Two recent South African plays in London showed us the different ways in which the past informs the present.

In Dream of The Dog by Craig Higginson, an elderly couple, Patrica and Richard are getting ready to leave their farmhouse in the country to live out their old age near their daughter in the seaside city of Durban.  Janet Suzman and Bernard Kay are superb as the long married but tetchy couple gathering up the past fragments of their lives into cardboard boxes and packing cases that will soon be reassembled on unfamiliar shelves, in strange cupboards and unknown rooms.  It is an unsettling experience for both and seems to exacerbate Richard’s progressive memory loss - perhaps the onset of Alzheimer’s - while at the same time flashbacks from the past are recalled with painful clarity.

‘They took two bodies away that day,’ he says before rushing off on one of his long walks to God knows where, leaving the bewildered Patricia screaming for the maid Beauty, to run after and look for him.  Beauty is played with perfect submissive loyalty by Gracy Goldman; questioning and doubting the sanity of her white employers yet always obeying their sometimes illogical commands.

Richard’s flashback is more important than we think at the time and becomes clear with the arrival of a visitor from the past.  LookSmart, their former garden boy makes a surprise appearance and is barely recognisable in his new sharp suit. Ariyon Benyon is excellent as the garden boy made good, now in charge of developing the land they are leaving behind.  He sneers at the nervous madam’s fond recollections of his humble beginnings when, being childless herself, she helped to raise him as her own son and paid for him to go to boarding school.  But he has come with his own recollections of the past; memories that are not so fond.  An inreasingly bewildered Patricia hears him accuse Richard of murdering his fiancee Gracie.  Looking and sounding unnervingly like Robert Mugabe, Benyon’s presence hovers menacingly.  As he saunters with increasing bravura around the room, brandishing a fruit knife left behind by Richard, fears of a revenge killing raise the tension level.

This year the number of white farmers killed in South Africa passes 3,000. The recent murder of the notorious far right leader Eugene Terreblanche by two of his black farmhands gives added frisson to the scene played out before us.  Past deeds, past enmities seem still to be simmering beneath the surface fifteen years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to bury them.

In Coming Home by the renowned South African playwright, Athol Fugard, memory is more beneficent.  Here Veronica Jonkers returns with her young son, Mannetjie to the village of her happy childhood spent in the company of her grandfather, Oupa played by Nadim Sawalha.  Her once youthful playmate, the loyal but dimwitted Alfred Witbooi, who has nursed a hopeless crush for her, is glad to see her back but can’t understand why she would want to leave the bright lights of Cape Town to come back to this godforsaken village in the Karoo where nothing happens.  He reminds her of why she left in the first place – to make her name on the stage as a singer.  Veronica recalls those innocent days making bean soup for her grandfather, watching him plant his pumpkin seeds in the acre, listening to his stories and singing for the villagers.  She had wanted more; to sing to many more people, and so she had gone to Cape Town.  Oupa had not wanted her to go.  Now he has died in her absence but his ghost haunts the little hut he left behind and he seems to give comfort to her tormented soul; for she is hiding a painful secret. 

The revelation of Veronica’s secret is the climactic scene of the evening and is played with heartfelt sincerity by Cat Simmons.  She has AIDS – a consequence of sleeping with a Mozambican migrant worker during her wild days singing and drinking in the shebeens of the Cape Flats.  She compels Alfred to marry her so that Mannetjie will not be put into an orphanage after she dies.  For those who know South Africa, Veronica’s revelations highlight serious issues in contemporary politics - AIDS, migrant workers and xenophobia, the removal of people from District Six to the Cape Flats, and the increasing drug-fuelled crime in the Cape Flats – but Fugard avoids the political harangue and refers to them obliquely through Veronica’s confession to Alfred. 

As Veronica becomes confined to her bed, Oupa reappears as a ghost to the teenage Mannetjie and there is a tender scene between the two as Oupa tells Mannetjie about his life on the farm and how small seeds become big pumpkins.  But Mannetjie keeps special words rather than seeds in Oupa’s seed tin.  ‘These are my seeds,’ says Mannetjie, ‘and one day they too will grow into something much bigger.’ The play ends with Alfred looking on as Mannetjie, writes the story of Oupa’s life and the simple homilies he had shared with his mother.  It is a redemptive ending and shows how memories are important in giving us a sense of ourselves and how an understanding of the past can help provide a stable bedrock from which to move forward and reinvent ourselves. 

Dream of the Dog‘s run is over. Coming Home is at the Arcola till 3 July 2010.