Hello and Goodbye

Published Friday 25 April 2008 at 13:40 by Mark Shenton

Originally premiered in 1965, Athol Fugard’s early, partly autobiographical story about a reunion of two estranged adult siblings, after an absence of 15 years, still cuts a deeply personal, potent and poignant path through its characters’ damaged lives. Hester Smit has long ago left for Johannesburg, where she now works as a prostitute, but her younger brother, Johnny, has stayed behind in the family home in Port Elizabeth to care for their father, who lost a leg in a dynamite explosion.

Now she comes back unexpectedly, and they revisit their parental legacies as they literally search for one in old boxes and suitcases, for what’s left of the £500 compensation money their father apparently received.

That provides what small impetus there is for a plot, but Fugard’s purpose is to expose the darker rifts and undercurrents of his characters’ miserable pasts and even poorer present. Paul Robinson, returning to a play he previously directed at Southwark Playhouse in 2003, has re-cast it - at Southwark he had Tracy-Ann Oberman and Zubin Varla in roles originally played in the play’s first British outing in 1973 by Janet Suzman and Ben Kingsley, and now they are succeeded by Saskia Reeves and Rafe Spall.

Both have had excellent dialect coaching (from Mary Howland), to deliver convincing South-African accents. But more importantly, they both dig even deeper to explore the desolate, desperate personal wastelands they occupy: Reeves is by turns chirpy, touching and obsessive in her pursuit of lost money and memories, while Spall gives a sometimes all-too-realistic portrait of a man locked in a hermetically-sealed world of his own thoughts. Sometimes it seems like he is having a private dialogue with himself as he gabbles and mumbles some of his lines, but it is absolutely true to the character.

Robinson’s production, staged with an amplified naturalism on Libby Watson’s effectively dishevelled set, perfectly captures the fractured rhythms of these fractured lives.