The Fountain Theatre

Published on the web by Tonight on May 25, 2004

THEATER ARTICLE-- Entrances and Exits

Fugard owes a huge debt to Huguenet

By Judy van der Walt

Almost 90 years ago in a theatre in Bloemfontein, a Russian ballerina lit a creative spark in an 11-year old Afrikaans boy who would one day be recognised as a visionary in South African theatre.

Many years later, the boy, André Huguenet, became a mentor to Athol Fugard, who was named the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world by Time magazine in 1989 and whose plays are produced with a frequency second only to The Bard.

Now 71, Fugard tells Judy van der Walt why his latest play is an 'an expression of gratitude I must make before I climb into my coffin a reasonably contented man...'

The autobiographical Exits and Entrances is about the playwright's relationship with Huguenet, who gave him his first job as an actor, casting him as the shepherd who clings desperately to the ankles of Huguenet's Oedipus.

"André was very important to me in terms of my awareness of theatre. The fact that he was a visionary might well have been the provocation that I needed to formulate a vision of my own," Fugard says.

With Fugard based in California in the US, Exits and Entrances was premiered at the weekend at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles. Mannie Manim of the Baxter Theatre hopes to produce it in Cape Town before the end of next year.

The play is about the exit of Huguenet - at the end of his creative life - and the entrance of Fugard, just starting his career as a playwright. It is an existentialist drama about mentors: Fugard and Huguenet; Huguenet and his mentor Eugene Marais, the famous Afrikaans naturalist and poet who revealed his mind to Huguenet one dark night and committed suicide a few years later.

Born in Bloemfontein as Gerhardus Borstlap, Huguenet was an outsider, a homosexual in a wholly unsympathetic place and time. He'd been groomed to become a dominee in the Calvinistic Reformed Church, but the fluttering of Anna Pavlova's swan wings in 1916 lured him onto a different path.

Watching her dance at the risk of damnation by a church that condemned ballet as the sinful prancing of half-naked women, Huguenet says in Exits and Entrances: "She had to believe she was the most beautiful, the most graceful of all the creatures in the world and then, having dreamt that, she also had to feel the first touch of death and try, hopelessly, to escape it, discover that her magnificent wings could no longer lift her off the ground, feel that touch turn into a cruel, unrelenting hold on her whole life."

Spreading his own magnificent wings, Huguenet became the most outstanding actor of his age in SA. He established his own acting company and performed new work and classics in Afrikaans, showing that the language had the gravitas to carry classics.

He later gave admired performances of most of the classic theatre roles all over the world and in 1947 won the Queen's Coronation Medal for his performance of Hamlet.

"André, as Oedipus, standing at the top of the steps in front of the doors of his Theban palace, became very still, and we ordinary mortals held our breaths and waited," says the Playwright (who is never named) in Exits and Entrances as he recalls Huguenet's acting genius.

In 1961, Huguenet folded his wings. He died at 56 - probably by committing suicide - in his sister's home in Bloemfontein.

In his play, Fugard evokes Huguenet's tormented descent. The once majestic but ageing and disillusioned actor is reduced to collecting tickets in the Pigalle, a "cheap bug-house bioscope in Joburg".

"Humility! That is what you are left with when your pride, your vanity, your selfishness is slowly stripped away. And dear God, how that hurts!" says Huguenet.

The lobby of the Pigalle turned out to be the rehearsal room for Huguenet's last and one of his most moving performances: as the Cardinal in The Prisoner performed in Port Elizabeth, which the Playwright attends. Huguenet says: "The Cardinal, a proud, conceited Prince of the Church, is slowly stripped of all his disguises and forced to recognise and confess to what he really is."

After the performance, Huguenet tells the Playwright about the mentor who had a profound effect on his life.

Late one night, Huguenet had sat in the semi-darkness of the deserted newsroom of Die Vaderland after writing a poisonous theatre review. The drama of the setting appealed to him and he started reciting Hamlet's soliloquy, 'To be or not to be'. A voice came from a dark corner. It was Eugene Marais, who also worked on the paper. He corrected Huguenet a few times and then took over the soliloquy.

"He was talking from the heart," Huguenet tells the Playwright: "You don't get it, do you? Neither did I at the time. He was debating his suicide. It wasn't Hamlet asking 'To be or not to be? '

It was Eugene Marais and he answered it five years later when he went for a walk in the Transvaal veld and never came back. He shot himself. You see, Marais was so right, 'To be or not to be?' is not a literary conceit, it is a real question."

It turns out that in this conversation, recalled by the Playwright, Huguenet was probably debating his own suicide. One month later he was dead.

I ask Fugard if he has ever debated 'To be or not to be'. "No, I haven't. I've never despaired," he says.

But he admits that when SA became a democracy 10 years ago, he'd stumbled across the new landscape, lost and unsure of his relevance.

"To think that my writing may no longer be of significance, meant that I was in a sense a purposeless human being. I'd lost the purpose of my life. And then I realised that is a load of bullshit! I am a storyteller and that will never change."

Fugard adds: "Now that Exits and Entrances is finished, I am playing around with the possibility of another instalment in my literary biography. And just as Sophocles finally had Oedipus at Colonus, maybe I shall put Athol someplace just before he enters into the great mysteries of death: karma."

Last year, Fugard decided not to direct again. His fellow professor at the University of California, Marianne McDonald, says: "I have seen what a toll directing takes on his health. He wants to write in the time left to him and is listening to the last songs of Strauss, late quartets, and the last songs of Mahler."

Does Fugard at 71 experience Huguenet's disillusion? "No. I don't. Looking back, I realise that Andre's vision of theatre was ultimately too limited. It did not encompass all South Africans. The only way forward, then as now, is by inclusion; by having a vision that truly embraces our multicultural identity. A theatre for the Afrikaner was really not enough. It was not what South Africa needed then and not what it needs now.

"The notion of a SA theatre 40 years ago was laughable, because as far as English was concerned, it was a very anaemic imitation of what was happening in London.

"But between then and now I just watched, and thanks to the pioneering efforts of Yvonne Bryceland and her husband Brian Astbury in Cape Town (The Space) and then Mannie Manim and Barney Simon in Joburg with the Market Theatre, I've just seen theatre grow from strength to strength.

"Admittedly it's a very complex moment for South Africa, but I have every confidence in the future of theatre in this country. Disillusionment, no. Exactly the opposite."

A few months ago Fugard launched a small community theatre in Nieu-Bethesda. "It was so wonderful to see how readily, how greedily, how happily, South Africans from the full racial spectrum came together in that little space to share stories about their lives. Afrikaners, people from the township, Pienaarsig, myself, poets from Grahamstown: it was a wonderful affirmation of what I've always held to be the only true vision that theatre in South Africa could have, one that embraces our multi-cultural identity."

As Huguenet kindled Fugard's creative fire, the playwright believes passionately that the spark of creativity is lodged in every human soul.

"It is another small miracle that even the most ordinary person can make happen, and all you need for that one is a blank piece of paper and a pen. That miracle is the telling of your own story."

And then he tells me a Chinese anecdote about a man who meets a woodcutter and goes into the mountains with him one day. They talk and they joke, they tell stories and they never return.

Hou so aan, Oubaas ... jy kom eerste!

Athol Fugard says he has already reserved his grave in the cemetery of Nieu-Bethesda in the Karoo. He's even decided on the inscription for his gravestone.

"One day in the Karoo, before my knees gave in, I went for a run and was battling up the hill while a group of black children were watching me. As I ran past them, one of them called out: 'Hou so aan, Oubaas - jy kom eerste!' (Keep going, Oubaas - you're first!)."

"I must admit, I do live with a sense that I haven't got a lot of time left. Let's face it, I've reached the biblical three score and 10, and I'm lucky if there's a little bit more time left to me."