“There are no white people sleeping here,” Simon Hanabe (Leon Addison Brown) exclaims, “Only black people.” Athol Fugard, the playwright and director of The Train Driver plays with a notion of redemption and has the audience anticipating every word of the dialogue.
When I first stepped into the theater at Pershing Square Signature Center, the play’s setting amazed me. Knowing the story behind the play, I did not picture the set to be covered with sand. It looked like a combination of a landfill and a desert. The seats are also situated in a way where the audience can almost touch the grains of sand in front of us. “How is this setting related to the story?” I wondered to myself. Similar questions continued to cross my mind before the lights in the room were dimmed.
There are only two characters. Each representing a culture that is fated to collide with each other. Roelf Visagie (Ritchie Coster), a South African man who comes from a culture where the deceased have crosses on their labeled graves, and Simon Hanabe, another African man whose people steal wooden crosses from the graves with no name to make fire. Fugard juxtaposes the two characters to portray the disparities between the mindsets and imbalanced privileges of one African man from another; Apartheid had segregated the colored from the white men in the 1950s. Sleeping in a hut, Simon is wearing a thin set of clothes with multiple holes, whereas Roelf has a t-shirt, jacket and a pair of pants to keep him warm from the cold winters. There are multiple effects during this part of the play. The lights grow dimmer to reveal a shift from day to night and sounds of whirling winds can be heard. I shivered from the cold air, as if I was also in the frayed hut with Roelf and Simon.
This was not the only instance when my emotions changed along with the actors’. When Roelf cursed about the struggles he had to go through, I, too, wanted to curse with him. His voice grows louder when he recounts the conversations he had with his wife; his wife had told him that the accident was not his fault. His voice lowers to an almost inaudible volume when he expresses his regret for being behind the train when it ran over the woman and her two children. The audience can hear the frustration behind his accent even if his words were incomprehensible. Fugard is amplifying the differences between the human mind and conscience with the rise and fall of the actors’ voices. This enhances the captivating qualities of The Train Driver.
Sitting in the theater, I felt as if I was the one searching for a way to redeem myself. I had almost wanted to shout with Roelf, “I’m not looking for white people. It is black people I am looking for.” Throughout this play, Fugard utilizes the audience’s various senses so that we can experience the South African man’s journey to redemption and the colored African’s living condition. The encountering of the two different cultures reveals the conflicted feelings that many of Simon’s people may have felt during the Apartheid era. It also reveals the perspective of South African men who may have benefited from the Apartheid, but felt guilty about the privileges that were given to them. Whether Roelf was able to redeem himself in the end is questionable because the ending left many questions unanswered. However, this may represent the South African men’s unredeemable sense of guilt from the Apartheid era. The unresolved ending has convinced me to want to watch other versions of the same play; I may be able to find clues to answer the various questions.
Signature Theater
What questions were left unanswered by the ending?
Some questions that I cannot answer are: Does Roelf truly redeem himself in the end? Did Fugard intend to imply that “death” is the only solution, or was it his way to end the train driver’s search for the bodies, and ultimately, redemption? From the ending of the play, I am assuming that South African men never truly find redemption because Apartheid had left such a big impact on African men at the time.