Of all the many woes afflicting mankind today, none seems to be arousing more strident worldwide recrimination than the issue of apartheid rule in South Africa. The urgency of the increasingly violent situation in the southern-most country of the African continent and the multiplicity of effects it is having on political, economic, and military activity elsewhere, is very likely the rationale for bringing Blood Knot, a twenty-five-year-old play by the white South African writer Athol Fugard, to Broadway.
The play premiered in 1961 in Sophiatown, a black shantytown outside Johannesburg, where it set a precedent of mixed-race casting, and thereby caused quite a stir: The drama takes place in the back ghetto of Koresten, outside Port Elizabeth. The premise behind the play, reminiscent of Pinter and Beckett and their Theater of Alienation, goes below down-and-out.
The Yale Repertory Theater production, directed with assurance by the author, stars the playwright as Morris, a grizzled, bedraggled, and utterly destitute white who moves in with Zachariah, a black, whom he manipulatively, though frantically, calls his "brother." Fugard is perhaps better knows for his later works, such as Boesman and Lena, and A Lemon in Aloes, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, The Island, The Road to Mecca, and most notably, for Master Harold.... and the Boys, which also explores the volatile chemistry of black/white relations in South Africa, and which, likewise, received its American premiere at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Heaven before coming to Broadway in 1982. Fugard began his career in 1959 with No Good Friday, a cynical and embittered study of racism that was soon followed by other works in that vein, including Nongoo, Hello and Goodbye, and Mille Myglia.
Fugard's costar, Zakes Mokae, who performed opposite the author in the original production, portrays the black man with a suppressed fury - a lame, though stoic, resignation to his fate of abject servitude to whites in the land of his birth. Both actors seem in total control of their material, rep-resenting polarized types within a society that is being ripped apart before their eyes.
Fugard's concept of the situation, which apparently has escaped the critics (most of whom raved and swooned anyway), is a rather clever, though academic, metaphor for the sociological plight of that mineral-rich nation. From the literal point of view, all that happens is of no consequence and is, indeed, pointedly ridiculous. Within this bizarre vision of an abysmal existence without prospect, however, meaning can be found - though it may not shed light on what to do about the conditions of life in South Africa, then or now.
As the British and Dutch did more than a century ago, the white man, Morris, moves in on the black, Zechariah, claiming that he is his spiritual brother. Black Zechariah must toil like a beast of burden for white men at the mine, while all that the white Morris has to do is to wait at home, watching the clock; to prepare Zechariah's hot foot bath; to serve tea; to read from the Bible; and to say good-night at the appointed time. This regimen is the foundation for his control over his black host, who wants only to find a woman, ostensibly, for purposes of procreation.
Morris does everything in his power to thwart this instinct, but then finally sees that he must accommodate
...
Read Full Article
|
