STOP WATCH LISTEN
What
Fugard@86: A season honouring the playwright and celebrating his birthday
Where
Market Theatre
When
From May 14 to July 15
Who
The Train Driver (May 4 to June 3) starring John Kani and Dawid Minnaar directed by Charmaine Weir-Smith and later on James Ngcobo will direct Nongogo (June 15 to July 15) starring Zikhona Sodlaka, Vusi Kunene, Peter Mashego, Bongani Gumede, and Zenzi Ngqobe
Why Care
Fugard is hailed as one of the greatest active playwrights in the English-speaking world. Watching a Fugard play, one is reminded of the dregs, racist, poor, dross, sad, good, dignified but most of all, the humanity in all of us as South Africans
As you walk into the theatre there is dust in the air. This is because the set of The
Train Driver is a desolate cemetery in a squatter camp, with litter (supermarket plastic packets, empty cooldrink bottles, hubcaps, broken plastic plates) and shoddy handmade crosses marking the small mounds of graves. There’s no grass here, no flowers, only sand and rocks. Next to the graveyard there’s a small shack — in it are two chairs, a single bed and small rickety table with a candle and a box of matches.
John Kani stands in the cemetery. He explains he is Simon, the gravedigger, responsible for putting the “nameless” ones to rest: those who have not been claimed at the mortuary. He meets Roelf (Dawid Minnaar) — an Afrikaner, looking for the woman in a red doek who was buried there with her baby — one of the nameless ones. Roelf is an angry, racist mess, wanting to find the woman’s grave in order to scream at her for messing up his life. He was a train driver and she stepped onto the tracks with a baby on her back in front of his train. He’s now traumatised and is haunted by her face in his dreams.
Minnaar’s Roelf is frenetic in the beginning, but Kani’s Simon manages to calm him down. They play off each other like the seasoned actors they are. Minnaar is superb in his role. He makes you uncomfortable in his soliloquies with his angry, dismissive body language and racist epithets of “these people”. You know who he is. You’ve met him before. Then there is the presence of Kani. His empathetic Simon is stoic and mostly silent — listening to Roelf’s rants. Simon’s dignified humanity is soothing. Roelf unburdens his troubles to Simon and they form an unlikely friendship with Roelf sharing Simon’s shack and food until he finds the grave of “Red Doek”.
The play touches on themes of loss, grief and trauma, but more importantly it raises questions about black poverty and Afrikaner selfrighteousness — perfect timing for what is happening in our conversations now.
And we can look forward to the next one. Directed by James Ngcobo, who is the artistic director for the Market Theatre, Nongogo was written almost 60 years ago in 1959. It takes place in a shebeen run by a woman known as Queenie. Not a play that has been staged often — this Fugard shows a piece of South African history that is both colourful and tragic.
Fugard@86 is relevant. His work still hits hard.