The Forsyth Report: The Road to Mecca at First Stages

What a powerful play and what powerful performances.
When you consider that the play The Road to Mecca by South African playwright, actor, novelist and director Athol Fugard is about an old woman who is a friendless, somewhat odd – actually a lot odd - artist who lives alone in the home she calls Mecca and that the play is all about her art and its effect on the community in which she lives, it’s easy to wonder how this will work as a play reading when you can’t see the art. It’s the play Robert Latimer chose to start the 2009-10 First Stages Theatre Company season and believe me, it worked.
The character of Helen Martins, whose Mecca is a place of love, refuge and memories, is based on the life of the real Helen Martins of Nieu Bethesda, South Africa. The inside of her house was a kaleidoscope of coloured glass and outside in the garden were more than 200 strange sculptures of owls, biblical figures, buddhas and ancient gods and goddesses. The neighbours thought she was nuts and her stuff a blight, the local church minister tries to persuade her to move to a retirement residence and her friend, perhaps the only one she has and to whom she has sent a plaintive note suggesting suicide, drives hundreds of miles non-stop to find out what gives. The result is Fugard’s examination of what it means to be an artist, what it means to be older and what it means to be shunned. It’s an exploration of the question we also may face: should we be forced/persuaded to leave our home when we are perceived to be unable to take care of ourselves?
What a powerful play and what powerful performances by the three actors, directed, of course, by Robert. Maria Heidler played Miss Helen, Godric Latimer-Kim played her friend Elsa Barlow and the Reverend Marius Byleveld was played by Sven Van de Ven. All the action takes place in Miss Helen’s living room and every second was riveting. The entire audience was rooting for her and there wasn’t a person in the house who wasn’t ecstatic when Miss Helen reveals her true strength and decides to stay in her Mecca.
The real Helen Martins committed suicide in 1975 and today her home, known as The Owl House, has been proclaimed a national monument and is a Mecca for artists and tourists.
Don’t miss First stages next production: an adaptation of Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. It will be a not-to-be-missed experience performed and directed by Robert. It’s at the Capitol Theatre on Sunday October 18th at 3:00 p.m. The box office is 905.885.1071 or 1.800.434.5092.
See you there.
Selena Forsyth