Theater: Brothers the Blood Knot

Some playwrights storm to greatness, some proclaim their devotion to great virtue, and some achieve majesty by all the while seeming to seek after something smaller. Athol Fugard uses deceptively simple language and stories to explore vividly specific individuals, yet he makes every wrong step between them seem a natural metaphor for some larger collision of mankind. He knows that the domestic quarrel is the central tragedy of any age. It is this pained acuity about the buffeting nature of daily life, even more than his passionate denunciation of the social system in his native South Africa, that makes Fugard the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world.

His reputation rests chiefly on works of the past few years, A Lesson from Aloes (1978), Master Harold . . . and the Boys (1982) and The Road to Mecca (1984), and on two remarkable collaborations with actors, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island (both 1972). But Fugard, 53, found a mature voice almost from the moment he began, as the Yale Repertory Theater demonstrated last week in what it billed as a “25th anniversary” revival of his first international success, The Blood Knot. The play, which Fugard started writing in 1960 and performed in 1961, is the story of two mixed-race brothers who live together in a tumbledown shack on the outskirts of Fugard’s hometown, Port Elizabeth. One is light-skinned enough to pass for white, and for years he tried to do so; one is unmistakably, and bitterly, black.

Apartheid is the ineradicable stench in the air of their mean home, but their squabble for power within those walls is neither didactic nor particularly political. The wry, absurdist humor recalls Beckett, and the inchoate sense of menace parallels Pinter. The candor of the final confessional between the brothers is Fugard’s own. At Yale, as in the original, Fugard has directed and plays the half-derelict, fair-skinned brother. At the outset he seems fragile, ineffectual, on the border of madness. As the narrative focuses on the implications of his relative whiteness, he gathers strength and wisdom. Zakes Mokae, a 1982 Tony Award winner for Master Harold, engagingly re-creates his original performance as the darker, earthier, more mercurial and in the end more freely dreaming brother. The actors’ blood knot of decades of fraternal friendship has only ripened their truth onstage. W.A.H. III