Volume 28, Number 2 · February 19, 1981
No Place for Heroes
By Tamar Jacoby
A Lesson From Aloes
by Athol Fugard. at the Playhouse Theatre, New York City
Tsotsi
by Athol Fugard
Random House, 167 pp., $8.95
Very little happens on stage in A Lesson From Aloes, the South African writer Athol Fugard's most recent play. In the first act, the Afrikaner Piet Bezuidenhout and his wife Gladys sit in the shabby back garden of their house in Port Elizabeth. They are waiting for the sunny afternoon to pass. Piet tends his collection of thorny aloe plants; together they set the table for dinner. His manner is considerate, elaborately solicitous, hers somewhat tenser but also pointedly polite. And yet it is clear from their first exchange that there is something terribly wrong—something that goes for the most part unmentioned, apparent only in their strained courtesy and the awkward silences between them. In the second act Steve Daniels arrives: a Coloured man, once a mason and a political leader, who has recently come out of prison. Although it was expected that he would bring his family, he has arrived alone—and very late. The exaggerated bonhomie that passes between him and Piet only seems to heighten the tension on stage.
Review, 3821 words
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