Mary Benson writing about The Blood Knot in 1993:
"A play that never ended," is Athol Fugard's recollection, in a conversation with me in 1986, of the first performance of The Blood Knot: it went on for four hours "on a terrible little stage, only about six inches high at one end." The momentous event took place in Johannesburg in 1961 with Fugard and Zakes Mokae playing Morrie and Zach. The tiny rehearsal room of the African Music and Drama school in Dorkay House, a rundown factory in the automobile district, was packed on that suffocating summer's evening. Egg boxes were glued to one wall to shut out the noise of traffic, but through blacked-out windows on the opposite side came the beat of drums from a nearby mine compound."
The excerpt is from an article in Encounters with Fugard: native of the Karoo- Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993
Later Fugard shortened the play considerably making it a normal length (about 90 minutes if my memory is correct) and renamed it Blood Knot (so without the The). The changes consist mainly of removing long speeches which turn it into a much better play. There is an audio available of Zakes Mokae and Athol Fugard performing the shorter work.
Iain