A Lesson from Aloes | Fugard and his Characters

In the following excerpt, Weales points out that Fugard writes about what he knows. As a South African, glimpses of Fugard can be found in his character Piet in A Lesson from Aloes and the characters in the play “are necessarily South African.”

“A man’s scenery is other men,” Fugard wrote in November 1966 (Notebooks 141), contemplating the final image of the Piet-Gladys-Steve story that would become A Lesson from Aloes in 1978. The men and women on Fugard’s human landscape are necessarily South African. “I stand on a street in Port Elizabeth or Johannesburg or a small South African town, and in terms of the life that passes me I’ve mastered the code,” he told Mel Gussow, and he gives a sample portrait of a black woman carrying shopping bags. “If I stood on a corner in London or New York, I couldn’t put...

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