The Road to Mecca by Athol Fugard

First published: 1985

First produced: 1984, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut

Type of plot: Problem play; psychological

Time of work: 1974

Locale: South Africa

Principal Characters:

• Miss Helen, an elderly woman
• Elsa Barlow, a teacher in her thirties
• Marius Byleveld, a pastor

The Play

The Road to Mecca takes place in the town of New Bethesda, in the heart of South Africa’s arid Karoo. The year is 1974, and the setting is the home of Miss Helen, an elderly widow whose work as an artist has led to her increasing estrangement from her neighbors. The play opens as Miss Helen’s young friend Elsa Barlow, a teacher from Cape Town, arrives unexpectedly for a visit. The older woman, her appearance unkempt and her small house in need of a thorough cleaning, is flustered by the surprise visit, and the two quarrel as Miss Helen fusses over her guest. Their initial unease dissipates, however, when Elsa delights her friend by playfully pretending to leave and arrive again.

Elsa’s visit to Miss Helen was prompted by a disturbing letter she has received from the older woman, but Miss Helen refuses to discuss the topic. Miss Helen also brushes off Elsa’s inquiry regarding burns on her hands and a burn mark on the window near one of her lamps. The pair talk instead about village gossip and about Elsa, who has angered her superiors by teaching her nonwhite students to question South Africa’s repressive society. She is still troubled by her encounter with a black woman and her child to whom she gave a ride during her drive to New Bethesda. Elsa has also broken off her affair with her boyfriend, who is, she now confesses, a married man.

The two also discuss Miss Helen’s work, an elaborate cement sculpture garden consisting of owls, camels, dozens of Wise Men, and other figures, all facing east—toward Mecca, as Miss Helen explains. She began the sculptures following her husband’s death fifteen years earlier, and they have become a vital source of creative expression as well as a source of conflict with her more conventional neighbors, who regard her work—and undeniable eccentricity—with suspicion. It was her sculptures that led to Miss Helen’s friendship with Elsa, who had stopped, intrigued, years earlier and offered the older woman the only praise and admiration her work had received. Miss Helen’s creative spirit is also on view inside her small house, where the walls are all hung with mirrors and bits of glass that catch and reflect the lamplight. Now, Miss Helen confides, she seems to have reached a barricade on her “road to Mecca,” and she fears an unnamed darkness that has entered her and caused the loss of her creative energy.

Miss Helen admits that she has no visitors besides Elsa; the local pastor, Marius Byleveld; and a young black woman who helps her with the house. Elsa is appalled to learn that Marius is making arrangements for Miss Helen to enter a home for the elderly and that he is expected that evening to obtain her signature on an admittance form. When Miss Helen insists that she can still live on her own, Elsa urges her to tell the pastor that she wants to stay put. Act 1 ends as Marius arrives.

Act 2 opens as Elsa retreats to a corner of the room to grade papers and listen as Miss Helen and Marius talk. When Marius’s gentle persuasions confuse Miss Helen, she pleads with Elsa for help, and the younger woman confronts the pastor, accusing him of bullying Miss Helen into entering the home. Elsa learns, to her dismay, that her friend has lied to her about the burns she noticed earlier; they are the result of a fire that would certainly have killed Miss Helen if a passing neighbor had not come to her rescue. Elsa angrily berates Miss Helen for betraying her trust, then, realizing that she has hurt her friend deeply, explains to Marius that the older woman’s independent spirit has been an inspiration and a challenge to her in her own life.

Marius insists that his only concern is for Miss Helen’s welfare, but Elsa accuses him—and the other townspeople—of resenting Miss Helen’s refusal to conform to their expectations. Marius acknowledges that at the heart of his concern is Miss Helen’s withdrawal from the church, and he condemns her statues as little more than idolatry. Miss Helen responds with a deeply felt explanation of what her work means to her, beginning with her own loss of faith many years before her husband’s death. Beneath its conventional surface, she tells him, her married life had been an empty lie, a fact brought home to her on the night of her husband’s death. Terrified that her own life was now effectively over as well, she had drawn courage from the light of a small candle and had resolved to fill her life with light, both figuratively through her work and literally through the candles and mirrors in her home. Her confusion over entering the home for the aged had been the result of her growing realization that her creative inspiration has left her—and with it, her ability to keep her own darkness at bay. As Miss Helen speaks, Elsa lights the dozens of candles throughout the room until it glows and sparkles from their flames.

As he listens to her, Marius at last realizes that Miss Helen has taken a spiritual path far different from his own, and he voices his own sense of loss at the distance that now separates them. It is clear from his words that Marius has long loved Miss Helen and that his concern for her welfare is genuine. After Marius leaves, Miss Helen blows out her candles one by one. Elsa admits that she is jealous of the depth of feeling between Miss Helen and Marius, and she refers again to the woman and child she met on the road. She confesses that she has recently had an abortion and feels now that she has put an end to the first real consequence her life has had. She begins to cry, and Miss Helen comforts her.

As the two make plans to ensure that Miss Helen will, indeed, be able to manage on her own, the older woman admits that she knows now that her work as an artist has come to an end and she must face the darkness in herself that she had so feared. It will be, she says, the last phase of her apprenticeship. The play ends as the two women reaffirm their friendship and trust in each other.

Dramatic Devices

The Road to Mecca is a play in which the characters embody three quite different responses to the inner need for expression and meaning in life. Miss Helen has listened fearlessly to the call of her artistic creativity and followed it despite societal pressure. Elsa, too, longs for an expressive inner life and draws strength and encouragement from her friend’s example, but she remains frightened by the thought of trusting herself completely to that path. For Marius, social convention and a lifetime of disappointed hopes have taken their toll, leaving him unable to break free of his moorings and join the woman he loves on her journey. As the play unfolds, the conversations and conflicts among the three characters serve to explicate their positions and the effects their choices have had on their relationships and their lives.

The play’s plot turns on whether Miss Helen will agree to enter the home for the aged, giving in, in effect, to her mounting fears that her creativity has left her. The home becomes a symbol of all the restrictions on her independence that Miss Helen has battled for so many years, and her eventual refusal to sign the admittance form represents her recognition that her inner journey has simply taken a new turn.

Dominating the play’s atmosphere is a sense of the vast Karoo desert, which surrounds the small village of New Bethesda, a landscape that can be seen as symbolic of the barrenness of the soul and spirit in an unexamined or unfulfilled inner life. Miss Helen’s sculptures stand in the mind’s eye amid the desolation like flowers sprung miraculously from the arid land—a vivid symbol of the play’s suggestion that art is indeed a miracle and one well worth the sacrifices it may demand.

A central image in the play is the contrast between light and darkness, with light representing life, hope, and creativity and darkness suggesting inward emptiness and death. Miss Helen’s life has been lived first in the darkness of a loveless marriage and then in the light of her own creativity. Now a new darkness looms on the horizon as she enters old age and draws nearer to death, and her final acceptance of its approach represents her realization that in trusting completely her inner sense of direction, she has found the key to overcoming not the darkness itself but her fear of it. For Marius, left bereft years earlier by the death of the wife he loved, Miss Helen has become a source of light, and his loss of her to her “road to Mecca” leaves him in darkness. Elsa is floundering in darkness as the play opens but has begun, by its close, to move into the light by at last facing the decisions and mistakes she has made. The climactic scenes in which Elsa lights the lamps and candles as Miss Helen explains the importance of her work makes the image concrete: The flames mirror the import of Miss Helen’s words.

Critical Context

Although The Road to Mecca is less overtly concerned with the turbulent history of South Africa than most of Fugard’s earlier plays, it is no less personal than his autobiographical drama “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys (pr., pb. 1982). The road of the artist and the personal sacrifices it entails are well known to the playwright, who has had many of his plays banned in his own country. Miss Helen’s refusal to bend to society’s wishes or to abandon work that her neighbors find unsettling has direct parallels in Fugard’s own life, for his wrenching dramatic attacks on apartheid have angered many of his fellow countrymen.

If The Road to Mecca is allegorically about Fugard’s life, it is also specifically about the life of the woman who inspired it: Helen Martins, an eccentric woman whose unusual sculptures intrigued Fugard during a visit to New Bethesda. The circumstances of the play, if not the precise incidents that make up its plot, were suggested by Martins’s life and work and by her friendship with a young social worker. As Fugard explains in “A Note on Miss Helen,” his foreword to the play,

as a writer I couldn’t help responding to this very eccentric character in this strange little community—a community which was in a sense hostile to her life and her work because it was a deviation from what the townspeople considered to be the way a life should be lived. . . .

Viewed from a broader perspective, however, The Road to Mecca can be placed within the context of Fugard’s earlier, more directly political works. Although the examinations of apartheid seen in such plays as The Blood Knot (pr. 1961, pb. 1963), Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (pr., pb. 1972), and “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys are not present here, the play’s story of the deep human need for freedom and the dangers to the spirit when that need is ignored or crushed certainly is a commentary on South Africa’s repressive social system. It is a mark of Fugard’s skill as a playwright that he has found in the life of a “very eccentric character” both a personal artistic statement and a moving testament to the essential, transforming power of freedom.

Sources for Further Study

Fugard, Athol. “A Note on Miss Helen.” In The Road to Mecca. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985.

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.

Henry, W. A. “The Road to Mecca.” Time, June 15, 1987, 70.

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

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.