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Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Athol Fugard: Death of a great South African playwright
Athol Fugard, who has died aged 92, was widely acclaimed as one of South Africa's greatest playwrights. The son of an Afrikaner mother, he was best known for his politically charged plays challenging the racist system of apartheid. Paying tribute to Fugard, South Africa's Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie hailed him as "a fearless storyteller who laid bare the harsh realities of apartheid through his plays". "We were cursed with apartheid, but blessed with great artists who shone a light on its impact and helped to guide us out of it. We owe a huge debt to this late, wonderful man," McKenzie added. Fugard wrote more than 30 plays in a career that spanned 70 years, making his mark with The Blood Knot in 1961. It was the first play in South Africa with a black and white actor - Fugard himself - performing in a front of a multiracial audience, before the apartheid regime introduced laws prohibiting mixed casts and audiences. The Blood Knot catapulted Fugard onto the international stage - with the play shown in the US, and adapted for British television. It led to the apartheid regime confiscating his passport, but it strengthened Fugard's resolve to keep breaking racial barriers and exposing the injustices of apartheid. He went on to work with the Serpent Players, a group of black actors, and performed in black townships, despite harassment from the apartheid regime's security forces. Fugard's celebrated plays included Boesman and Lena, which looked at the difficult circumstances of a mixed-race couple. Having premiered in 1969, it was made into a film in 2000 starring Danny Glover and Angela Bassett. His novel, Tsotsi, was made into a film, winning the 2006 Oscar for best foreign language movie. Other well-known plays by him include Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island, which he co-wrote with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. In a simple tribute on X, Kani posted: "I am deeply saddened by the passing of my dear friend Athol Fugard. May his soul rest in eternal peace. Elder 🌹" Fugard won several awards for his work, and received a lifetime achievement honour at the prestigious Tony awards in 2011, while Time magazine described him in the 1980s as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world. "Apartheid defined me, that is true... But I am proud of the work that came out of it, that carries my name," Fugard told the AFP news agency in 1995. Fugard feared that the end of apartheid in 1994 could leave him with little to do, but he still found enough material to write. In a BBC interview in 2010, he said that he shared the view of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu that "we have lost our way" as a nation. "I think the present society in South Africa needs the vigilance of writers, every bit as much as the old one did. "It is a responsibility that young writers, playwrights, must really wake up to and understand that responsibility is theirs, just as it was mine and a host of other writers in the earlier years." Additional reporting by the BBC's Elettra Neysmith. How royal divorce papers have shaken the Zulu kingdom Is it checkmate for South Africa after Trump threats? Even in his final seconds of life, first gay imam pushed boundaries Go to for more news from the African continent. Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica Africa Daily Focus on Africa
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Athol Fugard: Death of a great South African playwright
Athol Fugard, who has died aged 92, was widely acclaimed as one of South Africa's greatest playwrights. The son of an Afrikaner mother, he was best known for his politically charged plays challenging the racist system of apartheid. Paying tribute to Fugard, South Africa's Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie hailed him as "a fearless storyteller who laid bare the harsh realities of apartheid through his plays". "We were cursed with apartheid, but blessed with great artists who shone a light on its impact and helped to guide us out of it. We owe a huge debt to this late, wonderful man," McKenzie added. Fugard wrote more than 30 plays in a career that spanned 70 years, making his mark with The Blood Knot in 1961. It was the first play in South Africa with a black and white actor - Fugard himself - performing in a front of a multiracial audience, before the apartheid regime introduced laws prohibiting mixed casts and audiences. The Blood Knot catapulted Fugard onto the international stage - with the play shown in the US, and adapted for British television. It led to the apartheid regime confiscating his passport, but it strengthened Fugard's resolve to keep breaking racial barriers and exposing the injustices of apartheid. He went on to work with the Serpent Players, a group of black actors, and performed in black townships, despite harassment from the apartheid regime's security forces. Fugard's celebrated plays included Boesman and Lena, which looked at the difficult circumstances of a mixed-race couple. Having premiered in 1969, it was made into a film in 2000 starring Danny Glover and Angela Bassett. His novel, Tsotsi, was made into a film, winning the 2006 Oscar for best foreign language movie. Other well-known plays by him include Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island, which he co-wrote with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. In a simple tribute on X, Kani posted: "I am deeply saddened by the passing of my dear friend Athol Fugard. May his soul rest in eternal peace. Elder 🌹" Fugard won several awards for his work, and received a lifetime achievement honour at the prestigious Tony awards in 2011, while Time magazine described him in the 1980s as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world. "Apartheid defined me, that is true... But I am proud of the work that came out of it, that carries my name," Fugard told the AFP news agency in 1995. Fugard feared that the end of apartheid in 1994 could leave him with little to do, but he still found enough material to write. In a BBC interview in 2010, he said that he shared the view of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu that "we have lost our way" as a nation. "I think the present society in South Africa needs the vigilance of writers, every bit as much as the old one did. "It is a responsibility that young writers, playwrights, must really wake up to and understand that responsibility is theirs, just as it was mine and a host of other writers in the earlier years." Additional reporting by the BBC's Elettra Neysmith. How royal divorce papers have shaken the Zulu kingdom Is it checkmate for South Africa after Trump threats? Even in his final seconds of life, first gay imam pushed boundaries Go to for more news from the African continent. Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica Africa Daily Focus on Africa
BBC News
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Athol Fugard: A great South African playwright
Athol Fugard, who has died aged 92, was widely acclaimed as one of South Africa's greatest son of an Afrikaner mother, he was best known for his politically charged plays challenging the racist system of apartheid. Paying tribute to Fugard, South Africa's Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie hailed him as "a fearless storyteller who laid bare the harsh realities of apartheid through his plays". "We were cursed with apartheid, but blessed with great artists who shone a light on its impact and helped to guide us out of it. We owe a huge debt to this late, wonderful man," McKenzie wrote more than 30 plays in a career that spanned 70 years, making his mark with The Blood Knot in 1961. It was the first play in South Africa with a black and white actor - Fugard himself - performing in a front of a multiracial audience, before the apartheid regime introduced laws prohibiting mixed casts and Blood Knot catapulted Fugard onto the international stage - with the play shown in the US, and adapted for British television. It led to the apartheid regime confiscating his passport, but it strengthened Fugard's resolve to keep breaking racial barriers and exposing the injustices of went on to work with the Serpent Players, a group of black actors, and performed in black townships, despite harassment from the apartheid regime's security forces. Fugard's celebrated plays included Boesman and Lena, which looked at the difficult circumstances of a mixed-race couple. Having premiered in 1969, it was made into a film in 2000 starring Danny Glover and Angela novel, Tsotsi, was made into a film, winning the 2006 Oscar for best foreign language movie. Other well-known plays by him include Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island, which he co-wrote with the actors John Kani and Winston a simple tribute on X, Kani posted: "I am deeply saddened by the passing of my dear friend Athol Fugard. May his soul rest in eternal peace. Elder 🌹"Fugard won several awards for his work, and received a lifetime achievement honour at the prestigious Tony awards in 2011, while Time magazine described him in the 1980s as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world. "Apartheid defined me, that is true... But I am proud of the work that came out of it, that carries my name," Fugard told the AFP news agency in feared that the end of apartheid in 1994 could leave him with little to do, but he still found enough material to a BBC interview in 2010, he said that he shared the view of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu that "we have lost our way" as a nation. "I think the present society in South Africa needs the vigilance of writers, every bit as much as the old one did. "It is a responsibility that young writers, playwrights, must really wake up to and understand that responsibility is theirs, just as it was mine and a host of other writers in the earlier years."Additional reporting by the BBC's Elettra Neysmith. More BBC stories on South Africa: How royal divorce papers have shaken the Zulu kingdomIs it checkmate for South Africa after Trump threats?Even in his final seconds of life, first gay imam pushed boundaries Go to for more news from the African us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Athol Fugard obituary
Apartheid in South Africa cut both ways. The white Afrikaner playwright Athol Fugard, who has died aged 92, was not allowed inside a black township in his home country for many years, so was heavily reliant on black actors keeping him informed on how life was – and wasn't – for them and their families. His collaboration with two of them, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, from the township of New Brighton near Fugard's home in Port Elizabeth, in the early 1970s, resulted in three extraordinary plays; they dealt with the injustices and absurdities of the apartheid era in profoundly moving dramas of great eloquence and dignity of spirit. The first of them, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972), is the story of a man who, unable to work because of the wrong stamp in his passbook, steals a dead man's identity; the new ID allows him to earn a pittance for his family who live 150 miles away. Ntshona's beaming visage as the man recites his new number in the photographer's studio is one of the indelible images of my theatre-going life. The second play, The Island, showed the same actors in a cell on Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison), refracting their struggle for self-esteem and independence in a performance of the last, highly charged scene of Sophocles' Antigone. And Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act – performed in Britain by Fugard's great muse and inspiration, Yvonne Bryceland, and Ben Kingsley – charted the dangers and indignities of the prohibited relationship of a black man and a white woman. The plays were initially produced by the Serpent Players in Port Elizabeth, and all three were thunderously acclaimed when imported to the Royal Court, London, in 1973. Sizwe transferred to the West End and The Island began a long life around the world; it returned to the National Theatre in 2000 and, two years later, was no less powerful, still with Kani and Ntshona, at the Old Vic. Fugard, who had first visited Britain in 1959, was recognised as the leading South African playwright of his time, on a par with Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee in literature. He never went beyond a basic format of biographical monologues and spare, electrified dialogue between two (at most, three) characters; but that's all he needed. 'Space and silence,' he once told me, 'are the two definitive challenges in theatre. The one the actor fills with his body, the other he fills with his noise and, finally, with silence itself. Those are for me the two dimensions.' He was clearly influenced by Samuel Beckett, whom he revered, but loved music ('the most sublime assault on silence, and also the most sublime challenge to it') and said that no writer taught him more than did the cello suites of Bach. All playwrights are conditioned by their backgrounds and dig deep for their best plays, but Fugard ploughed richer terrain than most. Born in the Karoo village of Middelburg on the Eastern Cape, he was, he said, 'the mongrel son' of Harold Fugard, an English-speaking, disabled former jazz pianist and alcoholic of Polish and Irish descent, and Elizabeth (nee Potgieter), an Afrikaner, and woman of highly developed moral probity, who could barely sign her name. The family moved n 1935 to Port Elizabeth, where Elizabeth, the breadwinner of necessity, ran a boarding house and, later, the tearoom in St George's Park. Fugard was educated at the Marist Brothers college, the Port Elizabeth Technical college, where he studied motor mechanics, and the University of Cape Town, where he studied philosophy and social anthropology, and was the university boxing champion, before dropping out in 1953 without taking his finals. He hitchhiked across the continent and joined a ship in Port Said, Egypt, travelling the world as a merchant seaman. On returning to Cape Town in 1956, he wrote news bulletins for the South African Broadcasting Corporation and launched an experimental theatre group. That year, he married the actor Sheila Meiring. The couple moved to Johannesburg and, on discovering the black township of Sophiatown, Fugard wrote his first play, No Good Friday (1958), for a group of black actors, including Zakes Mokae; there was a writers' group, too, which included Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba and Nat Nakasa. By day, he worked as a clerk in the pass laws court but, after writing and directing his second play, Nongogo (1959), he found a job as a stage manager in the National Theatre Organisation. His watershed play, and the first to be performed in South Africa with an interracial cast, was The Blood Knot (1961), a lacerating duologue for two brothers, played by Fugard and Mokae, one of lighter skin colour than the other (they had different fathers, the same mother). When the film of The Blood Knot was released in 1967, Fugard had his passport withdrawn by the government of PW Botha, shortly after he had appeared in the play's British premiere at the Hampstead Theatre Club. But an international campaign had the passbook restored to him in 1971. Janet Suzman and Kingsley appeared as an estranged brother and sister battling over their inheritance in Hello and Goodbye at the King's Head in Islington in 1973; the show was taken up by the Royal Shakespeare Company as Fugard simultaneously triumphed at the Royal Court. He was now a major theatrical figure. The National Theatre presented the metaphysical, poetic A Lesson from Aloes in 1980, importing Fugard's own production from the recently formed Market theatre in Johannesburg, a collaboration repeated in 1983 with 'Master Harold' … and the Boys, which Fugard described as his most immediately autobiographical play; the Fugard character, Hally, visits his parents' tearoom where the black waiters are his best friends. A Place with the Pigs (1988), directed by Fugard at the National, with Jim Broadbent as a Soviet army deserter and Linda Bassett as his scavenging wife, was a metaphorical reflection, he said, on his protracted battle with alcoholism. He sobered up as apartheid crumbled and then faced the even sterner challenge of writing about his country in a totally new way, much as political playwrights in Europe had to adjust with the fall of communism. Not everyone felt that Fugard succeeded, but My Children! My Africa!, which arrived in the National Theatre repertory as Mandela was released from prison in 1990, anticipated trouble ahead: the black township schoolmaster, played by Kani, is murdered by a mob after his star pupil rejects literature in favour of political activism; another pupil, a white girl played by Fugard's daughter Lisa Fugard, achieves a more hopeful political maturity. His plays became calmer, more conciliatory. Playland at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 1993 was warmly received as his first post-apartheid piece – the story of two men, one black, one white, both haunted by a violent past, finding forgiveness and reconciliation in an amusement park on New Year's Eve in 1989. With the election of Mandela as president in 1994, Fugard expressed relief at being unburdened of the responsibility he had felt as a writer. Sorrows and Rejoicings (2001) at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn, north London, was the first of his plays to be written abroad, in California, where he taught at the university in San Diego; an exiled poet returns home to face the three women he left behind, a white wife, a 'coloured' mistress, and a mixed-race daughter. Nothing was perfect in the new South Africa, and Fugard became only slightly less angry with the government of Thabo Mbeki than he was with earlier regimes. But he never sold up at home, and was very moved to have a theatre named in his honour in Cape Town in 2006. He wrote his first play in 10 years, The Train Driver, for the Fugard theatre, and his production ran at the Hampstead theatre in 2010. The new play, like so many, was a two-hander, and a deeply disturbing one. The figures in a bleak landscape were a black grave-digger and a white railwayman haunted by the ghosts of a mother and her three small children from a nearby squatters' camp who stood on the track, on a windswept plain on the edge of Cape Town, where such distressing suicides are common. The driver had turned the tragedy in on himself and had lost his wife, his job and his sanity. Fugard published his Notebooks 1960-1977, edited by Mary Benson, in 1983, and Cousins: A Memoir in 1994. They form one of the most courageous and illuminating artistic testaments of our time. Gavin Hood's 2005 film of Fugard's 1980 novel, Tsotsi, won the Oscar for best foreign language film. Fugard's first marriage ended in divorce in 2015. He is survived by his second wife, Paula Fourie, a writer and academic, whom he married in 2016, and their children, Halle and Lannigan, and by Lisa, the daughter from his first marriage. Athol Harold Lannigan Fugard, playwright, born 11 June 1932; died 8 March 2025
Yahoo
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
South Africa's taboo-breaking playwright Athol Fugard
South African writer and theatre director Athol Fugard was acclaimed at home and abroad for plays that exposed the injustices of the apartheid system and challenged its racist taboos, including by putting black and white actors on stage together. Fugard, who died on March 8, aged 92, wrote more than 30 plays over seven decades, his most important in the darkest days of apartheid, touching on the raw themes of the cruel and dehumanising regime that ended in 1994. "His work helped expose the inhumanity, injustice and blind stupidity of the system to audiences around the world," The Guardian newspaper wrote in 2012 of the "fearless, flinty, obdurate Afrikaner". In 2006 the film "Tsotsi", based on a novel he completed in 1961 and published in 1980, won the first Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for a South African production. Mourning him in a statement on Sunday, the mayor's office in Cape Town called him "a true patriot whose legacy will continue to inspire generations". "Beyond his literary achievements, Fugard's commitment to justice and equality made him a pivotal figure in South Africa's cultural and political spheres," it said. "Athol Fugard was not just a luminary in the world of theatre; he was a teller of profound stories of hope and resilience about South Africa." - Staging segregation - Fugard was born in 1932 in the small Eastern Cape town of Middelburg. He grew up as laws were being assembled to keep the races apart and bar black South Africans from free movement, decent education, and other rights. His first major play was "The Blood Knot", a story of two mixed-race brothers which premiered in 1961 with a white actor -- Fugard himself -- and a black actor on stage together and in front of a multiracial audience. It was a first under the apartheid system and was followed by laws prohibiting mixed casts and audiences. "You could use the stage to talk about things that would have landed you in trouble if you talked about them openly and publicly in any other context," Fugard said in a 2014 interview with the American Academy of Achievement network. He went on to work with the Serpent Players, a group of black actors, resisting official harassment to put South African stories on stage at a time when many still thought only European classics were worthy. Among his best known was "Boesman and Lena", about the difficult circumstances of a mixed-race couple, which premiered in 1969 and was made into a film in 2000 starring Danny Glover and Angela Bassett. The semi-autobiographical "'Master Harold'... and the Boys", set in 1950, looks at prejudice through the interaction between a white adolescent and two black men working for his family. The prevalent theme of resistance in his most celebrated plays including "Sizwe Banzi Is Dead" and "The Island", which he co-wrote with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, solidified Fugard's place in protest theatre. Fugard "mirrors both the trauma and triumph of human striving in South Africa," The Christian Science Monitor wrote in 1992, calling him "The Face of South Africa's Conscience". - A life's work - "Apartheid defined me, that is true... But I am proud of the work that came out of it, that carries my name," Fugard told AFP in 1995. His pieces were regularly revived after the first all-race election in South Africa in 1994, although Fugard feared the end of the system could make his writing redundant. But the messy legacy of apartheid provided new material and he continued to write into old age, with "The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek" debuting in New York in 2015 when he was in his 80s. He told NPR at the time that "possibly, at this moment in our history, the stories that need telling are more urgent than any of the stories that needed telling during the apartheid years." Fugard, who married twice, won several awards for his work, notably a 2011 Tony for a lifetime's achievement in theatre. bur-br/eab/bgs/ach/rlp/sbk
