A Lesson from Aloes by Athol Fugard

First published: 1981

First produced: 1978, at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, South Africa

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: Autumn, 1963

Locale: Port Elizabeth, South Africa

Principal Characters:

• Piet Bezuidenhout, an Afrikaner in his mid-forties
• Gladys Bezuidenhout, his wife, the same age
• Steve Daniels, his friend, a “colored” man, the same age

The Play

Piet is in the backyard of his house with an aloe plant that he is trying to identify from a field book, for names are important to him. Other potted aloes are set across the yard. His wife sits quietly nearby. Piet and Gladys have invited Steve Daniels and his family for supper, and because both are apprehensive about the impending visit, the waiting time is passing slowly. Gladys, to relieve her tension, goes into the bedroom of the house (visible to the audience) to get her sun hat and while there hides her diary under the mattress.

She returns and continues to discuss her worries about the expected visitors. Piet, trying to reassure her, sets the table and compliments her festive idea of the brass candlesticks. It shortly comes out that these will be the first visitors they have had since Gladys has been back. Where she has been is not fully revealed until act 2.

Piet returns to identifying his aloe. Gladys expresses her dislike of the plants, but Piet sees them as part of his Afrikaner heritage. To him they are hardy South African natives, surviving long droughts for brief flowerings. “Is that the price of survival in this country? Thorns and bitterness,” asks Gladys, who exclaims that conversations with Piet have become “a catalog of South African disasters. Is there nothing gentle in your world?” The aloes “are turgid with violence, like everything else in the country,” she says, a quality she refuses to let affect her. Piet nervously changes the subject by saying it is time to dress for the party.

Scene 2 takes place in the bedroom. Piet knocks and enters after Gladys has protectively retrieved her diary from under the mattress and put it on the dressing table in front of her. In the seven months since she has been back, not one of their friends has been around to see them. Gladys wonders if she is the reason, but Piet says people are simply frightened and have crawled into their own shells. He even admits to being frightened, which surprises Gladys, who remembers Piet’s strong sense of purpose to life.

Gladys would be lost without this diary for keeping all of her woman’s secrets and reminds Piet that she did lose all of her old diaries once, when the police came and took them. This is a painful memory for Gladys, who believes that that invasion of her privacy amounted to rape. Piet is quite alarmed by Gladys’s agitated state, but she manages to control herself. Scene 3 takes place in the backyard. Gladys comes out dressed for the evening and quite calm in contrast to the violence and hysteria just displayed. Piet tells the story of how he got involved in the protest movement with Steve, before finally announcing the news that his colored friend is about to leave the country on an exit permit, which means he can never return. Gladys envies Steve, for she does not feel at home in Africa even though she was born there. She asks Piet, who had been greatly surprised by Steve’s news, if he knows who the informer was who got Steve imprisoned for breaking his Banning Order and whether the others think it was him. Piet admits that they do. And Steve? Piet thinks not, but as the act ends, their friends still have not arrived.

Act 2 occurs two hours later. Piet starts to clear the table, then hears Steve coming and quickly resets it. Steve arrives alone, making an excuse for the others. It is clear that this is a warm meeting of old friends, but a certain awkwardness is also apparent. They start to drink Steve’s wine, remembering the good times past as well as telling some new stories about each other.

Gladys joins them and tells Steve that he is fortunate to be leaving the country. Steve launches into some long remarks about how hard it is to be leaving, but he realizes that most of his dreams have soured and that he would have no future if he stayed, only oppression. Also, as Gladys had earlier, he realizes that Piet could never leave, though he cannot fully understand why.

This is their last chance to talk, and much passes between these old friends. Suddenly, Gladys asks Steve if he also suspects Piet of being the informer who sent him to jail. Reluctantly, Steve admits his doubts. After telling the story of his interrogation by the police, he asks Piet if it is true. Piet has no reply. Then Gladys says, “Of course he didn’t do it!”

She becomes increasingly violent and hysterical, and it is suddenly clear where Gladys has been as she makes her own painful explanation of how she tried to resist the doctor’s shock treatments by concentrating on a lovely picture of the English countryside hung in the antechamber to the treatment room. She then goes into the bedroom, and Piet explains to Steve about the diaries, the police raids, and Gladys’s eventual breakdown and stay in Fort England Clinic.

Steve is still puzzled about Piet’s silence on being asked if he was the informer. “If you could have believed it, there was no point in denying it.” Piet has no final quotation, even for old times’ sake, preferring this to be another occasion when he did not know what to say. Steve leaves, and Piet enters the bedroom where Gladys is sitting with her diary. She finally reveals that its pages are blank. She has been unable to start her life again and in fact feels she must return to the clinic in the morning. The play closes with Piet going into the backyard and sitting with his unidentified aloe before him.

Dramatic Devices

A Lesson from Aloes is a realistic play, though its plot demands a set that allows action to be played in the bedroom of the house while the backyard set remains in place and even occupied by other characters. All the devices common to realism, such as careful exposition, strict cause-and-effect motivation, a building of suspense, a sense of real time equal to stage time, natural dialogue, and convincing character interaction, are present. The play has been called Chekhovian, because of its similarities to plays written by Anton Chekhov, and while too much can be made of that description, it is accurate in the sense that everything the characters do is believable, and the overall effect is carefully achieved by a tapestry of accumulated detail instead of by a strictly linear plot, though at one level that is there, too. Nothing is ever obvious or superficial.

The first act presents a challenge that Fugard has met well in his writing, for on the surface, it is all waiting for Steve to arrive, while beneath the surface it is much more. The characters of Piet and Gladys are fleshed out, and other matters of exposition, such as the story of how Piet came to know Steve, are handled in a naturalistic manner. By the second act and Steve’s arrival, the ground has been skillfully prepared for the revelations and climaxes that follow.

For example, a masterful irony that is central to the play’s theme emerges from the fact that Steve is about to emigrate to England. He has always thought of Gladys as being English, so he asks her to tell him what this new place he is going to will be like. She says that she has visited it several times, always in a pleasant summertime, but her description for Steve is purposely delayed by other revelations until almost the end of the play. When she does finally describe England, it is a picture on the wall at the mental clinic called Fort England that she recalls, and it becomes clear that this is as close as she has ever been to the real England. The irony involved is completed when Gladys tells Piet that she knows she will have to return to the clinic in the morning. Like Steve, whose pending emigration to England she envies, she will escape to her England. South Africa has beaten her, at least for the present. Of the three, only Piet is left in his beloved Africa to care for his aloes. In less skillful hands, this ending might seem contrived and obvious, but Fugard makes it all quite natural and believable.

Critical Context

Athol Fugard’s first two full-length plays, No-Good Friday (pr. 1958, pb. 1977) and Nongogo (pr. 1959, pb. 1977), grew out of his experiences with Sophiatown, a multiracial area of Johannesburg that had just been rezoned as a white area when Fugard went to work as a clerk in the Native Commissioner’s Court, where passbook law offenders were tried. He made his first black friends while there and gained at first hand an understanding of how the bureaucratic maze of apartheid in his country functioned. These early plays are largely naturalistic, and while well received at the time, Fugard now openly considers them to be rather naïve apprenticeship pieces. They did, however, begin Fugard’s continuing exploration of the theme of human survival under extreme conditions.

The Blood Knot (pr. 1961, pb. 1963) is about the relationship between two brothers, one of whom can pass as white. This play established Fugard as an author of considerable promise. It is the first of many plays to be set in Port Elizabeth, a bleak home to the kind of people about whom Fugard writes. Hello and Goodbye (pr. 1965, pb. 1966), People Are Living There (pr. 1968, pb. 1969), and Boesman and Lena (pr., pb. 1969) all allow audiences to identify effectively with various other characters on the fringes of society.

Orestes: An Experiment in Theatre as Described in a Letter to an American Friend (pr. 1971, pb. 1978) was the first of several experiments inspired by Jerzy Grotowski’s work, in which plays were developed through improvisations with actors. Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (pr. 1972, pb. 1973), The Island (pr. 1973, pb. 1974), and Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (pr. 1972, pb. 1974) are stronger plays produced by the same process, which was itself carried on in defiance of the authorities who tried to stifle its performances. These plays are considerably nonrealistic when compared to both earlier and later works.

Dimetos (pr. 1975, pb. 1977) and the film The Guest (1977) belong to a less effective and more withdrawn period of Fugard’s work. Then, with the film Marigolds in August (1982) and the plays A Lesson from Aloes and “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys (pr., pb. 1982), Fugard returns to the Port Elizabeth setting with a matured and effectively realistic style containing strongly autobiographical overtones. The Road to Mecca (pr. 1984, pb. 1985) and A Place with the Pigs (pr. 1987, pb. 1989) continue to explore the theme of survival, but with subject matter that is not explicitly related to apartheid. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Fugard produced several new plays, including My Children! My Africa! (pr., pb. 1990), Playland (pr., pb. 1992), My Life (pr. 1994, pb. 1996), The Captain’s Tiger (pr., pb. 1997) and Sorrows and Rejoicings (pr., pb. 2001).

Sources for Further Study

Benson, Mary. Athol Fugard and Barry Simon: Bare-Stage, a Few Props, Great Theatre. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1999.

Fugard, Athol. Notebooks, 1960-1977. New York: Knopf, 1984.

Gray, Stephen, ed. Athol Fugard. London: Methuen, 1991.

Hauptfleisch, Temple. Athol Fugard: A Source Guide. Johannesburg: Donker, 1982.

King, Kimball, and Albert Ertheim. Athol Fugard: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1997.

Mshengu. “Political Theatre in South Africa and the Work of Athol Fugard.” Theatre Research International 7 (Autumn, 1982): 160-179.

Vandenbroucke, Russell. Truth the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985.

Walder, Dennis. Athol Fugard. New York: Twayne, 1985.