The Train Driver
From: Thursday, 4th November 2010
To: Saturday, 4 December 2010
Our Review: 
Your Reviews:
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Synopsis
In December 2000, Puma Lowland pulled her three children close to her body and stepped in front of a train on the railway tracks between Philippi and Niangua on The Cape Flats, South Africa. This true story demanded Athol Foulard's attention and compelled him to write The Train Driver; a beautiful and haunting play of redemptive power. He has described it as 'perhaps the most important play I've written... it's the emotional journey I've travelled in dealing with my inherited legacy of South African prejudice and what you do with that blinkered vision of reality.'
Our Review:
Michael Coveney - 10 November 2010
Athol Fugard’s first play for ten years – he’s now 78 and living in California – finds him still in sombre mood on South African home territory: The Train Driver is an 80-minute two-hander for a black grave-digger and a troubled white railway man haunted by ghosts.
The play is based on a news story about a mother who stood in front of an approaching train, with three small children, on a track near the squatter camps on the windswept plains on the edge of Cape Town. There are more than a hundred such suicides on this stretch of railway each year.
Fugard imagines the plight of a helpless train driver who mowed down a mother and child and who wants to pay his respects, or at least confirm the horror of what he saw. The obsession with naming the victim, bestowing an identity - how can he ascertain which grave is hers? - runs right through Fugard’s plays and here finds its perfect post-apartheid metaphorical expression.
...Latest User Review
David Baxter - 25 November 2010:
Athol Fugard's The Train Driver is a superbly acted two-hander between a black gravedigger and a white train driver, severely traumatised by the suicide of a nameless black woman beneath the wheels of his train. There is a palpable sense of atmosphere and the developing trust between the two men but it's painfully slow and feels like a very long 80 minutes....
Creative
Athol Fugard (Author)
Hampstead Theatre (Producer)
Eric Abraham (Producer)
Fugard Theatre (Company)
Athol Fugard (Director)
Saul Radomsky (Design)
Mannie Manim (Lighting)
John Leonard (Sound)
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