"Victory," The Fountain Theatre, West Hollywood, CA, by James Scarborough

Athol Fugard’s Victory, directed by Stephen Sachs for the Fountain Theatre, compels us to experience the gap between historical trajectories (Nelson Mandela, South Africa, post-apartheid) and personal realities (armed robbery, hopelessness, loyalty).

Sachs makes us aware of the huge strides South Africa has made as well as of the work that remains to be done to sustain the ongoing dream-come-true.

It’s relevance to our present moment is eerie: the jubilation of the statue of Saddam Hussein toppling over belies the tidying-up that needs to be done after decades of oppression. Rome wasn’t re-built in a day.

Sachs presents both a corkscrew drama and a political thriller. His direction is sensitive and powerful. The action is immediate, enacted on Travis Gale Lewis’s comfortable set that perhaps suggests complacency to outsiders like Vicky and Freddie. Is South Africa’s foundation really all that fragile?

Vicky (Tinashe Kajese) – thus named to commemorate Mandela’s release from prison...Victory! – was the daughter of a woman who worked for Lionel (Morlan Higgins), a teacher. The mother dies, Lionel’s wife dies, and child Vicky has to come to terms with growing up without a mother, with an alcoholic and probably abusive father. In other words, with a lot of sudden freedom, just like her country. She makes a wrong choice when she teams up with thug Freddie (Lovensky Jean-Baptiste).

They make a shiftless pair, with wild, unfocused dreams. When they decide, at Freddie’s behest, to rob a now-elderly Lionel, they don’t just rob an old man, they violate the prospect of a constructive future.

This ensemble cast is stupendous, top notch, (insert superlative here). You just want to hug Kajese for her vulnerable, horribly misguided, conlicted Vicky. Her false courage (a symbol for the New Africa methinks) and her on-again, off-again hope for the future move us, give us hope and despair. That’s the alpha and omega of Kajese’s majestic performance, her quivering equipoise of hope and despair.

Higgins made Lionel colonial: stately, refined, humanistic like something out of Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country. Not necessarily a relic of the past, but a template that’s probably been smashed. He made his character so compassionate that when he realized that ultimately he – and, by symbolic extension, all of the ancien regime – had had failed to provide, not just for Vicky but for the future of the country, his solemn resignation made his demise almost a foregone conclusion.

Jean-Baptiste’s Freddie was a live wire: mercurial, quick to anger and violence. He was the knee-jerk reaction of the pair, the one who, unlike Vicky, didn’t reflect, at least until that very last instant. He was totally void of hope and ambition. Unlike Vicky, he didn’t have a conscience and that’s where Jean-Baptiste shined: he made his character pure adrenaline. Dynamic, to be sure, but certain to spike in the end and spike hard.

Performances are 8 pm, Thursday – Saturday, 2 pm, Sunday. The play runs until March 23. Tickets are $18-25. The Theatre is located at 500 Fountain Avenue, Los Angeles. For more information call (323) 663-1525 or visit www.fountaintheatre.com.