Athol Fugard's Hello And Goodbye

IT IS 1963. A table and four chairs stand in the kitchen of a small cottage in the Valley, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. They are lit by a solitary electric light hanging above. On the table is a bottle of squash, a jug of water and a glass. This is the setting of Athol Fugard's second published play, Hello and Goodbye, and it is more comfortable than the primitive shack of the earlier Blood Knot. Blood Knot, with its confrontation of a white man and his black brother, was a microcosm of South Africa's explosive racial situation, but the two characters of Hello and Goodbye are both white: Johnnie Smit, indeed, is such a respectable bourgeois that he receives circulars from the Providential Assurance Company. Johnnie and his sister Hester are therefore relatively free of the economic and racial restraints that limited the possibilities open to Morris and his black brother, Zachariah: they are free to travel where they like and to live separately or together, as white brother and sister. The Smits are certainly not rich but they are less shackled than the Pietersens; thus they can build their lives as they themselves choose, without being dictated to by society's laws and prejudices. Hester and Johnnie are as unfettered as are, in one sense, Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting for Godot.