Bringing Alan Paton back to life
WELL constructed and intimate, Greg Homann’s play on the life and work of Alan Paton is both engrossing and uncomfortable to watch.
Co-written with actor Ralph Lawson (pictured), who plays the liberal author, it gives you a glimpse into some of his thinking around why he fought apartheid, as well as his guilt about whether he could have done more.
Drawing greatly on Paton’s writing, the dialogue features the author’s lyricism as he dictated letters to friends and family, as well as his second wife Anne Paton’s (Mortimer) thoughts.
Mortimer’s matter-of-fact approach creates a down-to-earth Anne, whose pragmatism helped her deal with the towering intellect that was Alan.
Lawson plays Paton as principled, a man of his word, but also a man of words, driven by the injustice of it all to say what he saw.
The play benefits greatly from the straight-downthe-line traditional staging and direction which creates a slightly nostalgic, old-fashioned theatre feel and Evan Roberts’s soundscape, littered with bird sounds, is evocative.
The set is that of Paton’s study, with black curtains covering the sides of the stage and a stone path running around the front of the raised study – which eventually turns out to be the garden path leading to a small wooden bench.
The first time we see Anne she comes on stage with a cardboard box and starts packing up books, which she does throughout the play until she has packed up Paton’s life by the end of it.
Her interaction with Alan gets him talking about the time he spent as warden of Diepkloof Reformatory, about the children he met there – which is where Menzi Mkhwane comes in. The first time Mkhwane is seen he is reciting what must be some of Paton’s writings, but it is only by his third appearance that he starts interacting with Paton and his role becomes clearer.
As Paton remembers the reformatory’s children, he starts to question his own actions, wondering whether he could have done more to help them or understand them better.
The nitty gritty of Paton’s life is the engrossing part – how the security police intruded on him, the daily running of the Liberal Party and how he interacted with all sorts of people is a glimpse into life under apartheid that white people like to pretend didn’t happen. But the guilt is the uncomfortable part because you see white privilege in action – how he wanted to save people on his terms and realised it about himself. In that sense, the play is brave, but since Paton died in 1988 it is very much a glimpse into a way that was and not what is.
Mkhwane stays a cypher – standing in for a different way of looking at the world that Paton never understood, but always in opposition to Paton’s way of looking at the world, never as a fully realised character, the black child in need of guidance from the grown-up.