The Island shows the backfiring of a system that wishes to rob John and Winston of their humanity by reducing them to beasts. Their white guard is unseen. Only his irritating noises and the sting of his blows are heard and he is reduced by Fugard to a character in a mean-spirited beast fable.John and Winston remain triumphantly human. Hodoshe exemplifies the prison guards whose humanity devolves into animal behavior, whereas the prisoners, Winston and John, create their humanity out of the very bestiality that has been forced on them. Their guards hail down beatings and wounds upon them; their human fastidiousness had been consciously taken from them when they were transported from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town and Robben Island (a journey of 770 kilometers, almost 480 miles) by vans, in which they were crammed and shackled to each other like animals, unable to refrain from urinating on one another as they traveled. And yet it is their care for one another’s wounds that brings forth and italicises John and Winston’s humanity. They forge drama, an art that is an affirmation of their humanity. And they fashion it from the basic artifacts of their prison life and from the basic resources of their imaginations. Using a few rusty nails and some string, John devises Antigone’s necklace; with a precious piece of chalk he has hidden away, he lays out on the cell floor the plot of the Antigone skit he has created. And in the course of the first scene, they reach out from the isolation of their island prison to friends and family in Port Elizabeth. They do so by using an empty prison tin cup imaginatively transformed into a telephone receiver and employing the power of fictive imagination, rhetoric, and gesture to create a two-sided conversation Through acting, in short, comes their survival
When Winston and John begin to rehearse their Antigone, Fugard reveals his master’s touch as a dramatist. Winston appears dressed in false wig, false breasts, and necklace, all wrought from the scraps the two prisoners have been able to find and squirrel away in their restricted, repressive, bare-essentials penal environment. Winston in his makeshift Antigone drag is ludicrous not only for John but for the audience, both of whom laugh freely at the grotesque, risible sight.
What Winston does not at this point in the play realize is that the story of Antigone and his own story are similar. He complains, “… this Antigone is a bloody … what do you call it … legend! A Greek one at that. Bloody thing never happened. Not even history! Look, brother, I got no time for bullshit. Fuck legends. Me? … I live my life here! I know why I’m here, and it’s history, not legends. I had my chat with a magistrate in Cradock and now I’m here. Your Antigone is a child’s play, man” .
When John suddenly learns that his case has been reviewed and that he will be freed in a matter of months, clock time—counting the months and weeks and days—returns to him, separating him from Winston, who has only the time without end of open-ended imprisonment.
For Winston, John’s forthcoming release serves to underline the pointlessness, the absurdity of his own lot. With that, his spontaneous joy for his friend is transformed into temporary jealousy and hatred that he releases through a new kind of playwriting meant at once as a self-defense and as a pointed attack on John. Whereas John and Winston’s earlier creative efforts had been devised for mutual entertainment or, as in the case of their imaginary telephone calls to Port Elizabeth, had permitted joint creativity, Winston now implies his divorce from John by creating a monologue, using the same subject matter as their telephone call, but taunting John with very graphic descriptions of relationships and events that will soon be but are not yet within his reach.
Acting out a dramatic monologue about John’s freedom creates heuristic experiences on several levels for Winston. He is able to give vent to his envy and purge it; he is able to punish John for his good fortune, and he is able to recognize his own absurdity. And as he comes to terms with that absurdity he also senses for the first time its power. After concluding his dramatic monologue, Winston sees an image of himself projected in old Harry, a seventy-year-old prisoner serving a life sentence and working in the quarries:
When you go to the quarry tomorrow, take a good look at old Harry… That’s happening to me John. I’ve forgotten why I’m here.
why I’m here. (71)
The picture of old Harry, like the opening stage picture of Winston and John with the sand and wheelbarrow, is a version of Camus’ picture of Sisyphus: “… Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.”
Yet Camus argues that Sisyphus, each time he descends from the heights to find his stone and his eternal torment, gains a special consciousness:
At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock…. [he] knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. (121)
Camus concludes his description of Sisyphus saying, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (123). Elsewhere in his essay, Camus addresses the question of freedom and absurdity. And what he says there is precisely what Fugard shows as Winston’s situation:
The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action. Now if the absurd cancels all my chances of eternal freedom, it restores and magnifies, on the other hand, my freedom of action. That privation of hope and future means an increase in man’s availability. (56–57)
In short, Winston looks with fright at old Harry who, like Camus’ Sisyphus, “loves stone,” but after his drama is over, Winston, as Fugard’s stage direction makes clear, reflects upon his fate and for the first time understands it: “Winston almost seems to bend under the weight of the life stretching ahead of him on the Island. For a few seconds he lives in silence with his reality, then slowly straightens up. He turns and looks at John. When he speaks again, it is the voice of a man who has come to terms with his fate, massively compassionate” (72). The result is the repeated exultation of brotherhood and a renewed commitment, “Nyana we Sizwe!”—brother of the land.
In the final scene of The Island, John and Winston present their Antigone play, but it is a presentation informed on the one hand by John’s and now Winston’s comprehension of the Antigone legend as an archetype of resistance, and on the other by their understanding of the Sisyphus legend in much the way that Camus understood it. And in his last scene, Fugard pulls out all his stops to create a coup de théâtre that is not an end in itself but a subversive means to enlightenment and political engagement. Brian Crow astutely writes, “[T]he ability to ‘act,’ to assume a new identity however temporarily, is here as in Sizwe Bansi a form of self-protection and a strategy for survival, allowing its exponent as well as its audience (the real one as well as the imagined prison audience) to achieve an understanding and a renewed commitment to struggle in spite of the horror of the situation.”
Plays like The Coat and The Island have made the world responsive to South Africa as they have italicized racial issues and racism.
Always a man of the theatre, Fugard turns stage acting into social action, stage performance into the performance of life. At bottom, all of his plays are about the power of art and more specifically the art of theatre to touch and diagnose the ills and problems humans and societies are heir to.
