The Real Review

Athol Fugard’s latest play is about the irresistible compulsion to tell one’s story in order to obtain release. The same compulsion seems to have taken hold of Fugard for he has blandly adapted a short story from his collection Karoo and Other Stories for the stage. It is the story of a certain Booitijie Barends he knew in his beloved Karoo town of Nieu Bethesda.
‘Booitjie’ is an uncommon (even bizarre) spelling of the diminutive ‘boykie’ or ‘boytjie’. In the play, Booitjie explains that “because I was small I ended up ‘booitjie’ and now no one calls me by my real name”.
Set in the 1950s, the ‘non-white’ Barends (Christo Davids) is nurse and carer for the farm’s oubaas (Marius Weyers) now debilitated by a stroke. In typical Fugardian imagery, it is as if the patriarch is “a big bloekomboom” struck by lightning.
Early on, the two men enjoy a moment of bonhomie, an intimacy rarely found across the racial strictures of that time. But the oubaas needs more: to confess his terrible secrets. As he says, “You don’t need God to judge you and send you to hell. You can do it to yourself.” Unlike Soekie Fortuin (Mary Daniels), the day nurse, who is far more candid about how things stand, the compassionate Barends has “learned to understand” the oubaas.
In the end, the two men are able to put aside the apartheid appellations of ‘booitjie’ and ‘oubaas’ introducing themselves as Gerhardus Daniel Lottering Strydom and Adam Barends. With understanding comes equality of respect and acceptance.
Despite the compelling clarity in the writing, it would have been far better for Fugard to dramatise the story with a full cast, rather than only dramatize the story telling. The vision and horizons for our theatre keep shrinking. Yet having the story related in this manner mitigates the melodrama – miscarriage and paralysis, plotting murder and family suicide, an illegitimate pregnancy through incestuous adultery are among Strydom’s secrets.
The only truly dramatic conceit – which many patrons didn’t understand – is the gentle transition Weyers makes until we are hearing the oubaas as Barends does – not the slurred murmurings in the opening scene caused by the left-brain stroke.
It is a function of theatre to give the audience a catharsis; it is a misconception of drama to try to make a play out of pontificating about this necessity.

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