VICTORY

By Athol Fugard
Featuring Morlan Higgins, Tinashe Kajese & Lovensky Jean-Baptiste
Directed by Stephen Sachs
Running time:  55 minutes without intermission
The Fountain Theatre
Los Angeles
January 25 – March 9, 2008
http://www.fountaintheatre.com/

Tinashe Kajese and Lovensky Jean-Baptiste. Photo by Ed Krieger.

Victory at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood delivers a powerful dose of reality in slightly less than an hour.  It might be comforting to think of the events in Victory as happening in South Africa, half a world away, but the fact is, it is a story that rings true everywhere people are divided by economic, racial and social barriers.

With origins in Fugard’s own experience, it is the tale of a 75 year old widower who comes home to catch a pair of young burglars in the act of vandalizing his home of many years.  One of the youngsters, Vicky, Zimbabwe born actress Tinashe Kajese, is the daughter of the “colored woman” who worked for him for 22 years until her death and in fact had been his late wife’s closest friend and confidant. Vicky was born on the day of the official end of apartheid and was named Victoria to commemorate the event.   She has been enjoyed by Lionel, Morlan Higgins, the widower and retired teacher, who had encouraged her to be educated and grow up to the potential he thought the new South Africa would have for her.  When Vicky’s own mother died, Lionel continued to encourage her.  But Vicky, reeling from her mother’s death, living in cramped quarters with her grieving drunken father in the black township surrounding Lionels' comfortable village, falls in with a local tough, Freddie, Lovensky Jean Baptiste.  Freddie becomes her abusive protector and mentor in the ways of the underworld.  They are in Lionel’s living room because Vicki has told Freddie that the old widower keeps lots of money in the house.  Freddie’s dream of success is to get enough money to make it to Cape Town and join an “American gang.” 

Money is not in the drawer where she had been so sure it would be and Freddie proceeds to rage at her and trash the living room unmercifully.  Vickie, meanwhile, becomes ambivalent when she finds herself party to the destruction in the living room in which she happily spent much of her childhood.  She tries to bury herself in alcohol and pot.  With gun raised, Lionel walks into the scene of his treasured books torn from the shelves and drawers emptied upon the floor.  He is weary, but prepared, after two burglaries within the past year.  He recognizes both of the intruders but is more crushed by the sight of the cowering Vicky than by the threatening young tough, Freddie.

Lionel’s power lies less in the weapon than in the combination of being the master teacher who could command the attention of even the hostile student, and now of Freddie, and world weary.  Lionel has the fearlessness of someone who feels he has nothing else to lose.  Childless, his home has become his retreat in which to mourn his wife’s death.  He says, “it is my home that has died here tonight.”  His hopes for a united South Africa, twelve years after the unification, are ground down by the reality that surrounds him and has invaded his retreat for the third time in one year.  He sees Vicky (hitherto his hope for the future, maybe his symbolic hope for a unified South Africa) become a part of the angry oppressed and his own inevitable identification as a rich white man.  His paternal feelings for Vicky and his overwhelming sense of hopelessness combine to make him almost immune to the angry posturing of Freddie.

Victory is beautifully cast.  Morlan Higgins, who had played the arrogant old actor in Fugard’s Exits and Entrances, here captures the nuanced persona of the lonely, thoroughly disillusioned but caring widower.  Fugard has written a long soliloquy for Lionel to deliver to the sullen and angry Freddie lecturing him on learning and morality.  In lesser hands it could be unbelievable, but Higgins makes credible the power of the talented pedagogue.  Jean-Baptiste, on his part, conveys both attention and barely contained menacing fury while Lionel calmly and wearily delivers his lecture. Kajese virtually channels the soul of abandoned cowering child who has tasted the other world but is caught in the still oppressed life of her people.  Confronting Lionel she is ripped apart by the two worlds.

Set designer Travis Gale Lewis has captured the ordered life of a bookish man’s modest living room, obviously unchanged since his wife’s death.  Victory is as tight and complete as the room where the post-apartheid tragedy plays out.  This is a drama with story and character development leaving nothing that could be edited out, nor anything that need be added.

South Africa, though a glaring example, is by far not alone in racial and economic stratification.  One cannot watch Victory without cringing as we are not immune.  Victory is not an easy play to watch, nor is it easy to dismiss the cautionary tale.  But it is rewarding to see such a meaningful subject handled with the dexterity of a skilled surgeon.

Karen Weinstein    
karenaw@aol.com