"Nothing has changed," are almost the first words you hear in Athol Fugard's latest work. But, of course, everything has changed in the new South Africa not least for an oppositional writer like Fugard.
And his play is a moving, if sometimes overly symbolic, meditation on exile, guilt, liberalism, love of country and the need to preserve the best of the past even in a time of political upheaval.
Fugard starts with the death of an Afrikaner poet, Dawid, in a Karoo village in the South African heartland. After Dawid's funeral his white academic wife, Allison, confronts the black servant, Marta, who 18 years previously bore him a daughter, Rebecca.
With the aid of flashbacks, mutual reminiscence and Dawid's own reappearance, we gradually piece together his story. We learn of Dawid's political activism, incendiary poetry, wasted years in London exile, failed marriage and return home not just to die but to confront the consequences of his actions.
So what is Fugard actually saying? Partly that the writer should never abandon his roots and that domestic persecution is sometimes preferable to foreign liberty.
But Fugard also suggests that while the South African future belongs to Rebecca and her generation, it would be a tragic mistake to destroy everything that went before: rejecting the monstrosity of apartheid does not, he implies, mean burning the oppositional art and literature it produced.
Fugard is never afraid to lay on the symbolism: the family house, with its table polished with Marte's tears, stands too obviously for South Africa. And, while Fugard uses Ovid as a potent example of the sorrows of exile, one could point to many writers and artists who have prospered away from their homeland.
But what makes the play emotionally powerful is the complexity of Fugard's own feelings about South Africa: his hatred of its past barbarities, his hopes for its future and his enduring love of its landscape.
Even the play's slightly awkward structure, with its reminiscent soliloquies and resurrected hero, is made up for in Fugard's own production by the quality of the acting.
Marius Weyers's Dawid has something of the gritty, self-flagellating intensity of Fugard himself. Jennifer Steyn as the bourgeois academic and Denise Newman as the exploited servant both perform with controlled dignity. And Amrain Ismail-Essop as Rebecca, though not allowed her voice till late in the play, burns with justified resentment.
It is a far from flawless play; but, as with the late work of Eugene O'Neill, you forgive its occasional clumsiness for its sense of lived experience and what it cost the author to write it.
· Until April 20. Box office: 020-7328 1000. At Warwick Arts Centre from April 23 to 27.
