My uncertainty is not that I don't that I think that when I've got to say to you this afternoon makes that title irrelevant or misguiding I will be talking about Port Elizabeth. I will be talking about my craft as a playwright. I will be talking about the politics of my country. What I'm just a little apprehensive of is that possibly the title suggests that I'm able to wrap all of that up and make it coherent in a way that to tell you the truth. I am not able to do I mean, I can't really make very much coherence for myself out of the life. I've lived and the things that have happened to me. So I really would be fooling myself if I think I could do that for you. It's not that there's any degree of confusion on my side. I know very clearly where I am.In terms of the life I have lived where I am. Now. I know very clearly why and what I have written and I know where I stand in terms of the politics of my country it is as I say just a measure of apprehension on my side that may be the title to this lecture promises more than I am. In fact able to give you so beep be forewarned.Now just over a year ago in New York. I found myself in the middle of a rather unusual and provocative experience. An experience which I don't think comes the way all that often comes away of many playwrights all that often. What it involved was being on stage six nights of the weeks performing the play which had launched my career in theater 25 years ago. And in fact being on stage with the same man who had who was involved in that launching 25 years ago as I smoke I my fellow South African being on stage with that playing while during the day during my days preparing and waiting for the evenings performance. I was in fact already beginning to tentatively explore the complex of images which were going to generate my next work. Now the two plays in question are the blood knot which had its first performance in a derelict Johannesburg Loft in 1965. I remember correctly. And the second play the play which I was beginning to think about during the day was a place with the pigs, which is now a robust 6 weeks old having premiered at the Yale Repertory Theater that many weeks back. Now, I don't believe I am flattering or inflating the occasion in describing it as unusual and provocative. and for this reason those nightly performances in the blood knot involved for me and intense rediscovery as it were I reliving of what is arguably the single most important moment in a writer's life that very very mysterious moment when you know that you have discovered for the first time and have used for the first time your own unique voice and when you in fact stop imitating others, Now when I talk about imitating others I'm talking about what I think of as the necessary apprenticeship every writer must serve in certain you an apprenticeship, which I think every player right should serve because I have used the word craft in talking in earlier and talking about in referring to my work as a playwright and it's word. I'm very fond of because it suggests sand implies the very strict and very severe literary disciplines, which I think playwriting involves. Now I had had an apprenticeship in playwriting during which I had both learned from by just by reading and trying to see Productions of and then by imitating without consciously imitating but by imitating other great writers of my time writers who at that point in my life young as I was I found particularly relevant and I must admit that American playwrights figure very very prominently among the teachers of my apprenticeship years men like O'Neal, obviously, Tennessee Williams Clifford a deaths author Malala. They taught me a lot about my craft in terms of playwriting but as I say with a blood nut that apprenticeship ever ended. And then and then six weeks ago on the Yale Repertory stage. I was up against the fact that that same voice that same voice that tried to start tilling its own or started telling its own unique stories in its own special way 25 years ago six weeks ago there it was on the Yale Repertory Theater stage trying once again to tell a new story. And what that experience what that experience on that Yale Repertory Theater stage has taught me because I was involved in performance in the new play just as much as I was involved in performance in terms of the blood not a year ago what that experience on the Yale Repertory Theater six weeks ago has taught me is that although it's now a little bit hoarse from age. It is identifiable as the same voice that started talking 25 years ago and in fact The fact that they can be no real doubt. about the common authorship of the blood knot and my latest Opus a place with the pigs was in fact a little disconcerting for me at first. The reason for that is that I was convinced. That the new play involved something of a radical departure on my side as a writer I had in fact deliberately set out to do try to do to try to do so to try to be different as time passes. I find myself becoming very neurotic. I'm very sensitive about a literary element, which I have seen afflict and then nullify many of my peers and literary Heroes and it's an ailment which is summed up in three devastating Little Words imitation of self. It is a very very easy trap for a writer to fall in for a play writer to fall in particularly if I may say so a particularly in America where success is is rated so highly and he's rewarded so lavishly the temptation to to go on repeating what has worked once to find different specifics and variations as time passes but to go on repeating to go on repeating oneself and to end up as I say imitating oneself is a great Temptation particularly when you have to deal with the innate laziness of so many people who claim to be critics of theater and of the work of theater artists because by trying to do something different you challenge them to start to rethink and a lot of people don't like doing that now, If time ever does come when all I can do coming back to myself again is repeat and rehash formulas which work in the past then I prayed to God and I mean that very sincerely I pray to God that I will have the courage and the scenes to stop writing but there I was trying something different with this new play both because I felt the need for it as a writer and because and this is always a major concern because I felt a material demanded it when you start to write a new play the question of style that you choose in order to tell the story involved is not just a an arbitrary choice on your own side. It involves examining very clearly and in a since getting a dictate from the material that you're going to Handling and dealing with as a storyteller. Now to start with my new play didn't have a South African setting. I'm just going to point out why I thought it was a very different. It didn't have a South African setting and in the case inning in terms of style. It uses a very very theatrical vocabulary both in terms of the word and the action and the event on stage very very different to the rather spare and economical way in which I'll be I'd been working in the plays immediately preceding it. but an hour in one other factor is that is that I was also trying to to write a funny play which disconcerted a lot of people and for the very reason that you're laughing now because I'd got a I'm beginning to get very suspicious about the degree to which I was being taken serious some of the descriptions that have been applied to me as a the conscience of my country and would you really awful things to have to live with if you're Justin and ordinary human being trying trying trying to earn a living, you know what I mean? So so II wanted I wanted people to laugh at me and I can remember as I said, I think I said to some friends who have already made in my life short little visit this time to Minneapolis that I could almost feel tangibly when that first light hit me on the stage and the first performance I could only it was almost tangible. The wave of reverence that hit me from the audience before I'd even said a word and it was very unsettling because I was going to go on to try to be funny. They finally got the message and they did start laughing and they kept on laughing right through the run of the play, but I know that for many people it became very confusing because they had in fact settled back in their seats for another sermon. Where is in fact I was trying to do something very different. And so after all of that after all of these efforts on my sign to be different both as I say for personal reasons, and because the material demanded I was slightly nonplussed when I kept encountering and it was a fairly frequent observation only you could have written it Ethel now the similarities between the two players I won't argue with they are they are similar similarities as separated as they orbit 25 years in the suit me very striking Central to both for example, let me give you an example. Let's say something about the similarity Central to both Is a metaphor for what I think is I desperate and regrettably fairly common human predicament self imprisonment self imprisonment the way we can lock ourselves or part of ourselves away in little prisons of our own making for for all our all the personal and private reasons that prompt us to do that Central to both plays is a metaphor for self imprisonment in the blood not it is I'm man's guilt-stricken conscience that has led to him his imprisonment in a squalid little one-room Shack and in which incidentally although he never leaves his present obviously because it wouldn't be a prison. He has made his brother also a kind of prisoner. I will come back to that a little bit later is automated his brother up. Noreen that to a certain extent that his brother has to go out and work and earn enough for the two of them to stay alive now in the new play a place with a pig's the prison is this time literally a pigsty and again the character at the center of my play has dragged somebody else into it. And in this case it is his wife were gained doesn't live in the pigsty with him because somebody's got to be out there looking after the world so that he can hide away for reasons, which I will make clear a little bit later on but again, somebody has been dragged in as a part-time prisoner. They are a host of secondary metaphors and symbols and images that the two plays have in common butterflies. I love butterflies. Obviously as a symbol of of lost the Lost Innocence of Youth There is the brooding and Powerful presence of a mother. There is and I couldn't believe it. I only realized this after I'd written there is even a man's suit of clothes, you know suit of clothes matching jacket and trousers as a symbol of Social respectability and acceptance. I know I'm sure there are a host of other of other little things that these two players have in common. Now, if similarities were all that I could really significantly talked about him in a comparison of these two plays then the comparison would actually be a Barren and a rather depressing exercise because it would suggest that in spite of my fervent intentions. I was still very much what I had been 25 years ago. Fortunately, I can also talk about differences. I have already suggested a few of them the fact that the play as hasn't got a South African setting. There are only one or two other little works of mine that have that future. I've already spoken a little bit about its Style. But there is one other difference that I really want to focus on because I think that by itself it far outweighs in significance the many similarities they are between the two plays. I believe also that it is a difference in trying to share a life in theater a life in theater in South Africa, which is really why I'm standing up you're talking to you. I believe it also to the extent that I want to try and do that we have started to do that with you this afternoon. I think this other major difference between the two plays. In a sense tells or suggest something of the story of the past 25 years or the journey that I have made as a man and a writer during the past 25 years of my life. The difference is as simple as this. As I've said already said Central to both players. is the metaphor for self imprisonment and image of a man driven into a hiding by a crippling sense of guilt and a fear of judgment and Punishment by his filming for an act of betrayal and desertion that much common to both plays now in the blood not This imprisonment is seen as final. It is a metaphor for an existential condition from which there is in essence No Escape a play which explores in a sense very much the same territory that the the blood not did at the level that it wasn't an essay into the extensional hell of having to deal with the fact of another existence sort of horseplay explored that territory as well. So in the blood not the statement is one of No Escape of No Exit. Am I just say in passing that existential is MM both in the person of scapa or going back even in in in chronology all of the interest in Sheila's Kierkegaard Sokka calm me. We're all very influential in my thinking when I was a when I was a starting out as a writer and in fact one of the Somebody who I think did a lot to sort of lay the foundation for existential thought Pascal had a paragraph which I think sums up what I'm trying to say about the blood knot and it's metaphor of No, Escape had a paragraph in his palm size that wonderful book of his which I think which absolutely riveted me and obsessed me as a young man in which I think goes even further in saying what I'm just trying to say about the blood not the paragraph. I can't quoted verbatim, but I can give you the sense of it. The paragraph says imagine a cell. And in the cell a group of men are chained together in the dark every morning at dawn the door to the cell is unlocked. And the man at the end of the chain is laid out and executed the door closing behind him and being locked again. The men Left Behind read their fight in that daily opening and closing of the door. And posco goes on to say that is The Human Condition now that's pretty heavy going but when you're 25 years and an addict of dust story of ski that also sounds very good. Now with a place with a pigs on the other hand. My recently the central statement is exactly the opposite. the condition of self imprisonment he seen as one from which a human being can escape. In the final scene of the play my Anti Hero because he is under no circumstances could be described as a hero. My anti-hero does in fact liberate himself. He leaves his prison. He leaves the pigsty to face the Judgment that he was so frightened of to take whatever punishment is going to come his way for his ACT for the act of desertion and betrayal of his comrades. A short quote from the closing minutes of the two players will I think give you a feeling of the way I made this statement on the stage the first statement 25 years ago the second statement six weeks ago. In the blood not the prison is a squalid Little Shack in a black ghetto. The two characters are half-brothers one light-skinned the other dark-skinned different fathers the same mother. In the last scene of the play they act out a terrible game. Terrible Sherrod of Blackness versus whiteness. A charade that has ended in violence and which will most probably end in the death of one of them when they play it again because they almost certainly going to play it again. It is all they have got left in their lives. They have blown all their savings for an imaginary happy future. They are blown their savings on a gentleman's outfit and the white brother wears this outfit in the game and they act out as I say this terrible Sherrod not going to go on playing it and my guess is that they will go on playing it until one of them kills the other one. Now at the end of the first playing of this game in the last scene of the play The Black brother shocked and stunned by what has happened between them he asks, what is it Morris? The two of us me and you in here. And equally devastated white brother looks around the miserable Little Shack and answers home. The black brother then asks. Is a no other way. The white brother shakes his head and replies no Zack. You see we're tied together. It's it's what they call the blood not the bond between Brothers. Those are the closing minutes of the blood. Not a somber mood a somber muted mood, which was we chose echoed in in quite a few players that I went on to write after that. I mean, I think the ending of another one of my plays Bushman and lyanna has that same Almost defeated recognition of of hopelessness. Now in a place where the pigs the prison is as I've already told you a pigsty. Where my central character has been in hiding for many many years in my central category incidentally is a is a deserter. And he has been hiding away from his comrades in this pigsty for many many years the play. Excuse me. The play is based on a newspaper item. I read in the New York Times we have setup. It's based on a newspaper item. I reading the New York Times. Couple years back a little village somewhere in Russia. A bearded half deranged wild looking man at suddenly stumbled into the light of day and it was fairly quickly established that he was a man. Where everybody at thought had died in the first world in in the Second World War. You story turned out to be the fact that he had deserted yet. In fact deserted hadn't died in the Battlefront had deserted and that with the help of his wife. He had hidden away in a pigsty for 41 years. He left it on one occasion at midnight dressed as a woman for a walk and you can see how the playwriting me smacked his lips when he read that paragraph So that is that is the story on which I based my play now in the last scene of my play because the the actual story has a different had a different ending in the last scene of my play the central character instead of resigning himself to a future in that pic Stein just going on accepting it and facing it and being heroic about it instead of that. He first liberates the pigs. He finally he goes through a colossal colossal experience, which he generates within himself and turns on himself. He first liberates the pigs which he has been brutalizing mercilessly over the decades because that's how long he's been in there you first liberates the pigs and he then braces himself to follow them out into the world and face judgment and take punishment, which he in fact does in the last they were that is the last image of the plays in is in fact him walking with his wife out of that pigsty. But before doing that he turns to his long-suffering wife and and he says and I was just trying to remember it. He says to his wife. It has been a long loneliness in yeah. I've forgotten what it means to look into another man's eyes. Ought to be looked at by them. I'm so frightened. But there's something else now and it's bigger than my fear. I'm homesick for other men and women-- I don't belong in here. Even if my punishment turns out to be a firing squad. Those men looking down the barrels of their guns at me. We'll be home in a way. This pigsty could never have been. Now I think it I think it should be perfectly obvious that the endings of those two plays are saying saying very opposite things are tuned into into life decision action the facing of consequences. And in fact what the living of life is about in a very different way. Many years ago in my notebook. I borrowed the phrase courageous pessimism from Alberta me to describe the attitude of stoic the spirit of stoic resignation reflected by the blood knot and those earlier plays. Staying within the spirit of that vocabulary. I think I would be right in talking now about the timid optimism, which seems to characterize a place where the pigs. And as I've said the story of the past 25 years 25 years of my life both as a writer and as and as a man is the story of my journey between those two very opposite images of The Human Condition. the seeing of the individual as helpless in the face of a fate which is by and large Beyond his control in which we are sort of the porn in in some bigger game. As opposed to the seeing of the individual as in fact responsible as a man responsible for his life. And for what happens to his soul. I would love I have spoken about it as being a journey. I think I should abandon the word journey and speak instead of my adventure of the past 25 years because I think that word reflects more clearly the spirit of those 25 years in the way. I've experienced them. That adventure and I would like to believe it is far from being over has by and large taken place in what I think of as home the small South African city of Port Elizabeth. I would guess that 95% of all the writing that I have done is taken place in Port Elizabeth. As Tom as told you I was actually born in what is called the Kuru. I harsh semi desert region in the center of South Africa, but my family moved to PE as it is known in South Africa when I was still a small boy. They have been spells away from it as a student at University a seaman a journalist all of which happened in my 20s, and then finally as not tolerant in theater, Work still takes me work now. Still takes me away from it for at least six months of each year. Nevertheless Port Elizabeth remains home. I return to it whenever I have to write I have just not found it possible to settle down with pen and paper and function as a writer anywhere else. They are two quotations. I would like to share with you which for me touch and just say more eloquently than I ever could what my relationship to my to my country and to that one little particular place one of the particular corner of it. Say more eloquently than I ever could what it's what it's all about and suggest something of its complexity as well. The first comes from that wonderful writer Pablo, Neruda And he's just a very simple. There's no ambiguity in what he's got to say about it all and this is it. I believe a man should live in his own country and I believe that the resignation of human beings leads to frustration in one way or the other obstructing the light of the soul. I can live only in my own country. I cannot live without having my feet and my hands on it and why ear against it without feeling the movement of its Waters and it Shadows without feeling my roots reach down into its Soul format for material nourishment. That seems of passionate unquestioning commitment is true in my case as well. The second quote is a poem by CP cavafy the Greek poet who lived in Alexandria. and the poem says you said I will go to another land I will go to another see another city will be found a better one than this every effort of mine is a condemnation of fate and my heart is like a corpse buried. How long will my mind remain in this Wasteland? Whatever I turn my eyes, whatever. I may look I see the black Runes of my life here where I have spent so many years wasting and destroying the voice on sirs You will find no new lands. You will find no other Seas the city will follow you. You will round the same streets and you will age in the same neighborhoods. You will grow gray in the same house. Always you will arrive in this same city. Do not hope for any other. There is no ship for you. There is no Road. As you have destroyed your life in this small corner, so you have ruined it utterly in the entire world. That's how I feel about Port Elizabeth. It is as my relationship with it is as certain as the tone of Naruto's statement and as dark and as complex as kavafis poem. in an introduction to a volume of my place in an introduction or start reading faster in an introduction to a volume of my applies about 15 years ago. I gave the following raw the flat and unflattering description of my city. Port Elizabeth is an almost futureless industrial port on the Indian Ocean. It is assaulted throughout the year by strong southwesterly and easterly winds. About half a million people lived there black white Indian Chinese and colored meaning of mixed race. It is also very representative of South Africa in the range of its social strata from Total affluence on the white side to the extremist poverty on the black. I cannot conceive of myself as separate from it. It is the setting for most of the players I have written. That was a lie described it now apart from adjusting the population figure because Port Elizabeth has grown and it's grown very fast. And I think that half a million is closer to three quarters or possibly even a million because it's hard to get accurate statistics in South Africa about population figures apart from adjusting the population figure and making it now closer possibly to a million. There is nothing in that description that 15 years later. I feel I should alter or delete the is however an omission That with the benefit of hindsight. I'm now conscious of and which in the context of my lecture to you this afternoon my lecture this afternoon. I must correct because it has a very direct bearing on my reality as a writer. And the commission is that in addition to all those other incredible qualities that I listed Port Elizabeth has put Elizabeth and its Hinterland. has the most highly politicized black communities in South Africa Now I know that for most Americans the name Soweto is the one that comes to mind when they think about my country, but obviously the name that you see most flushed up most often on the television screens in the newspapers, etc. Etc. But anyone with an in-depth or an intimate knowledge of the situation in my country will tell you that it is in fact, the Eastern Cape that is the region of which Port Elizabeth is the center the the capital city as it were that the Eastern Cape has been and continues to be one of the most critical areas. One of the most important areas not just in terms of what the government euphemistically refers to as the current wave of unrest but in terms of the whole the whole struggle on the part of the black people to be to try to be to be heard to to articulate their political aspirations, the political demands the Eastern Cape has been of singular and major importance. So much. So in fact that the Eastern Cape has been singled out by the government and its Security Forces for particularly vicious and brutal action. I mean I'm I just know that personally because at one point form for many many years it there they are because of my absences out of the country and the terrible situation inside South Africa. Now the group doesn't exist anymore, but for a long period I was actively associated with a group of black actors are called serpent players and I can't tell you how many members of that group. We lost the Maximum Security Prison of South Africa the Maximum Security Prison for political offenders called Robben Island. How many members of our drama group friends actors who had been in were taken or you know, where arrested in the middle of Productions on and then found guilty on trumped-up political charges and sent away for four periods ranging from 10 years to life. And I mean those were completely trumped up political charges the dddd government and as I say security focus on the black communities in the Eastern Cape has been particularly brutal and vicious. the largest single Massacre of black people by security police in the recent troubles occurred in about 20 miles away from where I stay in Port Elizabeth, the place called longer near a little town called you tonight egg where I think it was 21 22 people were shot by the police in one in one encounter. And the reason for this for the it for they did a high high degree of politicization in these black communities is there has many reason I mean it goes back centuries. In fact, I mean white settlers and Indigenous black tribes were fighting each other in bloody Frontier Wars in and around and near Port Elizabeth long before Johannesburg even existed as a place name. The African National Congress has its roots in the Eastern Cape the African National Congress, and I'm sure I don't need to explain this is the most significant black political movement from South Africa now in Exile has its roots in in in the Eastern Cape. There is in fact a little joke in in the black townships of Port Elizabeth, which in which Robben Island our as I say our Maximum Security Prison for black political offenders, simply because it has so many local men in its cells is in fact referred to as a suburb of Port Elizabeth and it's it happens to be about 500 miles away. Now, although I was a young man in my my mid twenties before I consciously started to come to terms with his very very powerful. Pull it with us very powerful political reality of my Port Elizabeth world. What is obvious to me now is that I was that they must be some process some psychic process a king to osmosis. Whereby one takes in certain things from an environment when you're growing up even though you may not be consciously aware of it or thinking about it because when my personal breakthrough did occur It wasn't as if I was suddenly discovered something. I didn't know anything about it was much more case. The sense was much more of recognizing and admitting to something I had known all along. Now in terms of this personal breakthrough this little personal Saga of emancipation they are they were two important experiences one of them and the personalities the characters involved provided the bow the basis on which I went on many many years later to write my play Master Harold and the boys it was all about my relationship with a black man who worked for my family how coming out of the power invested in me by virtue of my white skin. I was able to bully these two full-grown men and how coming out of a very very complex emotional situation one day. I spat in the face of the black man. I wrote the play a hoping that I'd end up being ashamed or would sort of atone for that event, but II did it hasn't worked that way. Anyway there that was one of the experiences intensely personal one the second experience. was was in a sense a personal. Still searingly talk traumatic got all South Africa seems to serve up by way of your education as a human being is trauma. But anyway, still sharing really traumatic but it it operated at a different level and was in fact in in a sense an object gave me an objective insight into not what I was doing to another human being by just unconsciously using the power invested in me by the church of my white skin, which was what my first experience had been all about after I spat in Sam's face. I knew what I was doing and would go on doing to other human beings simply because they had a different skin color and I was protected by a white skin unless I got my act together and etc, etc, etc. In terms of the second experience. It was all about me discovering. What my Society was doing to others myself included. It didn't happen to me in Port Elizabeth Johannesburg was the setting for that one. Newly married and newly arrived in South Africa's Golden City determined to make it as a playwright. I looked around for some sort of work that would pay the rent and feed myself and my wife while we labored away at night. I ended up working in the Fords Burg native Commissioner's Court. For what has four turned out to be the most. He least six months of my entire life a native commission is caught in South Africa is the place where we try men women and sometimes children who are guilty of offences relating to that dreaded passbook which by law by which by virtue of white man laws. They are forced to carry and which the side just about everything in their lives. Now if they are any transgressions in terms of that they have to cut that little book at all times and the police came and it has to be produced on request if there are any transgressions in terms of the stamps and the laws governing that little book they appear in a night of Commissioners court and unless they've got a case which they had never which is never Which never works out and this they've got some sort of Defense. They are dispatched and sent off to jail for periods ranging from two weeks it up to six weeks. I've even seen cases go up to six months. Now the thing about the night of Commissioners goat at Ford's Berg is that we were and I was in a sense the clerk of the court the man who signed the warrants the man who had to witness so that they were properly carried out the lashings which was sometimes given also as part of the sentence. That Court disposed of a case at the rate of one every five minutes. Every day six days of the week for six months of my life six hours a day at the right and I am absolutely accurate in this every five minutes. They would be indifferent face up there babbling incoherently as you try to put out some sort of Defense, which wouldn't be listened to which would be dispatched stamped sent off to a judge five minutes every five minutes every five minutes another face another face and then to round off the day was probably a searing a series of lashings that I had to witness. I was I don't think anybody is actually equipped to cope with that sort of flood tide of human. Misery. I certainly wasn't I I was absolutely devastated by it. I think that if anything like like therapy at existed in South Africa in those years, I would have I would have sold out of some sort of therapist or gone into analysis because my psyche was a complete mess at the end of that experience. But what he did leave me with was a very very clear understanding for the first time of object how thoroughly how diabolically that system worked. It is interesting. For example, it's an incredible system and That's just me. So so effective that South African way of life, which is now codified in a set of laws is so effective that we don't in fact and South Africa has never gone in for lynching parties. We've never needed them. We've never had to do that because the system does it for us? It's a very interesting comparison because sometimes parallels and comparisons comparisons or sort between the South African situations and aspects of American society. And one of the differences is that we don't have lynching parties. And for the reason that I'm just just mentioned now so there I was 25 years old obsessed with the urge to write and traumatized by what my I'm going to cut my Ultron basement traumatized by what I had finally understood my Society was doing now for many years there was an easy and an uneasy alliance between those two those two those two aspects of My reality at that point my incense side anger my rage at what that Society was doing and my urge to write. Sometimes they came together and they worked hand-in-glove in the sense that coming out of my needs to make a personal statement as a writer to make personal statements because that is what I am on about as a writer. I make personal statements. Sometimes the the way in which I was making my personal statement also made a statement about the society. I was living in places. Like I've mentioned the blood not plays like Bushmen and Leona plays like a lesson from a louse is where Bonsai is dead lot of a lot of them have both a social comment and a personal statement. Now to just move ahead. I'm going to just jump a little bit. I was going to spend a little bit of time there, but I'm going to jump it hits that I get to the to the number of it. I have described the alliance between this urge to write and this urge to be political as sometimes an easy Alliance and sometimes and uneasy one and the uneasiness came because they really were moments. When as the situation in South Africa went from bad to worse over the years where I really validly questioned whether writing was in fact an adequate form of action, whether it was a form of action at all in a situation that was crying out for mean to do something what I have now. I have survived enough crises of doubt about writing. On that score I have now finally, I think one through to a conviction and to a belief that writing is in fact if it contains a degree of political commitment and if it is directed at the site society in which he is in fact as valid or form of action for the right people as other forms of action or write for other people so that sort of uneasiness doesn't live with doesn't doesn't bother me anymore. now starting about a year ago, but none of them year ago starting about 10 years ago. Sorry another phase of uneasiness about my my political writing and my urge to make personal statement started and it wasn't so much a question of the politics involved so much as a sense that whereas When I had been governed by the action. And the emotions connected with my political anger my seeing of men who had always been as victims victims of society victims of other men with power I had been writing about men as victims of society or as victims of other I found a more in a more personal note creeping in and I found myself becoming moving imperceptible and unconsciously at first, but now I'm conscious of it and that is what the last play was about moving more towards and beginning to explore more the sense to which we in fact victimize ourselves Is that I think a certain balance needs to be redressed in terms of all the thinking and talking that's going on in our day and age about what the living of a life is about. When I think there is too great a to great I emphasis being placed on the on a negative aspect negative since of being an individual at this moment in in the course of the history of of man. I think we to easily fall into the Trap of seeing ourselves as victims of society and as impotent. To do anything even about ourselves literal let alone about the society in which we live. I actually don't agree agree with that anymore. And in fact just that I give some I give some time to this lecture to the answering of a few questions in case there might be some I'm just going to end off by with a few with two small crowds. three small quotes but from America witch Touch on and focusing on what the net the note on which I would like to in this lecture the first the first the first note comes from Thor 040 who somewhere and this describes. I think what started to happen to me about 10 years ago talks about the need to migrate interiorly as deeply as we can and without intermission toward that supremely consequential being oneself. You also see somewhere else in Walden. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. To affect the quality of the day. That is the highest of Arts. And finally in one of her books. Mary sartin asks, I wonder whether it is possible at nearly 60 to change oneself radically. My answer is yes because I think I succeeded in doing that to myself. When the character in my play leaves his pigsty. I'm in fact acting out a metaphor of an event which has taken place in my own life in which I have seen take place in in other men's life and I would like to believe as I say that that play is an affirmation of faith in the fact that the individual is the master of his soul. I thank you for listening to me. I'm prepared to answer any questions.