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. A Gift for His Seventieth Birthday: Athol Fugard's Sorrows and Rejoicings by Marianne McDonald
Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard was born on June 11, 1932, in Middelburg, Great Karoo, Cape Province, South Africa. His mother was an Afrikaner and his father was of Irish, English, and Huguenot ancestry. Athol Fugard is a playwright who writes for his time, and mines the memory of history. He writes mainly about South Africa, the country he knows and needs. He is grounded in his past and his country, and like Antaeus draws strength when he touches it. When he was writing Playland (1992) he said, "I need to be home, on South African soil, for that infusion of blood which the work is ready to receive."(Fugard Issue 536) He created significant theatre in South Africa, and his plays chart the history of the country. Fugard writes to save stories from silence: as the protagonist of The Captain’s Tiger (1997) says, "I and my writing belong to a world where a lot of people can’t put words on paper and tell their stories." Critics sing his praises. For example, Mel Gussow said that Fugard "has achieved his reputation — as high as that of any other living playwright…– with plays that have social and political content… He is a humanitarian – a rare playwright, who could be a primary candidate for either the Nobel Prize in Literature or the Nobel Peace Prize." (48) Sorrows and Rejoicings is his first play written in its entirety outside of South Africa and it shows the profound longing of a man for the land of his birth and his mother tongue. It is a play about a writer and a poet named Dawid, who has left South Africa, but who misses his country every day. Fugard wanted to write something about the many South African artists who had been active in the movement and living in exile. This is what could have happened to Fugard if in fact he had left the country when his passport was taken from him (1967-1971) and he has often said that this was probably what the apartheid government wanted. He felt strongly about exile and has said, "I identify passionately with my country, and the thought of any form of exile from it is to me a vision of living death. I know it would mean the end of Athol Fugard the playwright, that any creative energies I have would wither away and die. Everything that I am, good and bad, as man and artist, I owe to that country." (Fugard Issue 381) He understood Dawid’s predicament, because it was his own. He is also revisiting a theme dealt with in Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (1972): the consequences of a bi-racial sexual relationship. The setting is a large house in the Karoo. Its description is based on the spacious Van Heerden house in New Bethesda, with a nice garden. Two women, Marta Barends and Allison Olivier, have just returned from burying Dawid, who is also the father of eighteen-year-old Rebecca, Marta’s child. Marta Barends is a colored woman, about forty years old, who takes care of the house that belongs to Dawid Olivier’s family. Dawid saw his daughter, Rebecca, briefly before he left for England, and then once again after he returned home. The sexual relationship between Dawid and Marta was illegal under apartheid (Immorality Act, 1950). The two women reminisce about Dawid as Rebecca listens. Allison Olivier is the white woman Dawid married. She is from an English background, and will literally flourish in her life in England. Dawid, an Afrikaner, is vitally attached to his country, and when he is in England, he says, "I would have survived solitary confinement back home. I won’t survive freedom here."(34) While
Allison was at university, pursuing a literary career, she heard
Dawid read a poem from Yeats, and fell in love with him. They
were never able to have children because by this point in Dawid’s
life he was sterile, due to an attack of mumps as an adult.
Allison and Marta compare notes. Marta tells Allison how much she resented her. Dawid’s mother and father had been killed in an accident and he was raised by his grandparents. It was Marta’s mother who helped them to raise Dawid. Rebecca sulks as Marta and Allison speak. Marta polishes the table and tells Allison that she and Rebecca had a big fight over that table after Dawid’s grandfather’s funeral. Rebecca calls her "an old stinkwood servant." Rebecca does not appreciate the values or the work of the older generation. Marta tells her of this table’s life in the forest and how Dawid used to write there. She and the table waited for him to return. At the age of fifty-one Dawid, who learns he has cancer, returns to South Africa to die. Dawid has an epiphany when he first sees the Karoo again:
In this epiphany time seems to dissolve. The play is set in the Karoo where the desert contains "space, time and silence." In this speech, when Dawid says he could be either the first man or the last man, he is actually talking about himself. The first time he was a man it was for Marta who conceived his child, and the last time was when he returned to die. The end of the play is the beginning. Fugard has expressed this idea of time and epiphany in his Notebooks:
Dawid associates Marta with "fresh brown bread and doringboom honey." He insists that Marta only speak to him in Afrikaans. When he comes home he speaks to Marta like a typical Afrikaner about his disease: "It’s got a long fancy name, but they've given me lots of medicine so I'll be all right. What I really need though is Karoo sunshine and fresh air and your cooking." The Afrikaners believe in nature, fresh air, and good food, and that these are the cures for the most dire conditions. In the play, however, this "cure" is futile. Allison did not share Dawid’s epiphanic assessment of the Karoo. She told Marta:
Allison tells Marta it was not her idea that they not return to South Africa. Dawid had told Marta that it was impossible for him to remain in South Africa given the harassment. He tells the story of a man putting his testicles in a box and sending them to Prime Minister Botha. Fugard tells us in his Notebooks that this was based on a true story about "The white man in Grahamstown who went mad and intended castrating himself and putting his testicles in a box addressed to the Prime Minister." Allison admits to Marta she knew about the relationship between Marta and Dawid, but she never discussed it with Dawid. She asks Marta if he slept with her when they were there together, and Marta tells her that he didn’t when she was along, but asks her if she wants to know about when he visited alone. Allison says, "No." Allison
confesses to Marta that their life, which started out in such
a promising way, rapidly became a shambles when Dawid discovered
that his writing had dried up. He started to drink to compensate.
In one of the memory sequences we see him drunk. He calls a new
volume "Rejoicings," but he can’t write. He is
stricken by guilt. He is afraid he will never return home.
Dawid identifies himself with Ovid, the Roman poet exiled by Augustus, and recites two poems that Ovid wrote while in exile (which the author of this article translated for the play):
. .
. . Dawid wanted to leave England in order to attend his grandfather’s funeral. But he didn’t have the courage. So he lied, saying he was refused permission to enter South Africa. He felt ashamed to face his grandmother, or to even stand next to his grandfather’s grave "that beautiful old man who had had so much faith in him." (36) He never voted in the first democratic election, instead he went pub-crawling in London. It was at this point that Allison moved out of the house. Allison and he were separated. He was diagnosed as having leukemia and given two months to live. He decided to die in the Karoo, with Marta who loved him. It was after his grandmother died that they made love one evening. Marta had wanted two things, Dawid to live to the millennium and to see his daughter. Rebecca reveals that she saw her father the night before he died. She wanted to pour out her bitterness and tell him how the stinkwood table had been polished by her mother’s tears. In
a flashback memory he meets his daughter and may or may not recognize
her. He speaks of his love of Afrikaans. He calls his daughter
Suikerbekkie, and he promises her, "This world is going to
change and when it does, I’ll come back and you will be proud
of me because I will have made a contribution to that change."
(44) But he didn’t. He says he wishes to leave his daughter
this confession. And by this scene he does, but he says he will
never forgive himself. But he still thinks of the braaivleis,
the party just after the millennium to celebrate the new free
South Africa. Rejoicings after sorrow.
Allison tells Marta that the house is now Rebecca’s. In the first version of the play there was a will; in the final version it is Allison who decides, claiming that she is executing Dawid’s intention. But she had a choice legally, so perhaps she made up her mind during the course of the play. Allison’s choice in the second version makes her even stronger than the Allison of the first version. She will leave the house and go on to flourish in London just as Dawid predicted. Allison asks for Dawid’s early poems, but it turns out that Rebecca has burnt them. Allison tells Rebecca to embrace the love that she before rejected and tried symbolically to destroy by burning the papers. Allison leaves. There is a flashback to when Marta and Dawid made love, and he reads from a phone book and the recitation of the names became a poem: "The taste of the Karoo, sweet water and dry dust." (52) He remembered Eugène Marais’s "Song of South Africa": "She gives nothing, but demands everything. Tears, the names of the dead, the widow’s lament, the pleading gestures and cries of children...all mean nothing to her. She claims as her holy right, the fruits of endless pain." (53) They remember warm bread and thorn tree honey. Mother and daughter leave the house. In the New York version Marta has her arm around Rebecca. The Karoo settles into darkness. This is a memoir of love and guilt: broken promises, but love intact, the love of two women for one man, and that man’s love for his country and his daughter and his language The play is a wake, and an awakening of memories about a man who has died. There are a series of memories in which Dawid appears - five in fact - just like the acts of a Greek play; and the women are the chorus who define Dawid. The series begins with Dawid returning home to die, then travels to the moment in his youth when he tells Marta he is leaving South Africa, then to a drunken scene in London, to the meeting with Rebecca (whom he may or may not recognize) and finally to the evening when he first makes love to Marta (the night that Rebecca is conceived). So the play ends with the beginning and a new hope for South Africa. It ends on a note of rejoicing and a recapitulation of one of its main themes: love. Arias punctuate the drama, and each character has his or her personal moment of soaring self-expression. This play is about the personal journey of everyone in it. There are five main personal relationships: Marta/Dawid, Allison/Dawid, Dawid/Rebecca, Allison/Marta, and Marta and Rebecca. Dawid is dead, so those relationships are over, even though they still influence the lives of all he touched. The last two relationships are ongoing, significant not only for the people involved, but symbolically for the future of South Africa. In these relationships there is hope. Allison and Marta made a journey from conflict to reconciliation, as Marta says, "Life is full of surprises, hey Allison." (38) Dawid learns that he has betrayed his dreams and that he can only survive as a complete human being by living in his native land, where he can speak his native language and be understood. Allison learns how essential this is for Dawid, and she also learns to survive and fulfill herself as a teacher. Marta is fulfilled in her child Rebecca who finally understands her father. They come to terms with each other when they see each other and silently acknowledge each other. Allison and Marta come to understand one another. It is a play about forgiveness and understanding between people who are Africans. It is a play about the new generation that can be destructive if it nurses a memory of abuse. Yeats said in "Easter," 1916, "Too long a sacrifice /Can make a stone of the heart." All have to learn that they need love, "no matter where it comes from." (50) One
can understand how this is a requiem for the old South Africa
and a celebration of the new one. In a certain sense, apartheid
was as much a failure as Dawid’s life. He is the Afrikaner.
His language is dying in the new South Africa. The English Allison
will probably move to London. The New South Africa will belong
to those disenfranchised under apartheid. But they should learn
that there was some value in the older culture. Nelson Mandela
celebrated that transition and that heritage at his inauguration
by reading a poem by the prominent Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker.
(van der Walt on inauguration)
There are arias of suffering for all the major characters. Dawid’s appearance with his daughter just before he dies lays out his tragedy in graphic detail. In many ways this is his play. This is the "Death of a Poet" in the Arthur Miller sense. It is a great vehicle for any actor. The poems that Dawid did not write in life, can be written by the virtuoso performance of an actor. This play speaks about an exile in the same way that Ovid did after he was forced to leave his country. There are many reasons for going into exile. Here the political reason is paramount. Fugard has woven strands from his own life into this play. He and his wife Sheila were subject to comparable raids and threats. Fugard also says Dawid is based partly on his brother-in-law Norman Swart, who was married to his sister Gladys. He was an admirer of the Karoo. After Norman learned that he had cancer, he spent more and more time in the Karoo, rather than in Johannesburg where he had a job as an executive in the Automobile Association. Allison is a composite character, partially based on Mary Benson, a writer and activist friend of the Fugards, who lived in London. Fugard dedicated this play to her and to Katrina and Dudu, cherished housekeepers and friends of the family who lived in the Karoo. When asked about how he got the idea for this play, Fugard spoke of the many exiles who left the country and were destroyed as a result--he could have been one of them. One such poet was Breyten Breytenbach. He left in 1960 and made France his home. When he returned in 1975 he was arrested and received a seven-year prison sentence. Although he lived with the constant fear of his creative juices drying up, he survived and became the major Afrikaans writer of his generation. He has said, "Exile is the slow art of forgetting the color of fire." Another exile was C. J. Driver, who chose to live in England. Both he and Fugard identified with Li Po (701-62, Poems of Exile). Li Po, like Ovid, alienated rulers and both were forced to live in exile. There were also black South African writers forced into exile; for example, Lewis Nkosi, who left in 1961, and Bloke Modisane who titled his autobiography Blame Me on History (1963). The journalists Can Themba and Nat Nakasa are examples of writers who went into exile. (Vandenbroucke 14-15) Can Themba, a banned journalist, died an alcoholic in Swaziland at the age of twenty-eight. In New York, Nakasa jumped from a high-rise building. Another person who lost his voice in exile was Sydney Clouts who also died young. Perseus Adams went to London and has yet to produce the major work expected of him. Fugard has been asked about the stinkwood table. He said that he had been particularly moved by a production of Gorky’s Enemies directed by David Jones for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In that production, all the action, including murder, took place around or on the table. He remembered how effective the table was, and that was part of the inspiration for its use in Sorrows and Rejoicings. Fugard
loves wood and finds security at his own writing table. He always
polishes it before he begins writing. He is insecure anyplace
else, or in any role other than as a writer. His writing table
is his existential anchor. He says he never writes with a metaphor
in mind, but only about the relationships between specific people.
However the table obviously grew into a metaphor for South Africa
and the sorrows and rejoicings associated with it. The house (South
Africa) is, of course, symbolized by the table, and it is handed
over to the blacks and coloreds. It also presents a challenge.
What is Rebecca going to do with it? Sell it? Treasure it? Burn
it? She is going to give it a new identity, and Marta hopes it
will be without her tears. This is a message for South Africa
because there are now some who are burning the houses down and
AIDS is spreading throughout the country like a raging fire.
Albie Sachs, the ANC activist, envisions a new South Africa in which "The grandchildren of white immigrants can join in the toyi toyi — even if slightly out of step — or recite the poems of Wally Serote, just as the grandchildren of Dinizulu can read with pride the writings of Olive Schreiner." (13) This is just what Fugard wanted to convey with his ending. Another repeated image and metaphor is fire, not only the fire that inhabits Dawid, and by which Marta warmed herself (she notes that some would say she got burned), but "The Fires of Africa," the poem by Dawid that Allison remembers:
This is remembered in response to Rebecca’s burning her father’s poems. Fire can also be the blazing implacable sun of South Africa, or the crickets "blinking outside in the dark like little fallen stars." Fire here is creative, destructive, or nurturing. The same is true of water. It is the tears of women weeping after the African riots and their fires; these tears are dangerous. But water is nurturing and essential for Africa. And Dawid recognizes himself as an officially declared drought area, like the Karoo at times. He is without the water of inspiration, creative water. The ink in his pen has dried up and clotted like the blood in a dead man’s veins. Water in South Africa is lifeblood. Dawid considers himself as parched as a victim in Dante’s Inferno. With Hopkins he prays, "Lord of my soul, send my roots rain." (33) Sweetness is an important image. He uses it when Lena in Boesman and Lena (1969) sings a song about condensed milk that makes life sweet. She says, "Sugar’s not enough, man. I want some real sweetness." She expresses her life in images of food: "I’m here now…After a long life that’s a thin slice. No jam on that one." In The Road to Mecca, Miss Helen takes a valium from Elsa asking whether it is an artificial sweetener. Elsa says "That is perfect, Helen. Yes, they’re artificial sweeteners." Buks in Valley Song (1996) asks "What is happening to all the sweetness in the world?" And here Dawid tells Marta: "If it's sweetness you want then play with 'Marta' and 'Barends'…Marta Barends! When I roll that around in my mouth I taste Karoo food, Karoo sweetness." (53) Fugard points out that the Bushman had wild honey hives; so in spite of their poverty, they at least had that sweetness. Although a universal phenomenon, it is particularly African to appreciate it. Fugard effortlessly uses imagery to reflect internal states: Allison says to Marta, "He was with me in the bus one morning, a grey wet London morning, both us with moods to match the weather…" (21) Allison remembers a scene in their flat in London that is symbolic of their failed marriage. Dawid longs for his country as he drowns his sorrows in drink and himself along with his sorrow. He speaks poetically and shows his potential to be a good writer. Dawid appears as the failed father to Rebecca. He is shown to be a failure as a lover, a husband, a father; ultimately he betrayed himself and his dream of helping the new South Africa with his writings. But he is a poet, sensitive to Marta and his daughter, and someone who at least won Allison’s love. He contributed to the lives of both women, while destroying them: he taught Marta poetry, and that a life was possible beyond the location. He taught Allison to overcome her prejudices and made her flourish in a career teaching in London. Allison asked, "Would you have wanted anything different Marta?" She answers, "No!" Only more. I would have only prayed for more … more of everything, the good and the bad." (38) He, like fire, could warm, besides destroy. At the end one sees him through the lens of sorrows and rejoicings. One might anticipate someone asking why these two women would devote themselves to Dawid. Marta had a world opened to her of creativity and poetry, and she experienced sheer joy in life while Dawid was around. Allison fulfilled herself, making a career, and developing a sophistication both politically and intellectually beyond the Rondebosch "socialite" that she was. As Dawid claims, she will thrive, and we know that she is better for the experience that she has had. It matured her into a better human being. She was an excellent teacher, but suffered in the process of becoming one. Fugard said of her, "She felt she was as brilliant as a diamond, and then she realized that that diamond was a frozen tear." As in Kurosawa’s Rashomon, or Ikiru, we see Dawid, the main character, in the constructed memories of others, in this case, three women. Fugard said he made them monologues because he remembers things subjectively and only in terms of the other person. Others see things objectively (although memory is always subjective) and construct the past in cinematic terms with dialogue and all the characters speaking. This play is also an attack on the selective memory of the country that now tends to deny the contribution by the whites. This is a rejection of the cultural past: Shakespeare can be banned along with Nadine Gordimer. The message that Allison gives to Rebecca is vitally relevant to the new country:
This is a play about relationships: Dawid with the two women, his daughter, his language, and his county; Marta with Dawid, her daughter, and Allison; Allison with Dawid and Marta; Rebecca with her father and mother. Dawid is dead so the relationships that are left are Marta with Allison and Marta with her daughter. Rebecca has made peace with her father and sealed it by coming to terms with her mother. Marta and Allison come to an agreement on a personal level, but also on the symbolic level as Africa. It is "truth and reconciliation": they all face their truths. No one remains unreconciled, except Dawid with himself: he will not forgive himself, but he makes a type of peace with Rebecca when he sees her at the end, and with his country by his returning to die there. Rebecca resembles the young man Hally in Master Harold… and the boys. Both of them have lessons to learn: they have to take responsibility for their actions. If there is any hope at all in either play, it is that these lessons must be learned. Sorrows and Rejoicings expresses sorrow for the abuses of apartheid and rejoicings for the new South Africa. Some could see it as a requiem for the Afrikaner and his culture. It expresses sorrow for the past, rejoicings for the present and the promise: the new constitution sets a model for the world, verbalizing and legalizing the equality of all people, including women. The play also expresses hope that some of the good things of the past be retained, namely the literary heritage passed on by the whites, and Afrikaner poets such as Eugène Marais, quoted at the end. Fugard’s Notebooks show us that he had been thinking about some of the ideas expressed in this play for a long time. He quotes H., "In connection with not being able to create overseas: ‘Being in South Africa is like a bad marriage and leaving the country, the divorce. I mean, why should I paint that house, this scene, the tree…it had no meaning to me.’" (18) Fugard also realized the value of love to the African:
Another entry shows a reaction similar to Rebecca’s towards her mother:
Fugard wrote this play in three weeks; usually his plays take nine months, just like a baby. The only other play that was born in a similarly easy fashion was Master Harold . . . and the boys. He considers both that play and this one, "gifts." He says Sorrows and Rejoicings is a gift for his seventieth birthday (June 11, 2002). This play premiered in Princeton, New Jersey, at the McCarter Theatre, May 2001. It starred John Glover as Dawid, Blair Brown as Allison, Scotty Caldwell as Marta, and Marcy Harriell as Rebecca. The play opened in South Africa on August 28, 2001, at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town. It starred Marius Weyers as Dawid, Jennifer Steyn as Allison, Denise Newman as Marta, and Amrain Ismail-Essop as Rebecca. Fugard was particularly pleased with the South African audience and how they understood the nuances. He said, "This is our story." Reviews in South Africa lauded this masterpiece from the hands of their greatest playwright. They praised the acting from the superb cast. Each brought a special nuance. One began, "Old master is once again in our midst":
Snyman recognized the acting talents: "Denise Newman as Marta will move you to tears… Amrain Ismail-Essop is a talent to be watched." He also credits Marius and Jennifer Steyn. Owen Williams in "Weyers dominates Fugard Masterpiece" admires the flow that "comes in the words, which are eloquent, persuasive and highly emotional and starkly emphasise the sad and tragic story." (4) He notes some of the themes: "The play in a way is an essence of speeches of regret, emotional torment, loneliness, love, yearning and, finally, old age and encroaching death." Williams gave Weyers, who plays Dawid, a tribute: "I think the mixture of brute force and nuance he brings to the character of this tormented, ill, driven regretful man, forced on by just about all the demons that flesh and mind are heir to, make it the best piece of acting I remember from this distinguished player." Judy van der Walt commented on Fugard’s direction. Fugard told her that he took actors to the edge in their performances, and also audiences. He took the image from Orestes (1971) in which the actor playing Orestes at the beginning of the play slowly pushed a matchbox to the edge of his knee, building up audience tension, and then letting it fall. Fugard, when speaking with van der Walt, pushed his cup to the edge of the table where it was just balanced on the edge before it fell. He said he found that moment interesting. Van der Walt illustrates this: "He puts both hands on her [Denise’s] shoulders and asks her, ‘In the old days Denise, what would Marta have called Allison?’ Denise answers immediately: ‘Dawid would have insisted I call her Allison, that’s why I call her that with such ease.’ Fugard: ‘But if he didn’t Denise, what would Marta have had to call Allison?’ She is silent, almost visibly touching some pain deep inside herself. She answers softly: ‘Miss Allison.’ I have just watched the master lead a performer to the edge." (van der Walt, Watching 6) Guy Willoughby quotes Fugard:
Willoughby acknowledges what Fugard has done for the country:
The play then went on to New York, the Second Stage, in January 2002, with John Glover as Dawid, Marcy Harriell as Rebecca, Charlene Woodard as Marta, and Judith Light as Allison. The performances were uniformly brilliant; they acted together like virtuoso instruments in a string quartet, two sopranos, one mezzo, and one baritone. One could compare this play to the late quartets of Beethoven. It opened in May at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Marcy Harriell was replaced by Brienin Bryant and Charlayne Woodard by Cynthia Martells. John Lahr’s article in the New Yorker, "Homeland Defense," said:
Donald Lyons sees this as Fugard’s best play "written in pain, and full of a tender delicate hope….In Sorrows and Rejoicings, Athol Fugard has written his most magical, heart-breaking study of South Africa yet." Sorrows and Rejoicings played in London at the Tricycle (March 2002) with the South African cast, and in April-June at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles with a change in cast. All these productions benefited from the inspired direction of the author. This will be the last play that he will direct: another gift to himself for his seventieth birthday. Gordon Davidson, the producer in Los Angeles, spoke of Sorrows and Rejoicings "by our longtime friend, Athol Fugard":
SOURCES Athol Fugard Issue. Ed. Jack Barbera. Twentieth Century Literature 39:4 (Winter 1993). Botman, Gabriel. "Ou Mester is Weer in ons Midde." Trans Linda Louw. Die Burger 30 Aug. 2001. Davidson, Gordon. Performing Arts Magazine (Los Angeles). Oct. 2001. Gussow, Mel. New Yorker 20 Dec. 1982. Fugard, Athol. Notebooks: 1960-1977. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1984. Fugard, Athol. Sorrows and Rejoicings. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2002. Lahr, John. New Yorker 18&24 Feb. 2002: 196-98. Lyon, Donald. "Sorrows is Best of Fugard." New York Post 5 Feb. 2002. Sachs, Albie. "When Art Takes Liberties." The Independent (London) 18 Apr. 1990. van der Walt, Judy, was kind enough to tell me about the Mandela inauguration. van der Walt, Judy. "Watching the Master taking his Charges to the Edge" The Sunday Independent 19 Aug. 2001. Vandenbroucke, Russell. Truths the Hand can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985. Williams, Owen. "Weyers dominates Fugard Masterpiece." Cape Argus 30 August 2001, "Tonight" section. Willoughby, Guy. "Freeing Fugard." Mail & Guardian 24-30 Aug. 2001. . . .
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