Victory

Synopsis

Vicky was named to celebrate Nelson Mandela's victorious walk to freedom at the dawn of a new South Africa. Her mother worked happily as Lionel's maid for seventeen years, while Vicky played at Lionel's house as a child as if it was her own. When Lionel - widowed and alone - catches two burglars ransacking his house and finds that one of them is Vicky, it is more than his possessions that are destroyed.

Our Review:

15 August 2007

Just as the death of Communism deprived left wing British dramatists of their major subject -- socialist justice in a right wing democracy – so the end of apartheid in South Africa has surely done for Athol Fugard.

Or has it? Fugard suggests not, in this short, sharp three-hander receiving its UK premiere as part of the Peter Hall Company’s summer residency in Bath. Victory is a bitter postscript to Nelson Mandela’s statement in 1994 that his country was “a rainbow nation at peace with itself.”

Not that the “new” South Africa has, on this evidence, significantly re-charged Fugard’s dramatic batteries; now 75 years old, and a recovering alcoholic, he leads a comfortable, untroubled life in San Diego, California, these days.

“Victory” is the ironic full name of Vicky, black daughter of old white Lionel’s (Richard Johnson) former housemaid, who worked happily for the academic, bookish “white boss” for s...

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