Boesman and Lena | Power, Self, and Other: the Absurd in Boesman and Lena
In this essay, Craig McLuckie compares Fugard's Boesman and Lena, with the writings of Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett as he discusses Boesman and Lena's search for their sense of self in a desperate and absurd world. McLuckie sees Fugard here as being ‘‘less rooted in the metaphysical’’ than either Beckett or Camus, as he places his characters in specific geographical and temporal locations—showing the reader that the absurd presented in his work is a human, not a universal, construction.
As the substantive body of criticism about Samuel Beckett's theatre attests, it is difficult not to impose a variety of contexts onto his work. Athol Fugard's theatre, alternatively, restricts and focuses one's perceptions so that it is difficult to see more than a single context. More simply put, an audience reads its world into Waiting for Godot, while it reads another world out of Boesman and Lena. The authors' respective uses of absurdity have led to this state of affairs.
Boesman and Lena is as explicit a...
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