Remembering trauma: Fugard's The Train Driver

Abstract

Among Fugard's post-apartheid plays there is one that escapes the limitations of sentimental nostalgia evident in his recent turn inwards – The Train Driver (2010a). In this short play he develops a challenging sense of the country's dealings with the past by focusing upon the traumatic experience of a ‘track suicide’ remembered in morbidly excessive terms by the white driver, whose tragic story is told by a black gravedigger. The driver's hysteria, symptomatically the result of an identification with the death of the ‘nameless one’ whose burial place he seeks, is balanced by the sympathy and acceptance of the gravedigger who assists him in his quest. The dynamic between the two men, only fully graspable in performance, is at the centre of the play, which is set in a squatter camp cemetery, a liminal urban space emphasising the continuity of past wrongs in a country in which the conspicuous consumption and selective remembering of an elite masks everyday poverty and violence. What finally emerges is the continuing importance of theatre in conveying a recognition of individual suffering and loss that cannot and should not be ignored. The Train Driver may be said to engage in Adornian terms with an aesthetic of resistance to the present, denying redemptory longings.

Keywords:

• Athol Fugard
• The Train Driver
• South African theatre
• remembrance

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for financial support in researching this article.

Notes

1. Arguably The Fugard Theatre is hardly marginal: it is a small converted space situated on the edge of the historic District Six in Cape Town, and has had a ragged history since its opening in 2010, but now produces regular mainstream work.

2. In what follows I quote from the 2012 American edition of the play in the volume including Coming Home and Have You Seen Us? There are minor differences from the single-play text published by Junkets to coincide with the 2010 premiere.

3. In the Cape Town premiere several exchanges between the driver and the gravedigger were in Afrikaans (Miki Flockemann, personal communication, 28 March 2010).