In the end - in the true end - there is only acceptance. One may resist the various inevitabilities of human existence, but time, death and historical change are indifferent to stubbornness.
David Lurie is a professor in South Africa who has resigned his position in disgrace after first seducing, then date-raping, then housing at her request, a young female student who subsequently attempted suicide and filed a complaint with the university. Lurie goes to stay with his adult daughter on a farm in the changing political landscape of the East Cape Province and becomes the victim, with his daughter, of a violent home invasion that may or may not have been performed with the collusion of his daughter's gardener and neighbor.
Carl Nixon has said that his adaptation of the novel purportedly hews closely to the original text (I have not read it). If so, it's to great effect, as it allows Coetzee's compelling and always surprising prose a chance to take literal center stage.
Lurie's journey backwards in status, from smug Cape Town prof to humble township dog-clinic assistant, is also a spiritual ascendance requiring acceptance of many intolerable realities that he is unable to influence.
In Colin McColl's masterful production, the resolutions of these horrifyingly wrenching conflicts are never telegraphed; indeed, the audience must take part of the journey with the character in order to feel the subtle closure occasioned by the brilliant conclusion. Often, the ultimate pleasure of a difficult play is whether the ending becomes clear just seconds before it occurs, and such was the case here, with an acceptance of a reality in some ways as horrifying as death itself, yet in this case one also required by the complex bonds of love and history.
Stuart Devenie, one of New Zealand's more accomplished stage actors, carries the play as Lurie with an understated passion that could easily have been overplayed. Hera Dunleavy, a frequent presence on both kiwi stages and television, fulfills the two extremely difficult roles of the student and daughter with similarly understated power that allows the characterizations to grow in complexity almost invisibly. Kirk Torrance, an award-winning playwright himself, who has also appeared in TV's "Xena: Warrior Princess," is chilling yet not entirely unsympathetic as the gardener. And Donagh Rees, a NZ star who is best known internationally as the brain-damaged novelist in the 1992 film "Crush," doubles so effectively in multiple roles that it took most of the play for me to realize the same actress had played all of them.
This world premiere deserves notice and further production as a challenging, thought-provoking work taking on some of the most difficult questions of how old structures, held onto for too long, can change, however painfully, without breaking the spirits of those who must endure such evolution.
