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The latest revival at small size but big-hitting fringe venue the Finborough brings together two theatrical heavyweights: famed South African writer Athol Fugard and acclaimed actress Janet Suzman, here wearing her directorial shoes for a new staging of Fugard’s award-winning 1978 play ‘A Lesson from Aloes’.
Premiering in Johannesburg – and directed by Fugard – at the height of the racist apartheid regime, ‘A Lesson from Aloes’ created a political firestorm upon its debut and was nearly banned by the authorities. It would later make its UK debut at the National Theatre in 1984 before transferring to Broadway. How does it stand up, 35 years later, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of democratic elections in South Africa?
The Finborough’s small stage space actually suits the intensity of the play, which uses a handful of characters to sketch a broader landscape of division and distrust in 1960s South Africa. Anti-apartheid Afrikaner Piet and his wife Gladys are nervously awaiting the arrival of Piet’s mixed-race friend, Steve, who’s recently been released from prison.
They’ve not seen anyone for months: Fugard’s heightened dialogue and the image of an elderly couple stranded, paranoid and damaged, in an isolated house, lends the feel of a dystopian allegory to a play dismally rooted in reality. Gladys has been left psychologically destroyed by a previous raid by a brutal regime determined to crack down on any dissidence.
But stripped of the powerful, confronting immediacy of its initial debut, the first half of ‘A Lesson of Aloes’ is too long, with quote-heavy speeches stretching out a story that only kicks into gear later. The metaphorical role of the titular plant that Piet obsessively collects – a succulent that grows in even the harshest conditions – is undeniably a potent one but it’s heavily handled here.
It’s after the interval, when Steve arrives, that Suzman’s production really fires up. The distractingly loud banging of the door on designer Norman Coates’s clever but cluttered-feeling set subsides. David Rubin’s immediately energising presence as an engaging, fierce Steve also seems to cause Dawid Minnaar and Janine Ulfane, as Piet and Gladys, to up their game performance-wise.
Everything flows much better, and grippingly, as the three characters jab at each other with distrust and wounded affection. The fear of mutual betrayal that hovers over them finally boils over into Steve’s anger at how, even as comrades in resistance, the double standard of skin colour has seen him suffer more.
It’s in this final, bruisingly intimate portrait of lives devastated by oppression and struggle – including the fight against a creeping sense of futility – that still powers ‘A Lesson from Aloes’ today.