Falling Sky: Athol Fugard's Victory

In Athol Fugard's newest play,Victory (which is making its U.S. premiere at Hollywood's Fountain Theatre), the white South African takes a hard, 70-minute look at exactly what "freedom on the march" actually means, nearly 20 years after the world events that spelled the end of both apartheid and Soviet communism. Fugard's lifetime critiques of apartheid so defined his identity as a playwright — in works such as Master Harold and the Boys, The Road to Mecca and Sizwe Banzi Is Dead— that he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and he himself questioned in 1995 whether or not South Africa's reversion to majority rule had extinguished his larger purpose.

The white man's burden: Morlan Higgins

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More About

• Athol Fugard
• Nelson Mandela
• Morlan Higgins
• Cape Town
• Lovensky Jean-Baptiste

The white man's burden: Morlan Higgins
(Click to enlarge)

No, it hasn't. Rather, it has aided in his transition from being an artist-advocate, through stories marbled with indignation at his country's bigotry, to being a tragedian through stories marbled with regret.

Victory revisits the kind of small Karoo village Fugard wrote about in his 1996 Valley Song. Like that earlier play, Victory has three characters and follows a similar dynamic. Both works contain gentle, thoughtful and aging white men who engage in bittersweet confrontations with a "colored" (mixed-race) teenage girl eager for the personal independence promised by the new, black-ruled South Africa.

In both plays, the girl is a precocious child-woman eager to get off the farm and on to the city — whether it be Johannesburg in Valley Song,or Cape Town in Victory. Veronica is Valley Song's ingenue, innocent at her core. In Victory, however, she's named Vicky (Tinashe Kajese), and Fugard has slightly hardened this archetype of South Africa's future into a reflection of his growing disillusion. Vicky's dire poverty and absence of hope have tainted her ambition to such an extent that, in order to help pay for a new life in Cape Town, she's willing to participate in armed robbery — against the very man who employed her late mother as a maid.

The attempted robbery forms the crux of the drama, which opens with Vicky and an accomplice rifling through drawers using a flashlight, wrongly presuming that the homeowner, a widower-schoolteacher named Lionel (Morlan Higgins, who was featured in the last Fugard premiere at this theater, Exits and Entrances), is out of town. He stumbles down the stairs in midraid, groggy and armed with a pistol — moving the play somewhere between a potboiler and a meditation. It's one thing to rob a bank or a liquor store. It's quite another to loot the home of the man who helped teach you to read, as Lionel did with Vicky. This is Fugard's political allegory tinged with bitterness. Vicky has been gaming Lionel for money, claiming falsely that it was needed for school supplies, when education is the last thing on her mind. The author's heartache comes wrapped in the young woman's name, Victoria — picked by her pregnant mother, anticipating that the baby would be born on the same "victory" day that Nelson Mandela walked out of prison after 27 years, the first step toward winning the South African presidency.

Vicky's partner in crime is a spry user named Freddie (Lovensky Jean-Baptiste), who, through considerable bluster and bungling, carries out two telling actions. First, he seizes the gun when Lionel blithely leaves it on the table. This is not a dramatic flaw but an insight into the old man's state of heart, which he reinforces with the repeated line "I just don't care anymore." Whoever holds the gun holds the power, Lionel notes — not the most original insight. Yet the transfer of weapon from white man to black, given both reluctantly and freely — like Afrikaner President F.W. de Klerk finally legalizing Mandela's African National Congress — is as loaded as the gun itself.

Freddie's other deed cuts a far deeper wound: He desecrates Lionel's library by urinating on the books that he's tumbled from their shelves. One, significantly, is a copy of Tolstoy's Resurrection— a homage to the capacities of forgiveness. Resurrection winds up "marked" and shredded on the library floor — along, it seems, with Mandela's Truth Commissions, considered to be fairly radical acts of forgiveness.

Through all this, Fugard remains a storyteller first and a moralist second. Lionel makes a priority of people being civil. That may be all we really have in this world. The libraries and manicured English gardens of minority white rule were part of a civilization enforced by the whip and the bullet, and Fugard is making a severe dramatic inquiry into the unfettered rage that is the consequence of that enforcement. When Vicky mockingly dons a scarf to serve her "master" Freddie, he barks orders at her. Lionel's one request is that Freddie at least include the word please— as though such decorum would make her less of a slave. It's not the distribution or redistribution of power that annoys the old teacher, but the lack of politeness, which makes Lionel as quaintly absurd as the old Russian aristocrat Gaev, in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard— another study in the ludicrous dynamics of an incoming social revolution.