Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act

Diane Page’s fierce, harsh, beautiful, tearfully raging production of Athol Fugard’s Statement After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act has taken me several days to even start to process. The story is pretty simple: an interracial couple have been conducting a brief (illegal) sexual relationship when they are shopped by a neighbour and arrested. That’s pretty much it. We don’t see it quite in that order, though, and after a first half that is, I think, one continuous duologue between the lovers, their world caves in, as, in a way, does the structure of the play, fragmenting into monologues, and reportage. The effect, I found, was overwhelming.

Page has pared everything down. It’s a pared-down text but she’s kept things as simple as possible. The stage is dark car-tyre gray and designer Niall McKeevor has sunk a Torus shape into the stage, which you can kind of see in the picture above. It means, effectively, the stage slopes down into a shallow pit. (It faintly reminded me of the drain in the middle of the same stage for 2014’s Pomona.) Early on I worried that this might be a mistake, pushing the actors to the sides, putting a void at the middle of the playing area, and restricting their ability to interact. But I soon stopped worrying. For one thing, it did restrict their movements and forced the actors into the shadows, and that helped a physical sense of the illicit, dangerous relationship between Frieda and Errol. This wasn’t just metaphorical; their embraces were discontinuous; they were unable fully to relax. There was also a powerful blankness to the set that refused to disclose where we were; I didn’t know the play and assumed they were outside, somewhere beyond the town, but eventually it becomes clear we’re in an office in a library. Everything feels provisional, hard won.

And then, this Torus pit started to take on different resonances; at times it felt like a pool, a ledge, a dungeon, a hiding place, a refuge. When the two characters sat on either side, they felt flung apart. As you enter the theatre, the pit is surrounded by metal barriers that are obligingly removed by stage management as the play begins; the barriers are, of course, to stop unwary audience members from falling in. And then in a glorious final moment there was a beautiful moving projection turning it into a kind of vortex, like a mathematical model of a black hole. This came at the moment of the most raging despair and I swear I felt like we were all being sucked into it. The play ended as it began, with a warning not to fall into the darkness.

The technical design for the show is great. As I said, it’s a very pared-down show, but the minimal elements used are stunningly effective. The semi-darkness of the opening, in which a lit match terrifyingly exposes the space, is suddenly transformed as a series of harsh floodlights snap on and the dimensions of the location and the theatre itself change utterly. The benign voyeurism of the first half gives way to a ferocious witnessing. Our eyelids propped open with matches, we watch the brutalisation, the lingering prurience of the South African policeman as he salaciously takes us through what he knows and what he found., the light pitilessly complicit.

And then there is this sound. At first I thought it was some industrial sound bleeding through from a nearby building. A bass note, rising and falling, a kind of mechanic groan that starts quietly, distant, and becomes more intrusive as it gets louder. It’s very uncomfortable, slightly nauseating, and it lends the action after the arrest a deep unease. It brought our bodies into the action of this play. (I mean, I hope this wasn’t bleed through from an adjacent building, because if so I’ve just favourably reviewed noise pollution.)

And bodies are key to this play and this production. The beginning of the play is extremely sensual. Shaq Taylor and Scarlett Brookes appear, half dressed, a sheen of sweat on them, and the early dialogue lingers on the sensual immediacy of a world sparked into vividness by love and desire. Theatre-in-the-round gives bodies a particularly sharp three-dimensionality and I really felt a sense of the weight and sensuous presence in the forbidden proximity of these two bodies. The two actors give an extraordinary intensity to the relationship. I said the neutrality of the stage means we don’t know exactly where we are, but emotionally we know exactly where we are. The fractious intimacy of the first scene is beautifully established and pulls us right in. And the journey these actors go through - in a crisp 75 minutes, let me say - is phenomenal. The play ends with two different kinds of despair, beautiful bits of writing by Fugard. Frieda realises that she’s lost her lover, that he is slipping away from her, his presence, his smell, his memory:

My hands still have the sweat of your body on them, but I’ll have to wash them … sometime. If I don’t, they will. Nothing can stop me losing that little bit of you. In every corner of being myself there is a little of you left and now I must start to lose it. I must be very still, because if I do anything, except think nothing, it will all start to happen. I won’t be able to stop it.

It’s sensual again, but even more intense because we’ve now closed in on her attempt to slow her own mind to a halt to prevent the erosion of his presence in her mind. And then he speaks and his final speech is raging eloquence of what it is to have your sense of self stripped away:

If they take away your legs you can’t walk
If they take away your arms you can’t work
If they take away your head you can’t think
I can walk
I can work
I can think
I can’t love
[…]
If they take away your soul you can’t go to Heaven
I can go to Heaven
I can’t love

I mean, dear God, this is moving and it builds further to a confrontation with God as Errol imagines everything taken from him and God finally taking the nothing that is left. And the two actors did these speeches with such power, and conviction and moral force that I couldn’t breathe.

It’s a superbly powerful play, a wonderful example of a political play that speaks to - and beyond - its immediate circumstances. It’s a play of elegant revelation and sinuous paradox. I’ve mentioned that the play begins with sensuous intimacy and ends by confronting the Heavens; that’s its trajectory, from the small and particular and local to an anger that is literally cosmic. I thought, early on, that perhaps Fugard was being a bit ‘literary’ in some of his language choices; the opening speech is arguably a little pleased with its lyricism and could use a little roughing over; there are some (to my mind) clumsy bits of foreshadowing (a story of two mating snakes being destroyed; a memory of a door to sunlight being closed). But actually these are probably moments that just gives the dialogue a bump to get it started, to allow it to grow in scale. Errol’s fascination with geography starts to bring to this intimate real-time scene of two people a sense of geological scale that opens up for us the mental landscape of the play. And the writing remains very elegant while somehow, simultaneously, becoming more and more raw. (This might be a moment to talk about the title. I sort of love the title of this play, because it’s a rather ugly title. The two prepositions - ‘after’ and ‘under’ - make the syntax of it rather tortuous, in a way that feels to me a faint echo of the contortions imposed on everyone under a truly oppressive regime.)

And the emotion of the relationship is beautifully and cleverly structured. The first half of the play is a single, basically realistic scene between Frieda and Errol - the second half is fragments that jump about in time. But Fugard’s brilliance is that the intimate scene with the two lovers together is a scene that drives them apart; there are simmering resentments, even in their intimacy, about Frieda’s white privilege and these tensions flare up; the fear of the scene makes them jumpy and mistrustful. It’s an intimate scene but not one in which one can relax. And then it’s the fragmented half of the play when their yearning for one another reaches out across the spaces between the fragments to express something hugely moving and beautiful. In other words, the scene in which they are together, they are apart; the scenes in which they are apart, they are together.

And this production honours this play. Page’s unflinching, unsentimental focus on the reality of the relationship and the true effect of apartheid on the dignity, emotions, and lives of these two people a fiery hour and a quarter that takes us into the heart of racist darkness. It’s a wonderful production from a director to watch.