Addressing the Cape Town Press Club earlier this week, a theatrical Jacob Zuma (being a good sport he wore on his lapel an ‘Evita Bezuidenhout for President’ badge I’d given him at the start of the luncheon, although he is suing several other satirical commentators who also happened to be in the room) declared, ‘Crime is the singular most critical issue [for South Africa]’. Poverty was second on his list that day under the giant crystal chandeliers of the Table Bay Hotel ballroom. And now at last, we have a play with the bitterly ironical title, Victory, by indisputably our greatest playwright, Athol Fugard, tackling ‘the crime issue’ head-on with anger and despair.
Victoria (Ameera Patel) is so named being born in the same month of 1990 when Nelson Mandela was finally released on the promise of a future for the country. We first meet Vicky drinking stolen whisky and trashing a white man’s house in the present day. Together with her delinquent loutish boyfriend Freddie Blom (Wayne van Rooyen) they’re after a wad of money (‘a big fat bundle like lavatory paper’) to get them to Cape Town escaping their small Karoo town ‘kakhuis’. Blom wants to join a gang, he thinks the ‘Big Time’, where ‘all the members got a gun’ and take Tik that makes ‘you feel so strong you can do anything’. He is not committed to Vicky, his possessiveness is that he doesn’t wish her to defy him.
The plot unfolds as a botched robbery. There is no money in the house; the owner, Lionel, apprehends them; Lionel’s revolver changes hands; Vicky and Freddie can’t agree on what to do with him. In the ensuing stand-off, we uncover the twisted emotional ties and intractable historical circumstances that bind the people of this country together.
Anna (Vicky’s mother) and Sally (Lionel’s wife) were friends, even deciding together on Vicky’s name in utero. Anna continued to work for Lionel after Sally’s death, trying to ‘shake him out of his apathy’ until she too died. As in Fugard’s Sorrows and Rejoicings, the women make life possible for the disintegrating male who still believes nonetheless that the world revolves around him.
Lionel, retired teacher, listless man of letters with a notebook in his pocket, played by Cobus Roussouw with appropriate brittleness, dominates the script to such an extent with his monologues that it threatens to become an apocalyptic polemic on the state of the country. The dialogue is littered with phrases for ‘us’ and ‘them’. Freddie speaks of ‘white man’s promises’ and ‘white man’s arse’, while Lionel says it was only a question of time before ‘it would be my turn for you or somebody else like you to come along’. Fugard may articulate it unusually well through Lionel, but this is the story as it is reported daily, told and retold, reality as it is perceived and lived by thousands of traumatised South Africans. It is the least interesting point of view for a play about our current situation.
Perhaps it is the terms in which his character’s think, but unfortunately, like Riaan Malan, Fugard is in danger here of racializing crime, which obscures crucial issues and makes it about black on white violence. It is unsurprising that the play is being read as the white man’s epitaph on Africa. Yet, Fugard isn’t some sensation seeking contrarian. We watch as Freddie urinates on Lionel’s books, among them Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which has forgiveness as its theme. But Lionel has given up. ‘The real mess’, he tells Blom, ‘isn’t on the floor…it’s inside me.’ It feels as if Fugard too hasn’t the stamina anymore to wrestle with the full dimension of this crisis. What about rich black victims of crime and the resentment felt towards them by the masses? What if Freddie pissed on Long Walk To Freedom?
We never approach what drives Blom’s hatred and bitterness. Circumstance, suggests Lionel, ‘given the poverty among your people’. This is paternalistic liberal humanism reminding me of Nadine Gordimer’s account of when she was attacked in her home and noticed that the thug trying to wrestle the wedding ring from her finger didn’t yet shave poor thing. The production doesn’t help, for although Wayne van Rooyen is a solid actor, he is miscast. Our empathy for him does not arise despite the character as it should, but because of the actor, who for all his frothing at the mouth is unable to disguise his effete, natural charm. Sophisticated Patel is far too mature and self-aware for sixteen-year-old jailbait.
Fugard’s lamentable reclusiveness and distance as the years creep up on the great man shows in his increasingly meditative style. We believe Boesman and Lena, but Freddie and Vicky are oddly bookish, perhaps more a fault of this prosaic production than the script. In their mouths the odd Afrikaans word, like ‘mos’ and ‘stront’ thrown in, or at one point ‘aikona’, rings false, but will work well as locators for an overseas audience.
I hope Fugard will be better served by the Theatre Royal Bath and the Peter Hall Company in their upcoming production in August.
If Fugard wasn’t so bound to the theatre of the poor, we could have had the three-act play the nation desperately needs written, perhaps starting with Sally and Anna on stage. It is Vicky – vacillating, undecided, orphaned – not Lionel, who should be the fulcrum of this work. It is how the oppressed absorbs the psychology of the master and unleashes it with sadistic violence; how the Freddie’s of our world have cruel, high-living gangsters, not pathetic, downtrodden fathers as role models.
The script holds all the clues, but they operate under the radar, undeveloped. At one point, we have a play within a play. To appease Freddie, Vicky dresses up like the coloured meid; she wears an apron and doek and cooks him a meal; Freddie, holding the gun, describes himself as a ‘fucking hardegat Master’ and Vicky allows him to abuse her.
After Anna died, Vicky’s father started to make sexual advances. Vicky projected these on to Lionel as her true oppressor. Mommy, Vicky tells us, ‘knew how to talk hope’. It is the abuse of women and the degradation of what the feminine represents that Fugard neglects in favour of Lionel’s outrage and collective guilt.
Yet, Fugard’s instincts as a playwright seem infallible. Vicky get’s the last line. Abandoned by Freddie, alone, helpless and crushed, she cries, ‘Mommy!’
Despite an action brought to the Constitutional Court in 2000 by 196 private Christian schools claiming Proverbs (23:14): “Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell” – corporal punishment remains illegal in our schools. Theatre practitioner, mime and clown, Aldo Brincat, who now lives in Botswana, says today his long-haired son cannot believe children were once beaten over trivialities. In The Emancipation of Arney, a humorous and quirky schoolboy memoir set in the 1980s, Brincat revisits those uneducated times. 
Ian von Memerty is a consummate entertainer, one of only a handful left on our stages who unaffectedly possess that old showbiz essential – ‘star quality’. What he doesn’t quite shine at he knows how to fake incandescently. With his toothy Liberace-like smile, a dimple that stretches to his chin, and an ebullient energy, Von Memerty is as generous as he is entertaining. His professional standards are high, even if much of the material is a bit parochial.
