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The Road to Mecca
A play by Athol Fugard and directed by the author.
Decor: Douglas Heap And Bob Peck plays the Paster from his own point of view as a man of rigid, pocketbacked dignity unable to express the love that he feels. - Michael Billington, Guardian, 28 February 1985 At first, Bob Peck seemed so stiff of bearing, so hollow of voice and so jerky of gesture, that one might be forgiven for mistaking his pastor for an aged Pinocchio; but the mastery with which he was suggesting a man reduced to a husk enclosing a single obsession, eventually became apparent. - Francis King, Sunday Telegraph, 3 March 1985 |
For reasons having more to do
with political fashion than theatrical justice, Athol Fugard tends to be
admired in Britain more for his directly anti-apartheid tracts than for
his poetic dramas; his new play The Road to Mecca (on the National's
Lyttelton stage) has therefore had a predictably rough ride from
many of my colleagues, but turns out to be a marvellously lyrical account
of an eccentric old Afrikaaner sculptress finding the courage to stay well
away from the old peoples' home to which the local village pastor and her
long-time admirer wishes now to commit her. Put as bleakly as that, The Road to Mecca may not sound especially compelling: what makes it such an absorbing and unmissable evening is, however, the playing of Yvonne Bryceland as the old lady, and Bob Peck as the Pastor, and Charlotte Cornwell who completes the cast as the young radical teacher who comes back to give the old lady her independence again. If you can imagine The Corn is Green in an African setting, then that is one part of this Road; but it also, in the author's own production, manages to be a play about loneliness, and eccentricity, and the arrogance of church commissioners, and the claustrophobia of village life, and the fear of someone who abandons religion for art. - Sheridan Morley, Punch, 13 March 1985 |
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The Bob Peck Database was originally launched in September 1998.· · Relaunched on 24 January 2003. · · Photos are copyrighted by the photographers. · · Articles, reviews and interviews are copyrighted by the publications cited. · · This website is © copyrighted by cynicole, 2003. |