Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act

by Athol Fugard

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 9 September 2021

Diane Page, this year's winner of the JMK Award for new directors, directs Athol Fugard's play from 1972 concerning an affair between a librarian Frieda Joubert (Scarlett Brookes) and a schoolteacher Errol Philander (Shaq Taylor) which falls foul of race relations legislation in apartheid South Africa because she is white and he is not.

The affair is of necessity clandestine, both because of the colour bar and because Errol has a wife and children. Consequently there are any number of tensions between the two, whose needs and passions conflict with fear, uncertainty and suspicion. As Errol and Frieda circle round a huge sunken pit in the centre of the stage, and only occasionally meet in it, they voice their anxieties; each tries to hold on to the joy of their relationship as it threatens to crumble under pressure. The whole stage floor is a matt black, and the circular pit has no sharp edges: the ground just slopes into the wall of the pit, making their circling round it look perilously like water swirlng round a drain. The pit is, of course, of no use as a hiding place when a police raid led by Detective Sergeant J du Prez (Richard Sutton) leads to their arrest and interrogation. Niall McKeever's set achieves both a sense of limbo and an underlying threat.

This is not a play in which love triumphs over adversity. The two lovers are brim full of insecurities deriving from their personalities as much as their political and social situations. Lyrical outbursts vie with the pain arising from the need for concealment, and though this need is obvious it also leads to feelings of guilt and inadequacy. The wider issues of desperate poverty in the townships and intense bigotry in the privileged white areas create plenty of opportunity for misunderstanding. In a mere seventy minutes a whole crushing environment is evoked through conversation, monologue, and the chilling impersonality of the official police report which is delivered with startling venom.

Scarlett Brookes and Shaq Taylor portray two people involved with one another yet always beset by wariness of their predicament and even mutual suspicion. Though neither disavows their relationship under pressure, there is little sense that it could ever survive the rigour of public exposure. It is a salutary reminder that more is at play in the world than struggles for personal fulfilment, and that social oppression can be frighteningly strong. 

This particular piece must be grounded in its historical context to make sense, and therefore the cast adopted fairly strong South African accents. Occasionally this made it hard to catch everything that was said, even in the intimate context of the Orange Tree, and it perhaps ran the risk of giving the audience the consolation of thinking 'that was then, that was there'. Unfortunately for many it is no consolation at all. The cruelties of South African apartheid may have disappeared, but racial prejudice and oppression are still rife; the play has not lost its force or relevance.