No dramatist wants their work to become irrelevant but Athol Fugard must have at least politically wished it for the 1972 play that, for the convenience of advertising, is known as Statements, but has the full chilling title, Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act.

Statements After an Arrest
Under the Immorality Act
Orange Tree theatre, Richmond

Rockets and Blue Lights
National Theatre, London

No dramatist wants their work to become irrelevant but Athol Fugard must have at least politically wished it for the 1972 play that, for the convenience of advertising, is known as Statements, but has the full chilling title, Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act.

The name records the appalling fact that, in apartheid South Africa (from 1927 to 1985) interracial sex was banned, and discovered lovers could be charged, tried and almost certainly convicted. If you reasonably wonder how private love-making came to the attention of the state, it was through neighbours and relatives who eagerly accepted encouragement from the government to spy and inform, giving police legal cause to fit listening devices in bedrooms or other refuges.
That is what happens to Frieda Joubert, a librarian, whose nocturnal couplings with Errol Philander, a school principal in a distant township, are brought by bigoted vigilantes to the attention of Detective Sergeant du Preez, who bugs and then questions them.

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