A Lesson from Aloes. Athol Fugard
him into a room and into a chair beside an open window ... six stories up. The policeman with him sat at least fifteen feet away ... smiling all the time. Every five minutes or so the door opened and a captain just stood there, laughing mockingly and gloatingly at him. For Steve a moment of total despair. He did actually contemplate suicide. My last meeting with him in his little house at Schauder Township. A number of elderly Coloured women were there, making us coffee and digging up the plants in the garden.
Steve: The little guaya tree?
Aunt Betty: No, he’s out. Down at Johnny’s place. I planted it there this afternoon.
The African man, Lucas, who came around to say goodbye and offered a ten-rand note. “Buy fruit for the children. They say it’s expensive in England.”
November
An image which defines Piet and a human predicament. Thinking back to the drought, he cries out, “I’m frightened of being useless!” The logos behind his humanity, his politics. He escaped the horror of his impotence on the parched, dying land, by a life of action among men. And then the second “drought” (suspected by all that he is an informer), and again alone, just himself, empty-handed and useless. Piet face-to-face with himself ... the absurdity of himself, alone.
“A man’s scenery is other men.”
During the next ten years I made several attempts to tell the story of Piet, Gladys and Steve. When the last of these miscarried in 1971 I thought I had finally abandoned the idea. Then, two years ago, and without any apparent external provocation, my memories of Piet, Gladys and Steve returned to me very obsessively and I started working on the play once again. A year later I went into rehearsals in Johannesburg with A Lesson from Aloes.
In thinking about the protracted history of this play as compared with the others I have written, I am conscious of one thing: the completion of a work has always depended on a correspondence, a relevance, between the external specifics of the play—the “story” as such—and my sense of myself at the time. In the case of A Lesson from Aloes this correspondence occurred significantly for the first time two years ago. Most of the reasons why this was the case are private, but there is one that I am prepared to try to articulate. Aloes are distinguished above all else for their inordinate capacity for survival in the harshest of possible environments. In writing this play I have at one level tried to examine and question the possibility and nature of survival in a country for which “drought,” with its harsh and relentless resonances, is a very apt metaphor.
Athol Fugard
New Haven
2/2/80
Characters
The action of the play moves between two areas representing the backyard and the bedroom of a small house in Algoa Park, Port Elizabeth.
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