The Shadow of the Hummingbird. Athol Fugard

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      The Shadow of the Hummingbird

      Athol Fugard

      Prelude by Paula Fourie,

       with extracts from Athol Fugard’s unpublished notebooks

      The final version

      Human & Rousseau

      For Gavyn

      He lives a day.

      What is he? What is he not?

      Man is a dream of a shadow.

      Pindar: Pythian 8, 95-6.

      Foreword to the Play

      Athol Fugard

      One day in 2010, in the little study in Southern California where I used to write, I saw the shadow of a hummingbird on the wall opposite my desk. It didn’t take me long to realise that the bird in question was visiting and drinking deeply from the nectar feeder on the small patio outside. The particular angle of the sun that day, and for the following few days, had thrown the bird’s shadow on my wall. Although I could not see the feeder, nor the “real bird” from my armchair, I became fascinated with the dark smudge that hovered and shot away even as I focused on it. For about a week, I would sit there waiting for it. It was during that period of tense expectancy that I realised consciously for the first time that I had had a long fascination with shadows – both the word and the phenomenon. I had in fact ended a much earlier play – Exits and Entrances – with an entry from one of my very early notebooks in which I had explored this fascination. It is the very same entry that Paula has chosen as Oupa’s focus in the Prelude. That period, during which I sat riveted by the shadow on the wall, coincided with the realisation that it was time to reckon with, perhaps more nakedly and autobiographically than ever before, the only creative energy I have ever brought to my work – love. The immediate focus of my love was my grandson, Gavyn, then six years old. These disparate elements came together in the play I now call The Shadow of the Hummingbird. It is the second, and probably the last of my plays set in America.

      As this play is already in a sense based on my relationship with my grandson, Paula’s opening scene, which interlaces newly written monologues with material taken from three decades of notebooks, further confuses my life and my work. As Paula often points out – Oupa is not Athol Fugard, and yet he is. That is also part of the reason I decided to play the role myself. The Prelude made exploring the role of Oupa a very complex emotional experience. Paula’s selection from the unpublished notebooks is uncompromising. I never once attempted to censor her, even though this resulted in me exposing some very private moments in real time. I might have been more comfortable with a reader quietly encountering these entries on their own in a published text, rather than out of my own mouth in a situation where I was already exposing myself as an actor. This became possible because Oupa was, in effect, a fig leaf that hid my nakedness.

      The first version of this play was staged at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. The role of Boba (Gavyn) was played by two wonderful ten-year-old twins, Aidan and Dermot McMillan, who alternated in performances. This was a critically important stage in the journey of the play to the South African version, which I now consider the final one. Despite its enthusiastic reception in the USA, I had nonetheless realised that there were still areas in the play that could be opened up. Having Paula in the rehearsal room, this time not only as co-writer but also as co-director, offered us the opportunity to take our collaboration even further than before. In this, we had the benefit of our South African Boba, Marviantoz Baker, a young actor who invited us to age Boba so that his presence in the text was more substantial than before. This included Paula writing Boba’s story, “The Predicament of Percy the Dragon”, and also contributing one of her own disturbing notebook entries to the main portion of the play. In trying to capture exactly what we had on stage during the South African production, we have decided to publish this version of the play with perhaps more detailed stage directions than I would normally think necessary. The simple reason for this is that I wanted to define this particular staging as distinct from what had come before.

      This play is dedicated to Gavyn Fugard Scranton, now eleven years old.

      Foreword to the Prelude

      Paula Fourie

      For as long as I have known Athol, he has been tremendously excited about staging The Shadow of the Hummingbird, a short play which he wrote in 2010. However, he was also plagued by nagging doubts about the play’s length and felt that any production would have to be augmented in some way, or else combined with yet another piece. When the opportunity finally arose to stage the play, we began discussing this question in earnest. Remembering that he had once documented his fascination with shadows in a notebook entry from the 1960s, Athol finally asked me to compile an edited selection of his notebooks which he envisaged me reading to an audience before the start of the play. Through the generosity of the Lilly Library at Indiana University, where the majority of Athol’s unpublished notebooks are kept, I began working with those dating from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. In addition to this, I began reading the more recent notebooks in Athol’s possession.

      As I worked through this wealth of material, a portrait seemed to emerge from the fragments that Athol had written down over the past thirty years – that of a man who loves in strange and crooked ways. And I thought of Oupa, of how much of himself Athol had poured into this character. Suddenly, the idea of a disembodied voice presenting a portrait of the author to the audience was no longer the most interesting possibility. Instead, I saw a new opening scene in which Oupa encounters himself in the pages of Athol’s notebooks, coming face to face with the dark and powerful contradictions that run through them. Athol is not Oupa, and yet he is. The boundary between the fictional and the biographical in this play has been further blurred by my conflating of their pasts, giving the retired schoolteacher the experiences and thoughts that have formed the playwright. Barring minor edits on my side, mainly to remove references to people connected with Athol or to improve the dramatic flow of a particular passage, all the excerpts that I have chosen were taken directly from Athol’s notebooks. Throughout, I have retained the original dates on which they were written, or in cases where no precise date was given, have assigned an approximate date.

      Yet, as much as Athol and Oupa’s shared experiences blur the boundaries between them, the interlacing monologues in the Prelude, together with Oupa’s actions in this portion of the play, also serve to articulate their differences. I have given Oupa reactions to particular notebook entries that are very different from Athol’s own responses to the traces of his earlier self. I also know that this presented a particular acting challenge as Athol had to react to the pain and ecstasy of his past as someone other than himself, speaking from an entirely different vantage point. He also had to use someone else’s words. However, in the interests of writing an opening scene that was complementary to the main body of the play, I attempted to write material for Oupa that was stylistically attuned to Athol’s own writing, and that would also serve to further develop the character that he had created.

      In putting together this piece, I have tried to introduce some of the main themes of the play, much as the prelude introduces leitmotifs in a Wagnerian music drama. I have also tried to introduce Oupa to the audience, so that by the time Athol’s play starts, we already know something about him. Most importantly, I wanted the Prelude to work as an invitation into Oupa’s little room, enabling him to share with the audience a few private moments of reflection as they turn inward with him. After all, as the old man muses: “The final landscape is within.”

      Biographical Notes

      Athol Fugard

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