I knew I had seen a play about it before. I vividly recall the final image – a giant light of a train bearing directly down on us in the audience. Since Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver was staged earlier this year, it has been driving me absolutely nuts for months now. I asked various people; nobody seemed to know. I hazily recalled it as a work by Geraldine Aron. Hunting through Aron’s plays on the internet I could not find anything that reminded me of that work. Perhaps I’d got the author wrong. I searched for keywords such as ‘play’, ‘train’, ‘suicide’, ‘South Africa’ and all that came up was the Fugard play and news reports on train jumpings.
Finally, I found time this weekend to rummage through my enormous collection of theatre programmes. And there I found it. Geraldine Aron’s Rustlers deals with the same incident as Fugard’s play, and Aron had also dedicated her play to “Phumla Lolwana and her children Lindani, Andile and Sisanda”. It was performed here at Artscape Theatre in March 2003. Diane Wilson lead the cast. Mystery solved.
