It is the story of Piet Bezuidenhout, a red-faced, big-hearted Afrikaner, who is suspected of being an informer; Gladys, his fragile embittered wife, whose tenuous hold on sanity has been broken by a routine police raid during which her diaries were ransacked; and Steve Daniels, a Colored activist just out of jail and about to leave South Africa for England on an Exit visa (which means he can never return).
[3] In 2009, Don Aucoin of The Boston Globe listed it alongside Boesman and Lena (1969) and "Master Harold"...and the Boys (1982) as one of the plays in which Fugard "unforgettably dramatized the soul-warping costs, for oppressor as well as victim, of [apartheid].
[5] Tim Leininger of Journal Inquirer argued, "Though the root plot of 'Aloes' is profound, there is a lot of cumbersome subplot dragging what could have been a taught [sic] 90-minute play into 2 hours of sometimes lagging melodrama.
[7] In 2018, Marcus Crowder of the San Francisco Chronicle billed A Lesson from Aloes as "subtle yet shattering", stating that the play "slowly simmers for most of its absorbing two hours before brilliantly boiling over and sadly coming to rest."
"[8] Conversely, Arifa Akbar of The Guardian gave a 2019 Finborough Theatre performance three out of five stars, writing, "It is a powerful piece that reflects on how political fear and mistrust can taint individual lives, marriages and friendships, though the emotional pitch is raised early on by the actors and flattens any greater nuance or psychological subtext between them.