The Elements Of Epic Theatre And Reflections On White Guilt In Fugard’s The Train Driver

Athol Fugard is a well-known contemporary Afrikaner liberalist playwright in South Africa.His one-act play,The Train Driver,showed the white driver’s indelible guilt after accidentally killing a suicidal black woman.The Train Driver is Fugard’s most important piece in the post-apartheid era.It presents liberal whites’ sense of guilt,which is the ethical condition that the white cannot escape their conscience in face of the social injustices of apartheid,and continues the artistic expression of reaching reconciliation with the reality through moral repentance.It also takes the form of Bertolt Brecht’s “Epic Theatre” to reveal the historical predicament in New South Africa after the end of apartheid and then examines white guilt in the neoliberal context.There are five chapters in this thesis.The first chapter introduces Fugard’s theatrical life,the performance of “The Train Driver” and studies at home and aboard while the second chapter explains Bertolt Brecht’s “Epic Theatre” and “Alienation Effect” and his influence on Fugard.In the third chapter,the thesis introduces the geographical background in which the story is set and its related apartheid history and how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission operates.It also presents the reality of South Africa after 1994 and the plight of black people in the neoliberalism context.Then,the core argument of this thesis starts from the form analysis of “Epic Theatre”elements,trying to explain the change in Fugard’s perception of white guilt in the post-apartheid era and why he chooses to take the form of an epic theatre to present it.The fourth chapter firstly shows how the monologue in “The Train Driver” presents the white guilt,and then analyzes the setting of the dialogue,the prologue and epilogue and the alienation effect they create to prevent the audience from easily identifying with the white guilt.The fifth chapter further indicates the neoliberal issues involved in stage design,such as the background of the cemetery,the dilapidated dwelling of the black gravedigger,and the sound effects,to demonstrate that the alienation effect of the theatrical form of “The Train Driver” can arouse the audience to think rationally that the death of a black woman is not the fault of the white driver,but the result of neoliberal reality.In this case,the white train driver blindly bears the guilt,rather than looking up the roots of the tragedy.The thesis finds that in The Train Driver,Fugard transcends his previous understanding of white guilt and changes the way of presentation.He realized that by merely acquiring a sense of guilt and ethical repentance cannot reconcile with the social reality.Due to the changes of the times,Fugard chooses the form of epic theatre to arouse the audience to explore the truth behind the phenomenon that the plight of black people has not been changed,thus urging the audience to reconsider the causes of the tragedy in the plight of the neoliberalism and seeking a new path of racial reconciliation.