Peter Brook's 'Suit' and Athold Fugard's 'Train Driver'

Theatergoers may not instantly recollect the name and contributions of Peter Brook, but he stands at the top of influential theater directors of the 20th century and has surely been the most interesting on the modern English-speaking stage. [For a review of The Tightrope, a documentary about him, click here.] At the age of 89, Sir Peter Brook is still researching theater and making new art, and his former works are still being revived — including The Suit, which inconceivably and inexplicably was seen by scant few Philadelphians during its run of 11 performances at the Prince. Whether due to the ineptitude of the Prince's marketing department or the lassitude of Philadelphia audiences, the show was abysmally attended. On a Friday night, I estimated 50 people in the 446-seat Prince house.

In contrast, in 1985, when I raptly attended Peter Brook’s astonishing nine-hour adaptation of the classic Indian epic the Mahabharata at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, every one of the 834 seats was hungrily occupied; and such was the case reportedly for the three-month run. Gloriously operatic in style and scope, the Mahabharata was performed by an international polyglot company of 30. (A sizeable segment of the six-hour film version of the Mahabharata can be seen here.)

The Suit is a chamber piece threaded with eclectic music. It was performed at the Prince by seven South African and American actors and musicians, including a young African-American man from nearby New Jersey. Lightly and endearingly staged by the tender hand of Peter Brook, the production used little more than four colorful straight-backed chairs.

The Suit is set in a South African township in the 1950s. It tells a simple and sad story of a marriage in which a kind, decent, and conscientious black man catches his pretty, young, unconfident, and housebound wife cheating. The fleeing lover leaves behind his suit. As punishment, the husband demands that the wife cordially continue to relate to the garment as if it were an honored guest, including setting a place for The Suit at dinner and feeding it. The humiliation attendant upon this obsessive charade so diminishes the wife that she takes her own life.

The play reveals a pernicious bequest of apartheid: that oppressed persons are programmed to turn around and oppress others of lesser status and lesser power. The once-loving husband cannot cease degrading his wife, regardless of his own good sense or the protests of his best friend. His nonphysical way of abuse is to put a pleasant domestic face on relentless psychological torture. And yet, with the loss of his wife, the black husband recognizes himself in the web of apartheid. And the future opens.

The truth of apartheid

In Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver, onstage at the Lantern Theater through May 4, we hear of the suicide of another black South African woman. Based on a true story, the play tells us that the woman stepped in front of an oncoming train, with her baby on her back, and at the last moment before being pulverized made eye contact with the man driving the train. The motivating energy of the play is the white South African train driver’s aftermath of suffering. Feeling haunted and responsible, the driver has hunted his way to a derelict cemetery, where the remains of woman and baby would have been namelessly buried. The only other character is the black gravedigger, who receives the train driver and his burden of anguish.

Here, in the pitiful cemetery and in the miserable metal hut of the gravedigger, the driver lives for three days and three nights, in search of expiation. The revelatory scene occurs during the middle of the second night, when the white man goes into the cemetery alone to speak to the woman. As evidenced by the lines of the play, but unfortunately not embodied in the Lantern production, this is a love scene on a spiritual level; evolving into a symbolic union between a man and a woman who became betrothed when their eyes locked at the moment of her death. Moreover, their union is destined: the meeting and joining of white and black in South Africa!

Although the train driver has a white wife and children at home, on the next morning he unveils for the gravedigger his feelings of intimacy with the black woman who he says was “under” him when the train hit her. He confesses never ever to have felt closer to anyone. The gravedigger jokingly asks if the driver now wants to marry her, and although the driver protests, he is already as if wedded.

During the third night, the train driver again leaves the gravedigger’s corrugated hut, and the stage lights go down. When the lights come up, we learn from the gravedigger that black thugs killed the train driver and buried him. We may surmise his body now lies with the black woman and her baby. Underground, they are a family. They have offered their lives; they have been planted together in the most meager and desolate of South African soil. From this meagerness, from their naked gesture of having looked directly, shamelessly, and genuinely into each other’s eyes, integration may grow.

The Lantern production interprets the play defensively and argumentatively, and not poetically. In so doing the production misses the train driver’s discovery that he is capable of looking inward, as gleaned from the black woman looking into him. The production misses the opportunity for depicting transcendence, misses the love. And yet, because of the strength of the playwriting of Athol Fugard, we still may see that apartheid is ending. Through the sacrifices of the black woman with baby and the white man, the future is opening.