Athol Fugard

South African author and dramatist

• Born: June 11, 1932
• Place of Birth: Middelburg, South Africa

Early Life

Athol Fugard (ATH-ehl foo-GAHRD) was born to Elizabeth Magdalena (Potgieter) Fugard, an Afrikaner who ran a boardinghouse, and Harold David Fugard, a jazz pianist of Irish Catholic heritage. Fugard remembers his father as a man of many contradictions: although gentle by nature, the elder Fugard was “full of pointless, unthought-out prejudices.” While distant from his children, he shared with young Athol a love of horror films, pulp fiction, and comic books. His mother, on the other hand, was a capable woman who supported her family through her management first of the Jubilee Hotel and later of the St. George’s Park Tearoom. In contrast to her bigoted husband, Elizabeth Fugard had a sense of the injustices perpetrated by her society that made a lasting impression on her son.

The most influential adult in Athol Fugard’s childhood was a Black man named Sam Semela who worked first at the Jubilee Hotel and later at the St. George’s Park Tearoom. Although separated by age and skin color, Sam and Hally (as Athol Fugard was known in his childhood) became fast friends. To the rest of society they were young White master and a Black servant, but to each other they were companions. For a still unrevealed reason, ten-year-old Hally in a fit of anger one day spat in Sam’s face. Sam forgave him immediately, but feelings of shame haunted Fugard so strongly into adulthood that the incident became the focal point of “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys (1982).

After attending the Marist Brothers College for grammar school, Fugard went to Port Elizabeth Technical College on a scholarship, concentrating on an auto mechanics course, and the University of Cape Town, where he majored in philosophy. A few months shy of his final examinations for a degree, Fugard dropped out of the university to hitchhike to Port Sudan, where he signed on as the only White seaman on the SS Graigaur.

Aboard ship he began a novel that he later threw into the sea. After only two years at sea, Fugard returned home to begin a career as a writer. Starting as a journalist in Port Elizabeth, he moved on to Cape Town, where he met and in September 1956 married Sheila Meiring, an actress who introduced him to the theater and to playwriting. His initial attempts to write for the stage resulted in The Cell (1957) and Klass and the Devil (1957), both of which Fugard would later discount. At the same time, he was becoming aware through the work of John Osborne and William Faulkner of the importance and literary worth of a writer’s regional identity and voice.

A move to Johannesburg proved crucial to Fugard’s development as a distinctly South African playwright. His first job in the Fordsburg Native Commissioner’s Court opened his eyes to the oppressive passbook system that limited a Black person’s opportunities for both employment and decent housing; years later he would use the passbook system as the basis for Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972). Fugard’s second job, as stage manager for South Africa’s National Theatre Organization, introduced him to the practical aspects of theatrical production. The most important event of that year in Johannesburg was Fugard’s discovery of Sophiatown, the Black ghetto just outside Johannesburg. The result was No-Good Friday (1958), a full-length play about the Black youth in Sophiatown, which featured a nonprofessional cast of talented Black actors, among them Zakes Mokae. Nongogo (1959) followed shortly thereafter, also performed by a talented amateur cast. Performed before small private audiences, neither play earned much critical notice.

In late 1959, the Fugards moved to England in search of experience in the English repertory theater. The move was not a success. Fugard approached various theaters with his two early plays and a new one, A Place for the Pigs (wr. 1959), and was rejected, most notably by the Royal Court Theatre, which would later become his London producer. Whenever he could scrape together the price of admission, he saw as many plays as he could, but his own experience in the London theater world remained that of the outsider; his only entrée into that world came through the briefly successful New Africa Group, formed to produce original South African plays. In 1960, disillusioned with their life in London and facing the imminent birth of their child, the Fugards returned to South Africa and settled in Port Elizabeth, where their daughter, Lisa, was born.

Life’s Work

While in London, Fugard began keeping a journal in which he recorded his observations about people and life, reminiscences, quotations, scraps of dialogue, and descriptions. Fugard’s notebooks would prove to be the source of his most powerful ideas, and in 1960 he completed a play based on his first entry. The Blood Knot (1961), Fugard’s breakthrough play, concerns a pair of half brothers, one of whom is sufficiently light skinned to pass as White, the other of whom is dark skinned. With its graphic dissection of South Africa’s racial laws, The Blood Knot ignited controversy from the beginning, launched Fugard’s career as a playwright, and altered the course of South African theater, which was still producing only European plays. With The Blood Knot, Fugard found his style—poetic and colloquial language, a small cast, diametrically opposed characters—and his focus, the victims of apartheid. With Fugard and Mokae playing the half brothers Morrie and Zach, the play captivated audiences all over South Africa, and eventually a British producer mounted a London production, retaining Mokae but replacing Fugard with the better-known Ian Bannen. Despite favorable reviews, the play failed; once again rejected by the English theater, Fugard went home to South Africa.

In 1963, Fugard helped create the Serpent Players, an acting company of enthusiastic amateurs who took their name from their first performance site, a former zoo snake pit. Although repeatedly harassed by the police, the company performed for Black audiences such plays as Bertolt Brecht’s Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis (wr. 1944–45; The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1948) and Die Antigone des Sophokles (pr., pb. 1948; Sophocles’ Antigone, 1990). When two of the actors in Sophocles’ Antigone were arrested and incarcerated in the Robben Island jail, one of them performed a prison version of the play. That performance later inspired The Island (1973), which Fugard wrote with John Kani and Winston Ntshona of the Serpent Players. Fugard’s next plays focused on South Africa’s poor White population. Hello and Goodbye (1965) dramatizes the strained relationship between a brother and sister who meet after years of separation; People Are Living There (1968) depicts a group of lonely, hopeless individuals who live in a run-down rooming house.

In 1964, a critically acclaimed and popularly successful Off-Broadway production of The Blood Knot established Fugard’s reputation in the American theater. His international fame, his work with Black actors, and his powerful antiapartheid plays branded Fugard as a threat to the South African government, and in 1967 he was denied a South African passport. He had two choices: to leave his home forever or to stay in South Africa without the possibility of ever leaving. He stayed, and without theatrical stimuli and experience from elsewhere, was forced to rely on his own imagination and on the resources available in his native theater. The result was Boesman and Lena (1969), considered among Fugard’s finest plays. A two-character play like The Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena depicts a mixed-race couple living outside both the Black and White communities because they are neither one nor the other, bound by their marginality in a love-hate relationship that threatens to destroy them. First staged at Rhodes University in South Africa, the play received an American performance the next year. Lacking a passport, Fugard was unable to travel to New York to see the play. The next year, however, in response to a petition signed by some four thousand supporters, the South African government issued him a passport, enabling him to attend the play’s English premiere at the Royal Court Theatre. He has been able to travel freely ever since.

The 1970s introduced Fugard to the idea of theater as collaborative craft. Orestes: An Experiment in Theatre as Described in a Letter to an American Friend (1971), grew out of improvisations created by Fugard and his actors; as the title indicates, the play remains in the form of a letter. Two more collaborations followed. Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island were created by Fugard with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, who share the credit for authorship in the published versions. Statements after an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (1972), from the same period, was written by Fugard alone, but ideologically it belongs with the collaborative pieces in its treatment of apartheid as a pervasive fact of South African life.

Dimetos (1975), commissioned for the Edinburgh Festival, was inspired by a quote from Albert Camus, the writer most often mentioned in Fugard’s notebooks. Fugard’s only play not specifically set in South Africa, Dimetos was a transitional work as Fugard moved from portrayals of obvious victims of apartheid to less visible victims, conscientious individuals trapped in the paranoia created by an oppressive government. A Lesson from Aloes (1978) portrays three broken lives: those of Piet, believed by his associates to be a government informer; his wife, Gladys, recovering from a mental breakdown brought on by police confiscation of her private journals; and Steven Daniels, Piet’s mixed-race friend, who is to be exiled for his political activity.

“MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys, perhaps Fugard’s best play, grew out of his own pain. For years he had tried unsuccessfully to write a play about Sam Semela, but it took a chance conversation with a friend to trigger the memory of his spitting in his friend’s face.“MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys, Fugard’s attempt to atone for an action that has grieved him all his life, is about Hally (Fugard uses his childhood name), who is torn between admiration of the Black Sam, who has been his surrogate father, and his shame at being the son of a bigoted alcoholic. Hally’s confusion explodes finally in his demand that Sam call him “Master Harold” and culminates in his spitting in Sam’s face.“MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys was a critical and popular success, earning a Tony Award for Zakes Mokae in the role of Sam.

The Road to Mecca (1984), like Fugard’s other plays, has a small cast and a single set and is based on the life of a real person. Fugard’s only play with all-White characters, The Road to Mecca is not blatantly political; like Fugard’s other plays; however, it deals with issues of individual freedom through its heroine, Helen Martins, who has created fanciful figures that she displays in her garden facing east. The townsfolk consider her crazy and her sculptures blasphemous; the local pastor wants to put her away in a nursing home. The play focuses on how Helen manages to fulfill herself despite the bigotry and repression rampant in her small community. Fugard later directed the 1992 screen version of The Road to Mecca.

South African society underwent significant changes during the 1980s, during which some of the laws that affected Fugard’s plays were repealed, and apartheid formally ended in 1994 with the open election that put into power the African National Congress (ANC) and Nelson Mandela as president. Fugard noted forcefully that the nation’s racial and political problems were far from over. My Children! My Africa , first performed in Johannesburg in 1989, was inspired by an incident in which students murdered a teacher whom they suspected of being a government informer. The play addresses themes of politicized education, betrayal in the face of tyranny, and spiritual quests, but above all it celebrates the power of words over violence in achieving reconciliation. Fugard himself emphasized the point in interviews: The play extols the South African willingness to forgive, even among those with every reason to hate. My Life , premiering in 1994, depicts the attitudes of five young women from varying racial and socioeconomic backgrounds toward the new South Africa. Valley Song (1995) concerns a poor Black girl’s attempt to leave her poor home and seek self-fulfillment in the city, which her grandfather tries to prevent.

Some critics saw a shift in Fugard’s attitudes after the fall of apartheid to more introspective, personal, and symbolic plays. The Captain’s Tiger (1997), for example, draws directly from his experiences as a sailor. Exits and Entrances (2004) presents the friendship between a young, idealistic playwright and an old actor trying to recapture the meaning of his craft as his career approaches an end. Similarly, Booitjie and the Oubaas (2006) is about the friendship that develops as an elderly White farmer, following a stroke, confides secrets about his life to the young Black man who looks after him. Sorrows and Rejoicings (2002), on the other hand, explores the lingering effects of apartheid on two women, one Black and one White, in love with the same White man, a poet returned from exile. Victor (2007) concerns a South Africa troubled by broken dreams, drug lords, and criminals.

In 2005 a film was made from Tsotsi, a short novel published in 1979 but written years earlier, about a violent young gang member who overcomes his anger to find redemption in caring for a baby. The film won the Academy Award for best foreign film.

Fugard's later plays include Have You Seen Us (2009), The Train Driver (2010), The Shadow of the Hummingbird (2014), and The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek (2016). In 2022, he cowrote and codirected Concerning the Life of Babyboy Kleintjies with Paula Fourie. In the play, a group of homeless people taking shelter under a bridge confront the harsh truths about themselves as well as the brutal society in which they live.

Fugard has collected numerous awards for his drama, including an Obie Award, Tony Award, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, London Evening Standard Award for best play, Writers Guild Award for outstanding achievement, Evelyn F. Burkey Memorial Award, and Audie Award. In 2010, the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town was established in his honor, and the following year, Fugard was awarded a Special Tony Award for lifetime achievement in the theater.

Significance

Fugard has earned his title as “the conscience of his country” through his ability to translate social and political issues and concerns into living, breathing characters who, like his audiences, love and hate and live and work. His plays are the expression of a man compelled to tell the truth no matter what the cost to himself; they reach far beyond the specific problems of a single society to encompass the nature and needs of the human race. With his uncompromising portrayals of the effects of racism and bigotry, Fugard has accomplished much of value: he has breathed new life into Black drama, providing support and opportunity to Black actors and playwrights; he has proved that political drama can be artistically and theatrically compelling; and he has given the South African theater international status and validity.

Fugard’s life is a reflection and extension of his plays, many of which are based on his own experiences in his homeland. He wrote in the winter 1993 issue of Twentieth Century Literature devoted to him, “I sometimes think of my writing as an attempt on my side, hopelessly inadequate, to acknowledge, to pay back, something of the colossal debt that I owe to South Africa. I said once I think the most important thing a human being does with his life is how he loves in the course of it. The little or the lot that I know about loving was taught to me by South Africa and South Africans, and you can’t have a more profound tie to any place.”

Contrary to the expectations of his admirers, Fugard spoke out against the decision of international playwrights’ and writers’ groups to refuse permission for performance of their work in South Africa. Opposed to the boycott because he felt that South Africans needed to be educated through exposure to ideas from the rest of the world, he has attempted the education of his people through his drama, which portrays the painful realities of life in South Africa. My Children, My Africa is the premier example, recreating a disturbing real-life incident—the “necklacing” (placing a burning automobile tire around the neck) of a Black schoolteacher—but ultimately revealing the growing understanding between two students, one White, the other Black. That Fugard believes strongly in the power of literature is evident in his plays, in which he shows the world that only through brotherhood can the human race be saved.

Bibliography

Cohen, Derek. “Drama and the Police State: Athol Fugard’s South Africa.” Canadian Drama/L’Art dramatique canadien 6 (1980): 151–61. Print.

Cornwell, Gareth, Dirk Klopper, Craig Mackenzie. The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English since 1945. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Print.

Davis, Caroline. Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers. New York: Macmillan, 2013. Print.

Fugard, Athol. Cousins: A Memoir. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997. Print.

Fugard, Athol. Notebooks, 1960–1977. New York: Knopf, 1984. Print.

Gray, Stephen, ed. Athol Fugard. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982. Print.

Green, Robert J. “Politics and Literature in Africa: The Drama of Athol Fugard.” Aspects of South African Literature. Ed. Christopher Heywood. London: Heinemann, 1976. Print.

Gussow, Mel. “Witness.” New Yorker 20 Dec. 1982: 47–94. Print.

Phillips, Brian. "Ploughing the Page: An Interview with Athol Fugard."Journal of Human Rights Practice 4.3 (2012): 384–95. Print.

Simango, John. "The Paradox of Freedom and Fear in Athol Fugard's My Children! My Africa!" Imbizo, vol. 14, no. 11, 2023, doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/12367. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Spec. issue of Twentieth Century Literature. (1993). Print.

Vandenbroucke, Russell. “In Dialogue with Himself: Athol Fugard’s Notebooks.” Theatre 16 (1984): 43–48. Print.

Vandenbroucke, Russell. Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard. New York: Theater Communications Group, 1985. Print.

Wertheim, Albert. The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. Print.