Yearning For Ritual Pieties THE ROAD TO MECCA

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Athol Fugard's great gift as a playwright has been an almost journalistic evocation of the distorting impact of apartheid on blacks and whites in his native South Africa, coupled with a lyric ability to lift those observations to the level of metaphor. It is not enough for an artist to be right-minded on even the most potent political issues of his day. To earn a lasting place in literature, to rank with Ibsen or Shaw or Brecht, he must also demonstrate subtlety of craft, power of language and insight into character -- and probably must reach beyond his immediate context into other realms of the real world or imagination. Significantly, after the autobiographical catharsis of 'Master Harold' . . . and the Boys (1982), which reflected his formative bond as a white youth with a black father figure, Fugard has moved into brave new territory.

His most recent works, A Place with the Pigs, which debuted at the Yale Repertory Theater in April, and The Road to Mecca, which completed a short run at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., last week, have no black characters and concern wholly different kinds of repression and liberation. Pigs, about a Soviet World War II deserter, as yet amounts to an unfinished work. Road, if not as poignant or politically apt as Master Harold, is Fugard's wisest, most balanced and most nearly universal play.

Outwardly, Road is an issue melodrama about an old woman no longer able to take care of herself. To the outrage of a visiting younger friend, her pastor wants to move her into an old-age home -- and, not incidentally, thereby make her give up the backyard Mecca of Magi, camels, owls and other mystical sculptures she has built from cement, rusting wire, ground-up glass bottles and found objects. Her house is a shrine to her, an eyesore to neighbors, a mark of witchcraft to children and an affront both personal and theological to the pastor and his church.

Underlying the soap opera is an essay on the seductive comforts of a conformist society and the way in which free thinkers inescapably disquiet the people around them. When the pastor speaks of faith, he means order, moral certitude, freedom from doubt. To him there is no deeper satisfaction than to be regarded as normal. His attitude echoes the values of a police state; when Road opened at Yale in 1984, then more effectively at Britain's National Theater in 1985, the pastor seemed a humbug, professing affection for an old friend while ruthlessly trying to have his way. In Charleston, Fugard directed and also played the pastor. He found great sympathy in the man and showed compassion for the common throng's yearning -- in this or any society -- for ritual pieties as an alternative to reason.

Spoleto's brief production would not have been possible were it not for London's, which provided the other two members of the cast. Yvonne Bryceland, a fellow South African for whom Fugard wrote the role of the folk artist, won an Olivier Award, the West End's equivalent of a Tony, for her performance. At Charleston, she once again convincingly blended the workaday and the visionary, making an audience see glory even in Douglas Heap's set -- in truth, reminiscent of a tatty disco. Her manic scurrying in denial of advancing age was a shrewd counterpoint to the prematurely world-weary languidness of Charlotte Cornwell, repeating her role as the friend, a disillusioned teacher of mixed-race youths. The Charleston version, which Fugard terms definitive, achieved the resonance between the mundane and the metaphysical that characterizes all his best work. From Spoleto it deserves to move intact to Broadway.