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Analysis Of Athol Fugard's The Road To Mecca

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South African playwright, director, and author Athol Fugard’s play The Road to Mecca (1984) follows an older South African woman who refuses to enter a nursing home and her creation of an oversized sculpture garden of more than three hundred objects, which she calls her personal Mecca. The site is currently preserved in South Africa as “The Owl House.” Fugard drew the events from the real-life figure Helen Martins who was an eccentric artist in Karroo, South Africa, where he also lived. Fugard is perhaps best known for his 1963 play The Blood Knot, which looks at two brothers who have opposite views on segregation in South Africa. The Road to Mecca was adapted to film in 1991 and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1988. Its themes …show more content…

As she admits to Elsa, she fears that a “darkness” has entered her and is devouring all of her creative energy. Still, she refuses to enter a nursing facility; by refusing to leave her home, Helen is proclaiming that she still possesses some creative power within her. Elsa is outraged to learn that Pastor Byleveld has been trying to get Elsa committed to a nursing facility. They have a shouting argument about her capacity for self-care, and the pastor reveals that Helen one night knocked over a series of candles and nearly burned down her entire house, as well as endangered her neighbors. Elsa starts to see that Byleveld’s intent to move Helen into a nursing facility is motivated by love as much as by social conformity. It is true that she is not (perhaps) capable of taking care of herself. In the end, Helen—with Elsa’s help—chooses to stay in her personal Mecca rather than go to the “Old Folks’ Home.” The real Helen Martins completed suicide in 1976. The Road to Mecca ends with the hint that Helen has discovered her purpose with life, made peace with it, and is ready to die. Helen describes the need to understand why she must die, and how with that knowledge she can become master of her

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