"Just as I taught myself how to light candles, and what that means, I must teach myself now how to blow them out"
Helen
The Road to Mecca
The Owl House, Nieu Bethesda, South Africa
Photograph by Claudine Bennent (February 2024)
Part of The Camel Yard
Photograph by Claudine Bennent (February 2024)
Starting from September, The Actors Works will be running monthly play readings.
The first play we are reading is THE ROAD TO MECCA by ATHOL FURGARD.
THE PLAY
"At the heart of the first one [The Road to Mecca] is an attempt on my side to understand the genesis, nature and consequences of a creative energy...But I am also aware that in examining the predicament of the artist in a hostile environment I was saying something about my country". Athol Fugard, Foreword to Plays 1, 1997.
The Road to Mecca premiered in 1984. It's set in 1974, in the final years of Helen Martins' life. Helen Martins was an outsider artist in South Africa in the town of Nieu Besethda. After the deaths of her father and second husband, when she was in her sixties, she started a period of prolific creativity for the next 16 years - covering every surface inside her house with crushed glass, and sculptures. Outside, in "The Camel Yard", she created over three hundred sculptures of camels, people, mermaids, owls, peacocks and many other figures. Everything was created from cement and crushed glass. Her house, The Owl House, is now a museum, but her relationship with the town at the time she was alive was complicated.
She began to lose her eyesight in her final years and The Road to Mecca is set on a night in Autumn during that time. She is visited by a young teacher, Elsa, from Cape Town. This relationship was based on a real, intense friendship that Helen Martins had with a young social worker. They are joined later by Marius Byleveld, a local reverend and a friend of Helen's who knew her before she started her sculptures. He is trying to convince her to leave her home and to move into a care home. However, Fugard says that the play was never meant as a biography, but rather a means through which to explore what it means to reach the end of our creative journeys, and the friendship between the two women.
I have visited the town of Nieu Bethesda twice - first in 2007, and this year in February. Whilst there are other attractions in the tiny town, The Owl House has become a major source of tourism, which is interesting considering that Helen was seen as an embarrassment by many people at the time when she was alive. It was a unique experience. When I visited in 2007, it was very quiet and sleepy. Now, there is more energy in the town and it felt like living in some sort of experimental art piece.
The inside of The Owl House. Every surface is covered with crushed glass.
Photograph by Claudine Bennent (February 2024)
THE WRITER
"The private and the public, the personal and the political...the two safe platforms at opposite ends of the tightrope on which I have spent my writing life." Athol Fugard, Foreword to Plays 1, 1997.
Athol Fugard is one of South Africa's greatest playwrights. He has also been an actor, director and novelist. He was a strong, consistent voice against Apartheid from the 1950s to the 1990s, and has continued producing work (the total number is currently 36 plays). Throughout Apartheid (which existed from 1948-1994), he resisted the laws around racial separation, working with many non-white performers and refusing to perform for segregated audiences.
Fugard came across Helen's story in the 1970s, when he decided to buy a house in Nieu Bethesda as a writing retreat. However, he never really got to know her before her death and it would be a ten year process of being pulled into the story.
Helen's stove
Photograph by Claudine Bennent
More of The Camel Yard
Photograph by Claudine Bennent (February 2024)
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