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| Athol Fugard as Oupa in The Shadow of the Hummingbird |
“This is the smallest play I've
ever written, but it has generated more noise than the others. I never thought
it would impact on people the way it has,” says playwright Athol Fugard. It’s an early
weekday morning and I’m talking to him on the wide stoep of the guesthouse
where’s he staying while he’s performing in The
Shadow of the Hummingbird at the Market Theatre. He’s smoking on his pipe,
and the sweet smelling tobacco wafts my way as we talk, mostly about this new
play, and its genesis. His partner, and
collaborator on the play, Paula Fourie sits close by smoking.
At times, hadedas punctuate our
conversation half way through, flying noisily through the air, screeching their
presence at us, a far cry from the quiet shadows and suggestions of the
hummingbirds which punctuate this latest play as motif throughout its gentle
telling.
On the surface, The Shadow of the
Hummingbird is a quiet play. At just an hour in length, it’s set in two parts.
The first sees an old man, a retired South African school teacher, Oupa, now
living in retirement in California, played by Fugard himself. He’s kept
notebooks for years – and is searching for a particular entry from among the
clutter of books and notebooks in his room.
These excerpts are from Fugard’s
actual unpublished notebooks – a habit he continues to maintain today. He
likens the habit to what Virginia Woolf said about “capturing the image on the
wing” and adds that keeping a notebook for writers is akin to the finger
exercises of a pianist: “Writers must put pen to paper, capture the flower
you’ve seen, the thought you’ve had. One of the questions I always ask young
writers is whether they keep a notebook.”
There’s something about a shadow
that Oupa is seeking, and he can’t find it in the play. He goes through many entries, reading
fragments from each. There are lists of
bird sightings – Fugard is an avid bird-watcher – ruminations on death, on the
meaningless of the turning of the new year, a paean to Port Elizabeth, love, the
eager anticipation of having a grandchild, and the ever elusive search for the
entry with the shadow, shadow as metaphor for life itself, and then the final reckoning.
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| Paula Fourie, Fugard’s partner and co-writer of The Shadow of the Hummingbird |
Fourie was responsible for writing
the first section. Fugard had written the play, but it was too short to be
performed, and it was decided that Fourie would edit and go through some of the
notebooks, and combine them into the text, hitting upon the idea of Oupa
reading the entries. Fourie worked through 20 years of unpublished books.
However, as she explains to me, the process was an alchemy in terms of
combining fiction and non-fictional elements. Oupa isn’t Fugard – so there were
some changes, such as not including the notebook entries on rehearsals for The Captain’s Tiger, for instance. Fugard
adds that this really is an example of the collaborative nature of theatre,
that theatre itself is a collaborative form.
Fugard explains that there were
two seminal images that served as the genesis of the play. When he was based in
California, he was writing and kept being alerted to the shadow of hummingbirds
flitting around the birdfeeder on the patio outside. “Every morning I watched
the shadow for a few minutes.” He also remembered making an entry in my
notebooks in the early 1960s when I was writing the Blood Knot – the last entry I read on stage – the seed stayed with
me for days.”
Returning to the play, Oupa’s search
is interrupted by the arrival of his grandson, Boba (Marviantos
Baker) who instantly becomes part of a fun game the
two appear to have played for years with Boba slaying his grandfather, now the
teacher from the black lagoon! Fugard’s real grandson Gavyn served as the inspiration here for the
grandson.
This was another opportunity to
collaborate further, as Fugard notes. In the American version of the play,
which was staged prior to its south African run, the role of the grandson was
played by two 10-year-old twins alternating in the role – because of their
youth, they served more as foils to the role of Oupa. But Baker, although being
23, could look 13, and thus became an older grandson, “which took the play to a
new level, and opened up areas of the play, with Marviantos making his own contributions,” says Fugard.
On stage, this fun banter and play
turns to serious talk as watch the two navigate the realities of their
relationship – Oupa is estranged from his “stupid” son – and bonds with his
beloved grandson only through these secret meetings. The love between
grandfather and grandson, the two is palpable and fierce.
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Athol Fugard takes the role of
Oupa alongside Marviantos Baker as
Boba, the grandson, in The Shadow of the Hummingbird |
This is a cerebral work – and in
this last section Oupa quotes an allegory of Plato’s to the boy, and then goes
through War and Peace, holding up the
book as a standard to this young child, who, in his youth, doesn’t always get
all the allusions and references Oupa wants to impart. This is also as much a
play about that bond as with the final reckoning and slow acceptance of what’s
inevitable, after a long life.
But it’s the thread of
love that runs through the play alongside the search for shadows that intrigues
and I want to ask about the line of love in the story. In one notebook entry,
we hear: “Living through another Death
and once again I know that it is only through love that I will resurrect myself.”
The vicissitudes and habit of love continue to echo through the story, and then, towards the end, Oupa quotes from Tolstoy’s War and Peace: “What is ‘love’? he
thought. Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I
understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists. . .everything
that I understand, I understand only because I love.”
Fugard says, “Love is the only energy I’ve
ever used in writing – if I don’t love that individual on paper, it doesn’t
work. But it has presented wonderful challenges, for example in Boesman and Lena, loving Lena, a victim
of a dark and complex relationship is easy, and yet with Boesman, the
character, I also fell in love with him, although that was a severe challenge.
And, in writing, I have to leave negative emotions outside the door, hate,
anger, jealousy, it leaves nothing on the paper.”
For the future, Fugard continues to leave a trail on paper.
There’s a new play due to be performed in March next year, and he has an idea
for a second novel, perhaps to be titled, Dry
Remains, the title taken from the five stages of decay the body goes
through after death, from fresh to bloat, active decay, advanced decay and
finally dry remains. “Maybe we can look
at a life in the same way,” he muses. (begin poss cut: His first, novel, Tsotsi, was turned into a successful film
in 2005.
But for now, Fugard is treading the boards again – an acting
role he took on because, “I felt I could do a better job of Oupa than anyone
else. He’s performed the role from the US to South Africa, and describes the
first performance in the US as “like being in a holding cell of the gallows.
But Oupa posses me so completely on stage. In a strange sense I know exactly
what I’m doing.”
“Perhaps,” says Fourie, “Oupa is a version of you, what you
could have become?” She’s referring to the fact that Fugard may have become a
teacher.
As he says goodbye and steps through the wooden doors of the
guesthouse, I remember the other phrases he used early on in referring to
himself, and the mix between him and character he plays. Eyes laughing he’d
said, “It’s me in my various disguises – as an old schoolteacher or you can
also call me Helen Martins in drag!” in an allusion to the play, A Road to Mecca. Or, another line he
used to refer to himself, eyes, twinkling, taking delight in the strange twist
of words of juxtaposition of thought: “A man who loves in strange and crooked
ways.”
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