Remembering trauma: Fugard's The Train Driver

Walder, Dennis (2014). Remembering trauma: Fugard's The Train Driver. South African Theatre Journal, 27(1) pp. 32–47.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2014.876797

Abstract

Among Fugard's post-apartheid plays one escapes the sentimental nostalgia of his recent turn inwards - The Train Driver (2010). In it he develops a challenging sense of the country's dealings with the past by focusing on the remembering of a 'track suicide' by the white driver, whose tragic story is told by a black gravedigger. The driver's morbidly excessive reaction, the result of identifying with the victim whose grave he seeks, is balanced in performance by the sympathy and acceptance of the gravedigger. The squatter camp cemetery setting provides a liminal urban space stressing the continuity of past wrongs while the selective remembering of the nation's elite masks everyday poverty and violence.

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