The world première of
The Train Driver was on 19 March
2010 at the Fugard Theatre, a new theater in Cape Town named in the
playwright’s honor; Fugard directed the production, which was transferred to
the Hampstead Theatre in London for a 9 November opening. The U.S. première was staged at the Fountain
Theatre in Los Angeles on 16 October 2010, directed by Stephen Sachs, the company’s co-artistic director. The Signature’s production began previews on
14 August and opened on 9 September; it’s scheduled to close on 23
September. Based on an actual event, the
play recounts the quest of Roelf Visagie, the train engineer of the title, who
killed a mother and the child strapped to her back when she walked onto the
train tracks, to find out who she was.
The last he saw of the woman, whom he only knows as Red Doek for the
scarf she wore around her head, was the expression of despair on her face which
continues to stare up at him, depriving him of sleep. Fugard had read an article in the
Johannesburg Mail & Guardian
about a woman named Pumla Lolwana who committed suicide that way on 8 December
2000 and took her three children with her, and it set him to thinking about the
hopelessness the woman must have felt in the squatter camp where she and her
children were forced to live. Not for
the first time after reading a newspaper story, the playwright began “thinking
about the possibility of a play, of dealing with an issue, . . . trying to bear
some sort of witness to what was happening to people in my country.” A year later, he began keeping a journal about
the play, as is his practice. He tried
for three months “to get inside the life of that woman and understand why she
did a thing like that.” He finally
saw he wasn’t ever going to be able to do that and he abandoned the idea.
Some months later, however, Fugard realized that Lolwana and
her children weren’t the only parts of the story: the man driving the train was
part of it, too. “And suddenly that was
different. I knew I could get inside
him.” The writer saw that there were
many ways he could connect with the engineer of that commuter train, shared
experiences of their lives as fellow South Africans. “And the moment I did that the play started
to happen on paper . . . .” He drew
material from his outsider’s exposure to the squatter camps and “slowly but
surely, the play took shape.” It took
the dramatist nine years. Fugard tells
the story by having Roelf explain his search to the gravedigger of the cemetery
where the woman had been buried, near the squatter camp of Shukuma outside Port
Elizabeth. Simon Hanabe is Xhosa and Roelf
is Afrikaner, and Fugard sees this as another “opportunity for taking the play
to altogether yet another level, which is the relationship between black and
white in my South Africa.” Roelf spends
several nights in Simon’s corrugated-metal hut, his pondok, in the amangcwaba, the graveyard, and little by little he comes to see Simon as an
equal, at least in terms of his humanity and his care, in his own way, for “the
nameless ones” buried in his corner of the cemetery. One way or another, this accommodation has
been the leitmotif of the dramatist’s
playwriting career, both during apartheid
and now, under the country’s majority rule.
(The Train Driver is set in 2010, though much of what
happens could be a reflection of the South Africa of 1961.) Even in the “New South Africa,” the
relationship is “still bedeviled” by old prejudices.
According to Fugard, The
Train Driver is his most important play because “the journey that Roelf
Visagie makes over the course of the play . . . from prejudice to compassion
and understanding, is, in a sense the journey I have tried to make in my
life.” He sees this play as the other
bookend in a pair with 1961’s Blood Knot
(which he says is the play in which he “found my own voice”). Both are plays about two men, one black and
one white, he points out. (The Train Driver isn’t Fugard’s last
play, but at the time it was chosen to be the final presentation in the
Signature’s first Residency One series, it was his latest.) The writer doesn’t say so, but what I think
he’s suggesting is that these two plays, and others with similar pairs of
characters, represent Fugard’s constant attempt to reconcile the two halves of
his African soul. With an Afrikaner
mother and an Anglo-Irish father of Huguenot descent, he was raised, he says,
in “a not exactly liberal family . . . being conditioned unconsciously, by the
world in which I lived, acquiring all the prejudices that come with being a
privileged member of the white minority, of a white people.” He says he’s still struggling against his own
prejudices, “but I do know that I’ve tried, I’ve dealt with a lot of my prejudice.” Blood
Knot and The Train Driver, with
half a century of playwriting between them, are, I believe, Fugard’s accounts
of his private struggle—which he says is also his country’s struggle.
The play itself is also interesting—which is not to say it
entirely succeeds as theater. Only 90
minutes long (staged without an intermission), it’s virtually all conversation
with very little action. There are three
things that keep The Train Driver from
becoming nothing more than talking heads or a preachy classroom lesson like My Children! My Africa!, the second play
in the Signature’s Fugard season (see my report, 11 June): it’s a particularly animated conversation, Athol Fugard is the
composer of the dialogue, and it’s deeply, deeply felt—not just by the
characters, but by the author. Since he
directed this production himself, I can’t help but feel that he imbued the
performances with some of his own passion for this situation and how much he’s
said it means to him privately. (That
the two actors, Leon Addison Brown as Simon and Ritchie Coster as Roelf, are
superb in all respects in no small measure enhances the effectiveness of the
presentation, but I’ll get to that in its own time.)
Clearly from what
Fugard’s said about the play and its origins, it’s an important endeavor for
him. The suicide of Pumla Lolwana, when
the playwright first read about it, obviously moved him—so much that he
couldn’t get it out of his head. Even
when he saw that he couldn’t get inside Lolwana’s thoughts, he couldn’t drop
the idea. He carried it around with him
for nine years, so you know it must have grabbed hold of something inside him. Furthermore, Fugard’s said that this play
bookends his first important work, creating an opening and closing of sorts to
his struggle to come to grips with his South Africa. Even if I hadn’t had some little experience
with this kind of commitment in a playwright, I’d sense just from reading what
he’s said about The Train Driver that
his dedication to this project would affect its stage life. It indubitably added a level of excitement
and energy to the performance that’s probably impossible to quantify.
Fugard’s writing is
a significant element in the dramaturgy of The
Train Driver, of course. This
writer’s one of those few operating today whose prose is elevated to the level
of lyricism and poetry. (Others in that
category: Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, and, in his inimitable style,
David Mamet.) Whether consciously or unconsciously—and
I don’t know how Fugard composes his plays—his words are put together so that
the sound, the rhythm is as important in performance as the sense. In the case of Train Driver, Fugard uses a lot of both Afrikaans and Xhosa words
that add their own lilt and resonance to the lines (though it also helped make
following the dialogue difficult at times).
In addition, the contrast between the Afrikaner Roelf and the Xhosa
Simon, the way the prosody of one bounces off the speech of the other, accentuates
the lyricism of the play. If almost any
other playwright had written this play, it would probably have been inert and
static, but in Fugard’s hands, combined, of course, with the other elements, The Train Driver was compelling and absorbing.
Finally, while
little happens on the stage other than the conversation between Simon and
Roelf, the two men are so dynamic, so energized that for the 1½ hours it takes
to tell this story, they seem to be more active than they are. (I don’t mean physically: Simon, in fact, is
pretty restrained.) Of course, Fugard
has the actors moving about the stage and the men do things, but the drama, the
conflict, is all internal and verbal.
Nonetheless, that inner struggle is so vital, so anguished, it’s hardly
passive. After all, what Roelf’s
searching for is far from idle curiosity: it took him away from his home, his
family, and his job. He needs to know
who this woman he killed was, why she did such an extreme thing, and why she
made him part of her act. Verbal though
the play is, it’s not two guys sitting around talking.
Thinking about it
afterwards, I see that there’s not a little aspect of Japanese Noh in Fugard’s
play. I have no idea if the dramatist
has ever been influenced by Japanese classical theater, or if he even knows Noh
drama, but he’s incorporated some of the elements here: a mystical place (the
graveyard of the unnamed dead, the ones who died anonymously); a “man of the
place,” a sort of guardian spirit who knows its story; a traveler-seeker who’s
made a long journey to bring him there (Roelf’s been crossing the country
trying to find Red Doek’s identity for about a year). In Noh, there’s a transformation of the
person of the place who becomes a spirit figure, and that doesn’t happen
literally in Train Driver, though
Simon does undergo a sort of change, but there is a kind of crisis which ends
Roelf’s search in an unexpected way. The
actual spirits that haunt the amangcwaba are the dead woman and her child and the transformation is Roelf’s gradual
realization, like Fugard’s own, that he can’t ever know anything about Red
Doek’s life because his world is so different from hers. Noh is notoriously inactive and slow-moving, so
highly refined that, compared to the more raucous Kabuki, it can seem
tedious. But it’s an intense form of
drama (closely bound up with Zen Buddhism) and, if you are attuned to it,
extremely moving. Fugard’s one-acter
isn’t so philosophical, it’s much more earthbound; and it’s less serene, so it
moves more quickly—but I can’t escape the few parallels once I spotted them.
Dramaturgically, The Train Driver contrasts with
the other two plays in STC’s Fugard residency, Blood Knot and My Children!
My Africa! Though it resembles Blood Knot superficially because both
plays are about two men, one white and one black, who have a peculiar
connection, there’s at least one huge difference. In Blood
Knot, the conflict at the center of the drama is between Morris, the white
brother, and Zachariah, the black brother.
Their respective roles in apartheid
society split them along racial lines.
In The Train Driver, the
conflict isn’t between the two men, but within Roelf—and less so within Simon,
who’s a reducing-mirror image of Roelf in a way. The source of the conflict, interestingly, is
the same: the official apartheid
system in Blood Knot; the echoes of
that system in Train Driver. Because, however, the dramatic conflict in Blood Knot is between the brothers, it’s
a more physically active play (and, thus, I think, can sustain a 2½-hour
length); Train Driver’s internal
conflict limits the play to the 90-minute length, or it would have become
enervating.
That’s what happened in My
Children!, I think. It’s also a 2½
hour play, and it even has a third character, but its conflicts are all
intellectual and internal and it becomes a talky, preachy treatise all of whose
potential action takes place off stage.
While My Children! becomes
diffuse and airy, The Train Driver
remains tightly conceived in its hour-and-a-half format so that it works like a
fist. You can’t keep a fist clenched for
too long, but while you do, if it’s at the end of the right person’s arm, it
can be mighty effective at making a point.
Granted, The Train Driver’s
fist is used to slam on a table top in frustration, anger, and helplessness,
but the point gets made nonetheless.
All this is helped tremendously by the acting. As a director, Fugard must have a way with
two-actor ensembles. He also directed
the STC production of Blood Knot last
January and February, and that pairing of Colman Domingo and Scott Shepherd
established an astonishing stage relationship.
Leon Addison Brown’s Simon and
Ritchie Coster’s Roelf are just as connected and each actor delineates a
vibrant and vivid character. When Diana
and I were leaving the theater and she remarked on the accents, I told her that
from the actors’ program bios, it sounded like both are American. (I’ve seen Brown in a couple of STC
productions, namely August Wilson’s Two
Trains Running and Horton Foote’s Orphans’
Home Cycle, and both actors’ credits, including film and TV, are U.S.
productions. The dialect coach for
Train Driver was Barbara Rubin, as she was for Blood Knot and My Children!
as well.) Of course, the accuracy of stage accents
isn’t as important in a performance like this (though consistency and
commitment are essential) as the relationship the actors create and the power
of each portrayal, and Brown and Coster knock this out of the park.
I think it’s
significant that Roelf is an Afrikaner, rather than a British South
African. I know that South Africans of
English heritage can be as bigoted and resistant as any racist anywhere, but
the Afrikaners invented apartheid and
led the governments that implemented and maintained the system of repression
and exclusion that infested South Africa for over 40 years. In the new South Africa, after the
dismantling of official apartheid and
the rise of majority rule, that heritage still haunts the country, and what
Fugard is depicting in Train Driver
is the slow growth of understanding between white Roelf and black Simon as they
learn to see each other as people, not representatives of some amorphous group
(“White Men”; “Bantus”). “They’re human
beings, man,” says Roelf often of the nameless dead buried in Simon’s
graveyard—but he’s also talking about the people who live in Shukuma and
beyond. In the old days, I imagine,
Roelf wouldn’t have even started out on the journey of discovery he’s made to
learn who the suicide was; he certainly wouldn’t have spent a year on his
quest. Coster depicts the gradual change
in Roelf from anger at Red Doek for drawing him into her tragedy to compassion. His whole body, including his face, softens. That he’s an Afrikaner, I think, makes this
effort all the more momentous. Coster
portrays this haunted man with an almost frightening darkness and gives a
performance of such intensity that he almost turns the play into a monologue. Variety’s
Marilyn Stasio calls Coster’s portrayal “searing.”
Simon’s growth is
subtler—mostly because Brown’s gravedigger is a more patient man to start with,
but in the beginning, he doesn’t really see Roelf as much more than an
interloper, a white man who has no business in his cemetery. “There are no white people buried here,” he
explains to Roelf when the train operator first wanders into the
graveyard. But he lets Roelf stay in his
pondok, not that Red Doek’s visage actually lets
the visitor sleep, and eventually shows him how he cares for the people buried
in his care, protecting them from the marauding dogs and marking the ingcwabas, the graves, so he doesn’t accidentally dig
one up to burry a “new one” where someone’s already “sleeping.” Simon doesn’t actually welcome the intruder,
but he accepts Roelf’s presence in his private world and Brown plays the part
with quiet resignation as Roelf bares his soul in his effort to exorcise his
private trauma. Simon’s principal
function in the play is as an audience for Roelf, and he frames the play with
an introductory monologue and an epilogue.
Brown, who’s not a small man, manages to become almost a spectral
presence himself.
There are parts of
the performance that are painful, and even though Roelf may have found Red Doek’s
burial ground, he doesn’t find her actual ingcwaba or learn who she was. Brown loses his meager job because of Roelf’s
presence in the amangcwaba, leaving him with
nowhere to go and no work. In a way, however, Coster shows that he’s
come to terms with what he has learned—though the final outcome, which seemed
to me to be gratuitously shocking, isn’t a good one.
Christopher H. Barreca’s
graveyard set is about as bleak a stage environment as I’ve seen in recent
memory. Charles Isherwood of the New York Times even calls it Beckettian. (In the New
York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli describes the set as “post-apocalyptic,”
but I find that reductive. If this
landscape were the result of a science-fiction apocalypse, we could just shrug
it off as sort of normal. But it’s
not. The devastated terrain exists in an
ostensibly prosperous, democratic South Africa at peace.) Barreca also designed Fugard’s shanty set for
STC’s Blood Knot, but while that was
dismal and cheerless, the Shukuma cemetery is Fugard’s version of a blasted
heath: a dirt plot stretching over the whole stage—the Linney is configured as
a proscenium with the playing area along the wide length of the room with the
spectators arrayed in six rows along the front—with small mounds inches apart,
randomly placed with what looks like bits of junk and debris strewn on
top. In the upstage center is a square
panel of corrugated metal which Simon later rotates 180 degrees to reveal the
inside of the tiny shack where he eats his meals out of a can heated over a
single candle and sleeps essentially sitting up. At the far right of the stage is a large heap
of rubble the foundation of which is a rusting shell of a car. Everything is a sort of grayish brown—not a
lick of green or any other color whatsoever; nothing has grown here for decades
or likely will any time again. It’s not
hard to imagine what the rest of the squatter camp looks like. This is where Simon not only works, but
lives, on a dead ground covering dead people.
It’s where Roelf ends his search.
I found that the press largely dismisses the play too quickly and with
too little consideration. For instance,
the New York Post’s Vincentelli, who
calls Train Driver “ponderous” and “snoozy,” censures the play,
which she asserts Fugard says “is about guilt,” by objecting that “Roelf is
tortured by deaths he couldn’t have prevented.” But, of course, that’s not the guilt Fugard’s
exploring: it’s the guilt—if that’s even the right word—that Roelf feels as a
white man for forcing people like Red Doek into lives of such inescapable
despair, represented by places like Shukuma, that their only imaginable
recourse is an unthinkable act. It’s not
her death for which Roelf, not to mention Fugard, feels responsible—it’s her
life. Vincentelli declares, “You can
tell it wants to say something big and deep about the desperate mess South
Africa is in, but the metaphor isn’t grounded.”
I say that’s only true if you miss Fugard’s point. While it’s certainly possible to criticize The Train Driver for having failed
theatrically, even dramatically, I’d argue that Fugard didn’t miss his mark
intellectually. His metaphor is well
grounded, indeed.
In the Times, Isherwood says the play’s “a
modest but eloquent addition to Mr. Fugard’s oeuvre” even though it “often
feels like a monologue.” Joe Dziemianowicz
of the Daily News describes the play as “[e]asy to admire for its
sensitivity, but hard to recommend for its sluggish repetitiveness,” bringing the 2011-12 Signature season “to a
yawning conclusion.” Back Stage’s Erik Haagensen says Fugard’s play is “not his
most effective” and characterizes it as “barely dramatic, too obviously symbolic,
and so self-consciously Beckettian that I imagine the Nobel Prize–winning
playwright’s estate could sue for royalties.” Matt Windman in AM New York also raises the absurdist influence, saying the play is
“a bleak Beckett-style drama.” The
reviewer even concludes by suggesting that “you might even be tempted to fall
asleep—if you haven't already.” (Windman
is clearly not a fan of Fugard, whose work he characterizes as “repetitive and
excessively didactic.” He pans all of
Fugard's “disappointing trilogy” of this past Signature season, which he
dismissed as “boring.”)
On the flipside, Newsday’s Linda Winer calls Fugard’s The Train Driver, “one of his least forgiving,” a “shattering drama” that “sends out tentacles to the psyches of unseen individuals . . . to the questions that connect us all.” And as if to contradict AM New York’s Windman directly, David Cote of Time Out New York declares that the STC series was “deeply rewarding and satisfying.” He describes The Train Driver, despite “repetitive patches or thematic hammering,” with terns like a “sober examination,” a “purgative new work,” and “potent, engaged theater.” Stasio in Variety praised the STC production as “agonizingly well acted and directed with unflinching honesty.” “Direct, determined, with an openness just shy of obviousness,” writes New York magazine’s Scott Brown of Fugard’s play, which Brown calls “a sort of fugue on themes of flagellation” that’s “unsubtle” but not “ineffective.” On the ’Net, Simon Saltzman describes The Train Driver on Curtain Up as an “emotionally intense play,” labeling it among Fugard’s “arguably best plays.” Saltzman insists that it “resonates on a dramatic frequency that is uniquely Fugard’s.”
On the flipside, Newsday’s Linda Winer calls Fugard’s The Train Driver, “one of his least forgiving,” a “shattering drama” that “sends out tentacles to the psyches of unseen individuals . . . to the questions that connect us all.” And as if to contradict AM New York’s Windman directly, David Cote of Time Out New York declares that the STC series was “deeply rewarding and satisfying.” He describes The Train Driver, despite “repetitive patches or thematic hammering,” with terns like a “sober examination,” a “purgative new work,” and “potent, engaged theater.” Stasio in Variety praised the STC production as “agonizingly well acted and directed with unflinching honesty.” “Direct, determined, with an openness just shy of obviousness,” writes New York magazine’s Scott Brown of Fugard’s play, which Brown calls “a sort of fugue on themes of flagellation” that’s “unsubtle” but not “ineffective.” On the ’Net, Simon Saltzman describes The Train Driver on Curtain Up as an “emotionally intense play,” labeling it among Fugard’s “arguably best plays.” Saltzman insists that it “resonates on a dramatic frequency that is uniquely Fugard’s.”
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