TheatreguideLondon
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The TheatreguideLondon Review
The Train Driver
Hampstead Theatre
Autumn 2010
At a point before the beginning of Athol Fugard's new play a black
South African woman carrying a baby deliberately stepped in front of a
moving train. The play is about the driver of that train, traumatised
by being made an unwilling collaborator in her suicide.
Unfortunately the play tells us almost all it has to say in the first ten minutes - and it does tell
us, the man narrating his story and describing his feelings in an
almost unbroken monologue to the gravedigger at the Potters Field where
the woman is buried.
There's very little
forward movement in the play, except in the man's thinking, as he goes
from anger to the recognition that after death there's not much
difference between blacks and whites and to the realisation that the
woman's life must have been totally without hope and the discovery that
the more he empathises with her the less angry he is.
It's difficult to
believe that that's a major set of revelations, even for South Africa,
and so the psychological journey may not seem worth the effort.
In a programme
interview Fugard suggests that the play is a metaphor for the journey
of white South Africa in the recent past, from treating blacks as
invisible, to being angry at their calling attention to themselves, to
an understanding and acceptance of shared humanity.
But the play is too
fragile to carry such a heavy metaphoric load, and its power must lie
in our caring for the painful experience of the individual man. And you
may well think that he deserves more than some brotherhood-of-man
clichés for his efforts, especially when Fugard tacks on a darkly
ironic final plot twist that makes it all essentially pointless.
This should not
detract from the performance of Sean Taylor who, directed by the
playwright, does everything possible to make us believe in and care
about the driver's pain and his struggle to find a way to closure. Own
Sejake brings an understated warmth and dignity to the almost silent
role of the gravedigger.
Gerald Berkowitz
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