. It is there in the imaginary playwriting and acting of the two brothers in The Blood Knot (1961) and in the playwriting and performing of the two prisoners in The Island (1973), in the photography of Styles in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972), the engineering of Dimetos (1975), and the ballroom dancing of Sam in “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys (1982). In his post-apartheid plays, Fugard focuses on a budding coloured singer in Valley Song (1995) and on himself as a budding writer in The Captain’s Tiger (1998). But nowhere does he focus more centrally on art and the artist than he does in The Road to Mecca (1984), in which he writes a play, as his title page avers, “Suggested by the Life and Work of Helen Martins of New Bethesda” (iii).2 Fugard, who has a house in the tiny Karoo town where Helen Martins lived, naturally identifies with her as a fellow artist and in that role can empathize with the terror she feels about her waning inspiration.3 Although racial matters are part of the background of the play, the figure of the artist, Miss Helen, is very much in the foreground , as are her psychological struggles with her art, the local pastor, and a young teacher from Cape Town.4 As the title suggests, The Road to Mecca concerns primarily a journey of a religious nature; and the title brings to mind as well another play of religious journey, August Strindberg’s The Road to Damascus. Strindberg’s expansive trilogy The Road to Damascus recounts symbolically the main character’s and the playwright’s own journeys toward a modicum of expiation and their limited acceptance of Christianity. Fugard’s The Road to Mecca is, by contrast , a spare drama and one that recounts a journey toward a personal vision unbounded by the constraints of conventional Christianity. The Road to Damascus SIX The Other Problem Plays suggests a return to Christian ideas. It strikes out in new directions dramatically as well, paving the way toward expressionist drama. The Road to Mecca, in contrast, is what Fugard himself describes as a “very, very orthodox” theatre experience,5 employing a conservative dramaturgy to convey the courage necessary for finding new directions in one’s art and personal life. It may be that in choosing his title and in writing his play, Fugard had Strindberg’s trilogy in mind not as a model for imitation but as one to work against. In The Road to Mecca, Fugard returns to the theme of the reclusive artist he began to examine in Dimetos and to the portrait of the persistent, indefatigable Afrikaner he outlined in his portrait of Piet Bezuidenhout in A Lesson from Aloes. And as in Lesson from Aloes, Fugard in The Road to Mecca keeps to one time, place, and action, limiting his drama to three characters, the third of whom does not enter until the dramatic curtain line that ends the first of the play’s two acts. As always with Fugard, such simplicity is a deceptive veneer covering the richly complex fabric describing human souls in struggle. Although in part The Road to Mecca is a play about art and the artist, it would be a mistake to read the play simplistically and to equate Athol Fugard with Miss Helen , the central character and eccentric creator of the bizarre cement sculptures that are so threatening to the socially and religiously conservative inhabitants of New Bethesda, her remote Karoo village. There is clearly much of Fugard as well, as the playwright himself has suggested, in the character of Elsa Barlow, the young liberal schoolteacher whose unusual friendship with Miss Helen impels her to drive for twelve hours from Cape Town to answer Miss Helen’s letter of distress.6 One might argue that in a sense the at first unlikely friendship between Helen and Elsa embodies two sides of Fugard himself. The playwright is part Anglo-Irish and part Afrikaner. He is a city dweller raised in Port Elizabeth, and someone whose life as a playwright has taken him to the theatre environments of Johannesburg , Cape Town, New Haven, New York, London, and San Diego. At the same time, his origins are in...

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