Exits and Entrances

An autobiographical play by the grand old man of South African theatre is filled with Oedipal themes

★★★★

archive review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes

115270 original

By Thomas Hutchinson

Published 08 Aug 2007

100487 original

The narrator of Athol Fugard’s newest play is the idealistic ‘Playwright’ – a younger incarnation of the South African writer in all but name. His story is, at surface, a portrait of André Huguenet, the magisterial Afrikaans actor who bombastically dominated theatre in South Africa for a while (Olivier is a good comparison), famously manserved by the budding Fugard. When Morlan Higgins’s ageing Huguenet intrudes on the stage, haunted by his depreciating value in the theatre and swollen with self-love, he takes over. His sexuality is barely closeted, his theatricality innate. This is camp, in its best and most tragic sense – something Fugard excels at.

Fugard’s gloss, that this autobiographical two-hander is “a small play”, should not be taken too seriously. His most attended-to work, The Island, was similarly tiny in its dimensions, but remains an international headliner for South African drama, thirty years on. Likewise Exits and Entrances is a big play on a small scale, taking in such sundry topics as national independence, racial bigotry and those famous “little vipers,” the critics.

There is far more at stake than a memorial. As the young Fugard speaks of André via the patricide myths of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, so the mature playwright writes a covert valediction. This leaps up, sprightly, from the subtext, but it is the play’s biggest flaw that the zealous young playwright is not morally complex enough to carry the weight of self-scrutiny his mature self would have been braver to confront. Oedipus plays a big part here, but there is no mother to fuck, except perhaps the theatre, and its latent social politic.