White Guilt and Epic Theatre Elements in Fugard's The Train Driver

Athol Fugard is a well-known contemporary liberalist playwright in South Africa. His one-act play, The Train Driver, is a story about the guilt of a white train driver who accidentally hit a black woman who was committing suicide and his journey of searching the woman's tomb at a graveyard in the charge of a black gravedigger. 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 whites cannot escape their conscience in face of the social injustices of apartheid, and continues the artistic expression of reaching reconciliation with 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.This article focuses on form analysis, which is the "Epic Theatre" elements in The Train Driver. It tries 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 article shows how the monologue in The Train Driver presents 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 identifying with the white man and his guilt. Then, it further indicates the neoliberal issues involved in stage designs, 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 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 the complex neoliberal reality. In this case, the white train driver still blindly bears the guilt,rather than looking into the roots of the tragedy.The article reveals that, in The Train Driver, Fugard transcends his previous understanding of white guilt and changes the method of presentation. He realized that by merely acquiring a sense of guilt and ethical repentance, one 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 neoliberalism and seeking a new path of racial reconciliation.