Police state and military junta: contexts and conflicts

Since readers of this article will likely know one better than the other, affinities and differences between Fugard's and Radrigán's contexts require clarification. Fugard (b. 1932) began making plays in collaboration with black performers in the 1950s but he wrote Boesman and Lena in the mid-1960s, after the architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, had outlawed such collaboration, and after Verwoerd's assassination allowed the next prime minister, B. J. Vorster, to deepen racial discrimination against the black majority and develop policy to favour Afrikaner capitalists, while reinforcing the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) that he had created as minister of police.Footnote ¹¹ As a white man with maternal Afrikaner ancestry, Fugard had kin in the volk and so escaped the detention and torture that the police inflicted on alleged communists and on black dissidents of all persuasions, but his plays nonetheless provoked the government. His passport was revoked and BOSS spied on him and his black partners, the Serpent Players,Footnote ¹² whose collectively authored play The Coat (1966) and the later collaborations, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973), depicted conflicts between black people and apartheid law. Although censorship prohibited naming laws or leaders, performers managed to insert politics into these plays. Actor John Kani, creating the roles of township photographer Styles and good Samaritan Buntu in Sizwe Bansi, for example, showed the former mocking his white boss at Ford Motors and the latter illegally switching ID photographs to help Sizwe, a stranger about to be evicted from the city, pass as another man, now dead, who had a work permit. During the US tour in 1974, Kani pointed to Chile on a map of the world, remarking that President Nixon had ‘big trouble there’, implying that repression in the name of anti-communism resonated from the United States to Chile and South Africa.Footnote ¹³

While Sizwe Bansi and The Island emerged in the 1970s, when renewed anti-apartheid activism prompted overtly political theatre, Boesman and Lena was written between 1967 and 1969 in a period of deep repression.Footnote ¹⁴ The play portrays a migrant couple and an unknown interloper deprived by apartheid of work and shelter, but it avoided emphatic protest. Although mild enough to transfer from Rhodes University to the state-funded Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB), the play was not apolitical. The vagrants that Fugard saw on the mudflats near Swartkops outside his home town of Port Elizabeth were not just drunks with faces ‘shriveled and distorted by dissipation, resentment, regrets’,Footnote ¹⁵ but part of a large class of people deliberately displaced by apartheid. The government planned the ‘enforced vagabondage’ (Billington's phrase) of thousands and eventually millions by means of the Group Areas Acts, evicting Coloureds, Indians, and blacks allegedly squatting on white-owned land, even if they had lived there for generations. These mass ‘removals’ not only deprived individuals of their livelihood, they also destroyed communities that had been vibrant and sustaining even under duress. The sheer cost, as well as the violence, of ‘removing’ three million people from their homes between 1960 and the 1980s, when the policy was dropped, put the institutionalized inhumanity of apartheid in a unique class.Footnote ¹⁶ Despite Fugard's ‘nagging doubts’ about his inexplicit treatment, his characters’ embodiment of enforced vagabondage captured this phenomenon, and still indicts the poverty affecting millions in South Africa today.Footnote ¹⁷

Five years younger than Fugard, Radrigán (b. 1937) began writing later in part because he had no formal education, having learnt to read and write from his mother at a time when only three out of ten Chilean children received more than primary schooling.Footnote ¹⁸ The son of an itinerant repairman who abandoned his family in Bolivia, Radrigán began working at age twelve in 1949, after the Radical Party suppressed Communists and other progressives that had helped it into power. As a textile worker he served as union president during the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende,Footnote ¹⁹ who won the election in 1970 despite US subsidy of the conservative opposition and CIA attempts to assassinate him and his allies.Footnote ²⁰ Radrigán's profile, a self-educated worker building organizations to lift the majority out of poverty, was reflected in the plurality of voters that supported Allende's programme of education, housing and health care for all. After the 1973 military coup, his tactical retreat from politics enabled his survival and that of comrades who knew that others had fallen prey to the state-sponsored terror that followed the coup, even before the junta established an official Directory of National Intelligence (DINA) to rationalize assaults against alleged guerrilla plots.Footnote ²¹ Having published stories in the 1960s, Radrigán began to write plays only after Pinochet banned opposition parties, and after factory owners responded to the junta's labour deregulation with the mass lay-off known in Chile as la gran cesantía, which eliminated his job and many others.Footnote ²² His first play, Testimonio de las muertes de Sabina (Testimony on the Deaths of Sabina), drew on his experience on the street to show street vendors ‘who lost their stall as a result of nightmarish city bureaucracy’.Footnote ²³ Although the play focused on one woman and her partner, the title alludes to the many documented deaths and as yet uncounted ‘disappearances’ at the hands of military agents, and to the dangers of bearing witness.Footnote ²⁴ Written the same year as the junta's Plan Laboral and other assaults on work in the name of free markets drafted by University of Chicago graduate Sergio de Castro (Pinochet's primary economic adviser), the play testified to the hardship caused by the sudden elimination of industrial jobs and social welfare.Footnote ²⁵ While this and Radrigán's later plays up to Hechos consumados do not address the engineers of la gran cesantía directly, they chart the consequences of the junta's economic violence and plebeian attempts to survive dispossession.

Dispossession and reclamation: staging vagabond economies

Fugard's and Radrigán's exposure of tyranny may be oblique but is nonetheless telling. To be sure, Fugard's intimate dramas differ from the political theatre sponsored by unions and socialists in 1930s South Africa and from his own protest plays in the 1970s,Footnote ²⁶ while Radrigán's representation of dispossessed people in their own words differs from the ‘social pedagogy’ of leftists like Acevedo Hernandez, who wrote plays about the poor from 1918 to the 1950s.Footnote ²⁷ When censorship curtailed overt protest in the 1970s, especially from student militants, their indirect critique prevailed. In South Africa, the Peoples Educational Theatre and similar Black Consciousness groups were charged with treason, while in Chile direct dramatic attacks on the junta faced reprisals:Footnote ²⁸Lo crudo, lo cocido y lo podrido (The Raw, the Cooked, and the Rotten) (1979) by Marco Antonio de la Parra and Teatro Imagen, which mocked Pinochet in the grotesque figure of a senator, was banned by the Catholic University. Nonetheless, censorship did not eliminate theatre that critiqued la gran cesantía; the oblique but realist treatment of women surviving their partners’ disappearances in Tres Marías y una Rosa (1979) set the standard that Radrigán would match in Hechos consumados.Footnote ²⁹ As María de la Luz Hurtado and Juan Andrés Piña argue in their introduction to Radrigán's works, even if a ‘distinct antagonist’ (antagonista nítido) rarely appears, the ‘invisible presence’ of society's powerful sectors (sectores dominantes) nonetheless creates a ‘constant tension’ between the wretchedness of the dispossessed and their aspiration to full lives.Footnote ³⁰ The tension between solidarity and alienation also animates the multiple meanings of Radrigán's title. ‘Accomplished fact(s)’ is the dictionary translation of Hechos consumados, but ‘done deal’ better captures the plebeian voice of its characters. Further, hechos denote not just facts but also products and, applied to people, workers dispossessed of the product of their labour. Consumado (‘consummated’) also suggests consumido, meaning ‘consumed’ or ‘used up’. The title for Ana Puga and Monica Núñez-Parra's translation, Finished from the Start, highlights the overwhelming social forces arrayed against characters for whom, as Emilio (the play's raisonneur) puts it, ‘the only sure thing was that we had to die’,Footnote ³¹ but the laconic ‘done deal’ more succinctly captures the sense of the play. While Hechos consumados and Boesman and Lena do not end in death, a character's death in each play sets in relief the struggle for survival of those who remain.

This comparison suggests significant overlap between Fugard's representation of ‘surplus people’ and Radrigán's of desposeidos (‘dispossessed’). Even if the playwrights do not use the aforementioned terms, the word ‘rubbish’ and its equivalents stress the existential as well as economic alienation experienced by Boesman and Lena on the one hand, and Maria, Emilio and Miguel on the other. Boesman links economic dispossession and dehumanization: ‘Into gaol, out of your job. One push and it's pieces . . . We're whiteman's rubbish’.Footnote ³² Similarly, Emilio says of himself and fellow dispossessed, ‘somos hechos consumados’ (‘we're a done deal’); the shift from the personal somos to the impersonalized hechos highlights the treatment of people as objects by a nameless boss who might say, ‘Aqui están. Vayan pa'alla’ (‘Here you are. Go over there’).Footnote ³³ The representation of exploitation in this terse language, as well as in embodied exhaustion, shows characters that once had possessions, and indeed self-possession, but have been stripped of the dignity conferred by steady labour and secure habitation by unseen agents of state and economic power.

In the opening moments of Boesman and Lena a man and then a woman enter an empty space that appears initially as undefined as the road in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a play that Fugard admired.Footnote ³⁴ The stage directions describe the migrants as a couple in their fifties who have been worn down not merely by drink but also by cycles of settlement and eviction, often, as Lena confirms, in places from which they had previously been ejected. In the CAPAB production in 1971, Fugard played Boesman and Yvonne Bryceland (1925–92) Lena to comply with the Separate Amenities Act's requirement that state-funded venues use segregated casts, but they played their characters as people toughened and also exposed by forced vagabondage with a fierce and unsentimental intensity that eschewed racial mimicry while highlighting the institutionalized racism captured in the text. Lena's reference to the bulldozer and its white driver that demolished their shack in Korsten, a Coloured settlement close to Port Elizabeth, links their displacement to apartheid reality, as do the characters’ worn clothing whose previous use – ‘sports club blazer’ now faded and torn and a ‘sad dress’ – suggest garments discarded by country club whites, and their baggage – including corrugated iron and a shovel for building a pondok or shanty – is likewise scavenged. Lena's opening, ‘Mud! Swartkops!’ identifies the place as the mudflats on the coast near Fugard's home, which was also the location for Ross Devenish's 1973 film.Footnote ³⁵ As the play unfolds, Lena struggles to piece together their life journey, with flashes of barely remembered happiness – a steady job and a child – which have become harder to recall as they have been pushed farther away from home and livelihood and deeper into drink and abuse, especially by Boesman against Lena. While Lena's list of places from which they have been evicted marks the vagabondage enforced by government policy, Boesman's abuse implies that that policy is not completely to blame for his behaviour.

The stage directions of Hechos consumados are more abstract but the setting still suggests local specifics. The American translation begins, ‘An empty lot on the outskirts of the city . . . On one side – left – can be seen the figure of a sleeping person (MARTA), covered by an old overcoat. By her side, sitting on a rock, a man heats water over a small fire’.Footnote ³⁶ Filling in the picture with sacks of potatoes and flour and an improvised clothesline, this scene may suggest an established, if informal, dwelling occupied by a couple, until the man ‘grows tense, as if he had heard something in the vicinity’, implying that this squat may be just as vulnerable as Boesman's pondok.Footnote ³⁷ Marta's opening lines refer to someone else: ‘And Mario?’ Her questions – ‘What happened?’ and ‘I'm askin’ who you are, where you from?’ – indicate that Emilio is a stranger who has rescued her from the river and hung her clothes out to dry, and is now boiling water for tea.Footnote ³⁸ Locals might place this vacant lot in the cinturón de miseria (misery belt) on the peripheries of Santiago, Chile's capital, where unevenly formalized poblaciones (settlements) by 1970 housed half a million people out of a city of about three million, the result of social and economic crises having an impact on the poor even before la gran cesantía.Footnote ³⁹ This context is not explicitly articulated but, even if Emilio has some food, both are essentially destitute. When Marta asks Emilio if he has work, he responds, ‘you think even if there was work [pega is used here instead of standard trabajo] someone would give it to me looking like this’, implying that he has not worked formally for some time.Footnote ⁴⁰

Radrigán's text does not describe clothing in detail, but the film by Luis Vera uses clothing to suggest different degrees of dispossession. Shot in 1984, three years after the stage premiere and after a global economic crisis and arbitrary acts of state violence had provoked public protest that broke the paralysis of earlier years, it was one of several films criticizing the regime.Footnote ⁴¹ In the film, Loreto Valenzuela's Marta wears worn but intact clothing, a knee-length skirt, a T-shirt and scruffy sandals, while Nelson Brodt (who directed the 1981 premiere at the Teatro Popular El TelonFootnote ⁴² and played Emilio in both stage and screen versions) wore a shabby suit, albeit covered by an apparently newer coat and hat. The dialogue reveals that Emilio had been a tejedor (textile worker), a history he shares with the third character, Miguel, whose recent lay-off has left him in the precarious position of nightwatchman at the vacant lot. Miguel is bitter about the loss of his industrial job and about his wife, who turned shrewish when she became ill, but he does not draw broader conclusions about the neo-liberal policy that led to the collapse of the textile industry and to his own plight.Footnote ⁴³ Instead he insists on individual property rights, ‘I got my home and my job and I don't go going on other people's property’ as he reminds Marta and Emilio that ‘he was sent’ (me mandaron) to tell them that ‘this is private property’.Footnote ⁴⁴ By enforcing the boundaries around private property and the individual and disdaining the overtures of solidarity, Miguel resembles a reduced version of bourgeois economic man in neo-liberal mould, striving for himself and disdainful of the alleged moral failings of the those left behind.Footnote ⁴⁵ His aspirations are cast in doubt by his evident anxiety; the plebeian language that he shares with the squatters indicates how close he could be to dispossession.Footnote ⁴⁶

In contrast to Miguel's bourgeois attitude, reflected in his neat clothes and defence of private property not his own, Emilio's absurdist language – ‘The truth is we didn't know that the world was private property; that's why we were born’Footnote ⁴⁷ – fits the vaguely intellectual attire that Brodt wears in the film, but his philosophizing puts Miguel on the defensive. Emilio's comments about the futility of existence, as much as his refusal to budge, ultimately provoke the nightwatchman to beat him to death. Marta, in contrast, is also homeless and jobless but claims at the beginning to ‘like life’ (‘me gusta la vi[d]a’).Footnote ⁴⁸ Like Lena, she keeps talking optimistically about tidying up as if words might beautify an otherwise desolate place. After Emilio's death, Marta and Miguel seem close to despair, but his declaration, ‘No soy [u]na basura’ (‘I'm not a piece of trash’)Footnote ⁴⁹ (in language that echoes Boesman's ‘rubbish’), and Marta's final lines, ‘What the hell did they do to us?’Footnote ⁵⁰ suggest the potential of solidarity against ‘them’.

Solidarity as kinship: performing class against race

Although Hechos consumados ends with alienation, it highlights the power of solidarity, which permeates both plays despite the characters’ dispossession. Fugard's directions cast Boesman and Lena as ‘Coloured’ and thus mark the racial dimension of their oppression by white bosses as well as the apartheid state. This branding in turn provokes Boesman's racial slurs against those weaker than him; when the old man approaches their fire, Boesman calls him kaffer (like ‘nigger’ in common use by racists in the 1960s) and tries to deter Lena from offering shelter by withholding her share of their rotgut. While ‘Coloureds’ may have had access to slightly better employment than those classified ‘Bantu’, Boesman's dissipation testifies to the dubious effect of this privilege and the fact that these workers on white farms were often paid in leftover wine.Footnote ⁵¹ Despite their alcohol-dependency, Lena expresses solidarity toward the man she calls Outa. Further Bryceland's performance invited compassion from the audience not only for Outa but also for Boesman, and thus also critical reflection on racial separation. Fugard and Bryceland satisfied the Separate Amenities Act that required that ‘Coloured’ characters be played by white actors in public venues, but their history of collaboration with black performers enabled their performances to escape the stereotyping that marred white productions of ‘Coloured’ playwrights like Adam Small.Footnote ⁵² Although Albert Wertheim, following Afrikaans critic Tim Huisamen, argues that Fugard gives these characters more Afrikaans slang than his white characters as a dramatic marker of their ‘racially mixed situation’, the performances of Fugard and Bryceland suggest that economic deprivation rather than ‘racial’ identity was likelier ground for their characters’ brutality in speech or action.Footnote ⁵³ Furthermore, the implication that ‘Coloureds’ are ‘racially mixed’ while Afrikaners are white denies the now acknowledged fact, demonstrated by Afrikaans-speaking researchers of colour like Vernon February, that all Afrikaners (including Fugard on his mother's side) have mixed ancestry.Footnote ⁵⁴

Marta and Emilio are not racially marked but their plebeian speech functions, like Lena and Boesman's Afrikaans-inflected English, as an index of class, identify them as bajo pueblo, have-nots who have historically been mestizo, and whose marginalization testifies not only to economic shock treatment but also to Pinochet's little-known promotion of racial ideology.Footnote ⁵⁵ Conversely, while discussions about racism often overlook it, class solidarity is part of the history of dispossession in South Africa.Footnote ⁵⁶ While Radrigán does not give his characters racial labels, the references to hunger in this play and its contemporaries offer reminders that 60 percent of Santiago's population in 1969 lacked sufficient food and that malnutrition marked this population physiologically, with significantly lower health and life expectancy than the rich elite.Footnote ⁵⁷ Although nobody indicts the government directly, the characters complain about being deprived of steady work, and refer continually to the effects of dispossession, from hunger to depression.

In Fugard's play, Lena's concern for a stranger, even when she is suffering abuse, and her understanding of their shared condition of dispossession show solidarity, even if solidarity does not appear in the text or notes. Lena notices ‘somebody out there’,Footnote ⁵⁸ and while she refers to him initially as a kaffer, she suggests, in response to Boesman's resistance, that they should share: ‘We got a fire’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Even though she understands little of the old man's Xhosa, she is willing to forego her bottle of rotgut and even to spend the night outside talking to him. The word outa that Lena uses to address her guest is the name that Afrikaners, especially children, historically gave old black men, who apparently did not merit the oom (‘uncle’) or meneer (‘sir’) due to white men, but Lena uses it respectfully in the formal third person from Afrikaans: ‘Does Outa come far?’Footnote ⁶⁰ Communicating despite the language barrier, she responds to Boesman's taunt, ‘Is he hot stuff?’ with an appeal to the visitor: ‘Sit close. Hotnot [hottentot – pejorative synonym for ‘Coloured’] and kaffer got no time for apartheid on a night like this’.Footnote ⁶¹ When she reports the old man's unexpected death – ‘he grabbed [her] hand, held it tight and then let go’ – Boesman reacts violently, kicking the corpse after Lena ‘gently eas[es] the body down’,Footnote ⁶² even though his accompanying expletives suggest that he knows more Xhosa than his emphatic distinction between ‘brown’ and ‘black’ implies.Footnote ⁶³ While his attack on the dead man is as brutal as his abuse of Lena, Boesman's panic at this moment is justified: ‘dead men are dangerous’.Footnote ⁶⁴ As Lena points out, the combination of his raw fists and her bruises could lead police to infer that he killed the old man and to arrest him ‘for something [he] didn't do’.Footnote ⁶⁵ This sober assessment keeps Lena's sympathy from being merely sentimental and, while highlighting the potential power of solidarity as the transformation of sympathy into social action, also shows its limits under apartheid. The absence of the term ‘solidarity’ in Boesman and Lena does not eliminate the feeling but it does remind us that its public political expression has been banned along with the anti-apartheid movements and its leaders. Moreover, the fact that English lacks the adjectival form that animates other languages, including Spanish, is a striking mark (though not a cause or effect) of the thinner history of solidarity movements in the English-speaking world.

This problem of translation highlights the more explicit solidarity in Hechos consumados, beginning with the act that precedes the opening – Emilio's rescue of Marta from the river – and developing with Marta's gesture toward the stranger who interrupts their fireside conversation. Shaw renders Radrigán's adjective solidaria applied to Marta as ‘with sympathy’ where Puga and Núñez-Parra craft a phrase around the English noun in ‘show of solidarity’;Footnote ⁶⁶ this more effectively emphasizes its social dimension. The stranger's one word plea ‘Hambre’, abbreviating ‘Tengo hambre’, which Shaw translates correctly as ‘hungry’, elicits a matter-of-fact response from Marta, who asks Emilio, ‘Got any bread?’, a characteristically practical attitude that later earns Emilio's praise for her attention to their shelter.Footnote ⁶⁷ Her behaviour might also remind readers of the history of solidarity as an everyday people's practice in Chile, and the work of the Catholic Church's Vicariate of Solidarity and others documenting the disappeared, thus highlighting the play's depiction of solidarity not just as fellow feeling but as a social act with historic resonance.Footnote ⁶⁸

At this moment in the play, the intruder, whose name Aurelio appears in the directions but not in the dialogue, recalls Outa, in that he seems even more destitute than the others. Unlike Outa, however, whose Xhosa most white actors and spectators would not have learnt during apartheid, Aurelio speaks Spanish, the language self-evidently shared by audience and actors even if some utterances seem as lyrical as his interlocutors seem plebeian and others simply crazy. Aurelio is a ‘strange being’ who answers his own question ‘How did you come to this place?’ with ‘You [plural] had to have found something. No one lingers when there is nothing to wait for’ but he is not insane.Footnote ⁶⁹ Emilio queries Marta's assumption of Aurelio's craziness with the solidario comment ‘He must think the same ‘bout us’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Despite the textual reference to a man, women have often played the role, as in the 1981 premiere, Vera's film and Shaw's English staging.Footnote ⁷¹ Feminizing the character highlights her vulnerability, but the patchwork skirt and tangled, beribboned hair that Myriam Palacios's performance of Aurelia in Vera's film added to the strings and tin cans mentioned in the text also brought the character into resonance with the ‘gypsies’ referred to later as well as the silent figures that Marta points to at the start of the play.Footnote ⁷² These figures never speak but they invite Marta and Emilio's speculation about the causes of their displacement.Footnote ⁷³ The presence of these figures, supplemented by Marta's account of being abducted because she witnessed an abduction may not indict the state directly but nonetheless suggest the social upheaval that displaced them and, in the film version of 1984, also index the resurgence of public protest after 1983.Footnote ⁷⁴ Aurelio speaks in riddles, but his statements about ‘the wind of injustice blow[ing] again’Footnote ⁷⁵ hint at the state of the nation while his eerie divination, gesturing at Emilio, ‘this man is approaching the measure of death!’ (‘está alcanzando el tamaño de la muerte’),Footnote ⁷⁶ turns out to be prophetic, even if it seems unlikely at the time.

Miguel, the man who eventually kills Emilio, appears initially to be an exception to the vagabondage that marks the other characters. In Vera's film, José Soza signals this distinction with his initially confident stride, heightened with low-angle shots that place Miguel above the other characters, even if only on a rise on the lot that looks like a dump. In the text Miguel first appears from below but makes comments about their tea that suggest that he has been watching the others.Footnote ⁷⁷ When he returns, it is to lecture Marta and Emilio about private property and to tell them to leave, but the ‘darkly threatening’ edge to his ‘politeness’ (in Radrigán's directions) appears to soften somewhat after Emilio shares anecdotes about working in the textile factory, especially when it turns out that they worked at the same one.Footnote ⁷⁸ But when Miguel talks about the wife that he loves, albeit her complaints drive him crazy – ‘Goddam, am I goin’ to rest when she dies!’ – he tenses up again.Footnote ⁷⁹ As Miguel works himself up into a rage, Marta also tries to calm him down. While Emilio's anecdotes about factory work came from shared experiences, Marta relates a story about someone she once knew whose apparent windfall at the races enabled him to buy gifts and food for his wife and family: ‘the wife got well from sheer happiness [de puro contento] . . . Or could it be ‘cuz she had eaten?’.Footnote ⁸⁰ When the police find out that he stole the money from a rich employer, the man asserts his family's – and his class's – right to happiness with ‘So what? We weren't going to die [no ibamos morir] without knowing what happiness was. We're people too’.Footnote ⁸¹ While Emilio lends Marta's fable a personal alibi by adding that she told him that this man was her father, Radrigán gives the story collective resonance in his later play La felicidad de los García (The García Family's Happiness), whose revised title in the film by Claudio di Girólamo El 18 de los García (1983) challenged the effective exclusion of the bajo pueblo from the national holiday, 18 September, in the context of the revival of political protest that year. In the more constrained situation of 1981, Marta's lines testify to urgent needs – the woman got better because she got to eat – but its allusion to death anticipates Emilio's identification of all of them as ‘done’, exhausted or extinguished.

Beyond the absurd: from dispossession to self-possession

In Hechos consumados, Emilio does not call his world view absurdist, but his double vision of the absurdity of life, in tension with his attachment to arguing about it, reflects Radrigán's interest in Camus's philosophy, which has been noted, and his critical distance from Camus, which has escaped attention. While Eduardo Thomas mentions Camus at the outset of an article on the absurd in Chilean drama, he misreads Camus's secular understanding of the stance of the absurd as the just response to a world without God when he treats Emilio as a tragic hero whose ‘choice to sacrifice his life’ marks his ‘transcendence’ of absurdity.Footnote ⁸² A passage from Le mythe de Sisyphe serves as epigraph for Radrigán's later (1983) play Informe para indiferentes (Report for Indifferent [Readers]),Footnote ⁸³ but the extract also illuminates Hechos consumados. As Camus writes,

Camus's sense of the absurd drama that will end by undoing the logic of a life resonates with Emilio's speech about done deals, especially the last line – ‘the only sure thing [is] that we have to die’,Footnote ⁸⁵ but Camus's conception of the individual philosopher–subject's choice to die does not prompt a simple repetition in the play.Footnote ⁸⁶ Emilio speaks as ‘we’, part of a group striving for solidarity even if state terror and economic shock deter them from collective struggle. The group may appear to consist only of Emilio and Marta, who together try to elicit solidarity from Miguel, but the silent figures in the margins of the play suggest the potential of the multitudes pushed underground by the dictatorship.

To be sure, Emilio returns to the first person singular in his final statement, after Miguel demands one last time that they leave the property: ‘listen to me . . . so many times I've been forced to say Yes when I wanna say No; so many times I've had to choose to be nothing . . . No pal, I'm not moving from here’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Nonetheless, Radrigán's sense of a collective in the wings gives Emilio's apparently fatalist response here and his final ‘No’ near the end more cooperative weight than Camus's singular homme révolté (‘man in revolt’) allows.Footnote ⁸⁸ Although Miguel apparently speaks only for himself – ‘I'm not a piece of trash’Footnote ⁸⁹ – the final question posed by Marta draws in not only herself and Miguel but also the ‘remote’ babbling of homeless or deshabitados (‘unhoused’) people in the wings: ‘What the hell did they do to us?’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Reading this question in the light of Camus's suggestion that ‘even in saying no’ the rebel seizes freedom as [s]he begins to ‘desire and judge’ makes it an open rather than merely rhetorical question, inviting solidarity, if not in the present then in the future.Footnote ⁹¹

If Camus's ‘man in revolt’ is not only the slave who says no to his master, Radrigán's is not just the one man who wanted to say no but also the women and men who ask ‘why?’ as well as ‘what?’. In Hechos consumados, as in Boesman and Lena, it takes a death to prompt this resistance. In the latter play, Outa dies from malign neglect, not homicide, but Boesman's post-mortem cruelty is like Miguel's violence, largely an expression of panic. Boesman's panic frees Lena to resist Boesman's violence at least temporarily: ‘No. The first time I tell you. No. I wanted to finish it this morning . . . I wasn't ready for it yet. I am now’.Footnote ⁹² Fugard links this moment to the ‘No’ in Camus's The Rebel, but he still has Lena leave with Boesman after all.Footnote ⁹³ Even though she admonishes Boesman – ‘next time you want to kill me, do it. Really do it’ – her last words match the fellow feeling expressed in her movement to catch up with him – ‘But not so fast’ – as they ‘walk off into the darkness’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In Hechos consumados, Marta and Miguel remain seated onstage surrounded by the shadows of the dispossessed, but although this play no more than Fugard's could not in the climate of censorship and violence advocate an uprising, Miguel's ‘mechanical’ justification – ‘I had to protect my job’ – as well as Marta's allusion to agents, albeit an unnamed ‘they’ who have dehumanized ‘us’,Footnote ⁹⁵ cannot yet articulate the collective NO that would animate the campaign that toppled Pinochet in the plebiscite of 1988.

Coda: prospections and retrospections

Hechos consumados, as performed in 1981, could not anticipate the eruption of public protests after 1983 or the resonance of ‘No’ in the 1988 plebiscite, any more than Boesman and Lena could predict the surge of activism that would transform South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, but both Radrigán and Fugard set influential examples for theatre, imagining solidarity in the face of dispossession. Fugard's commitment to anti-apartheid theatre created a repertoire of more explicitly political theatre by himself and others, and some plays, especially Master Harold and the Boys, made him among the most performed playwrights worldwide. Despite uneven work in the post-apartheid years, his contribution is so great that he is credited with inventing political theatre in South Africa.Footnote ⁹⁶ Although Radrigán shared the anti-dictatorship stage with many contemporaries, his work in the post-dictatorship period with plays like Oratorio de la lluvia negra (Oratorio of Black Rain) (2003) or El desaparecido (The Disappeared) (2004) has found new forms with which to represent this still pressing legacy. In retrospect, the post-dictatorship era looks less like a clean break with the past than a prelude of the much more difficult struggle to bring the dictatorship's perpetrators to justice, on the one hand, and, on the other, to critique premature consensus around a ‘fixed past’ when, as cultural theorist Nelly Richard puts it, ‘recollection in motion’ exposes the politics in memory.Footnote ⁹⁷ Likewise, the Soweto Uprising of 1976 was not only the beginning of the end of apartheid but also a reminder of the responsibility that the old men of the former liberation movements bear to help youth dispossessed by empty promises of prosperity, as political scholar Adam Habib notes in his apt study South Africa's Suspended Revolution.Footnote ⁹⁸

Even when it may seem to retreat from politics, the intimate resonance of state violence in Hechos consumados and Boesman and Lena looks forward to theatre that illuminates transnational conflicts with domestic dramas. I offer in this coda a few examples that invite further research. In Chile, ‘El año en que nací’ (The Year in Which I was Born) (2012) by Lola Arias, an Argentine born in 1973 collaborating with Chileans of a similar age, features the sons and daughters of Pinochet's enforcers as well as of returning exiles, who recount memories of childhood in places as different as Cuba and Canada, and ponder the ‘recollection in motion’ that characterizes the unreconciled present; ‘Beben’ (German for ‘quake’) by Guillermo Calderón (2012) blends Heinrich von Kleist's 1810 story ‘The Earthquake in Chile’ and confrontation between German non-governmental organization (NGO) volunteers and local survivors after the earthquake in 2010 to reflect on the political economy of international aid. In South Africa, Lara Foot-Newton's plays about people dispossessed rather than helped by post-apartheid ‘black economic empowerment’, especially Karoo Moose (2007) and ‘Fishers of Hope’ (2014), likewise juxtapose family drama with the transnational disruption of local ecologies, without eclipsing their finely drawn characters with global abstractions. In drama that is resolutely local as well as linked to the world, these plays owe significant debts to their pioneering precursors Fugard and Radrigán, whose affinities invite further investigation of points of contact between suspended revolutions across the southern hemisphere and their comparable histories of dispossession and solidarity that broad gestures toward the ‘global South’ cannot provide.