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New York Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Athol Fugard's Plays Illustrated the Value of Every Human Life
In early 2010, I was sitting at a communal table in a coffee shop in Cape Town, when I spotted a grizzled, bearded fellow who looked strangely familiar. It was Athol Fugard, South Africa's foremost playwright and the great chronicler of his country's apartheid past. There he was, sipping a cup of coffee like any ordinary person. I plucked up courage and approached him, murmuring something inarticulate about my admiration for his writing. 'Hall-O,' Fugard said enthusiastically. 'Join us. Have a coffee. Or a glass of wine.' One of the great things about Fugard, who died on Saturday, was that he was an ordinary person as well as an extraordinary one. He was wonderfully enthusiastic about people and their potential, ready to see the good in every situation, but also unafraid to confront the bad, both in others and himself. The famous scene in ''Master Harold' … and the Boys,' in which the young white protagonist spits in the face of his Black mentor, was, he freely confessed, drawn from his own life. As the theater critic Frank Rich noted in a 1982 New York Times review of the play, Fugard's technique was to uncover moral imperatives 'by burrowing deeply into the small, intimately observed details' of the fallible lives of his characters. My first encounter with Fugard's work was in the early 1980s, when I saw a production of his 1972 play 'Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,' written with Winston Ntshona and John Kani. It's a bleakly comic tale of a man who assumes another identity and assigns his own to a corpse, in order to gain the coveted pass book that the South African authorities required as permission to work. It was a visceral, painful jolt to the soul. I grew up in apartheid South Africa. I knew about passbooks, about the police hammering on the door at night, about the dehumanizing, demeaning way Black people were treated. But the humanity and warmth of Fugard's writing, the complex reality of his characters, made the cruelty of South Africa's racist regime an excruciating truth. In 2010, Fugard was living in San Diego, but had returned to Cape Town to rehearse a new play, 'The Train Driver,' before its premiere at the newly built Fugard Theater, which the producer and philanthropist Eric Abraham had named after the playwright. The Fugard, which was to become a vibrant beacon on the South African arts scene, was located in District Six, a formerly mixed-race area that was declared a 'whites only' neighborhood by the apartheid government in 1966. (The theater, where numerous works by Fugard were seen over a decade, closed in 2020, a victim of the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns.) 'You will be sitting in the laps of the ghosts of the people who couldn't be here,' Fugard said on opening night. Fugard's plays are in great part about those ghosts, an attempt to bear witness to forgotten and unknown lives and to the moral blindness and blinkered vision of the reality engendered and perpetuated by apartheid. His best-known works — 'Blood Knot,' 'Boesman and Lena,' 'The Island,' 'The Road to Mecca,' 'Sizwe Banzi,' 'Master Harold' — are mercilessly unsparing about the insidious way that race determines relationships in apartheid South Africa. But they are also deeply humane. 'Moral clarity — in such short supply in South Africa and indeed the world — was what he delivered,' Abraham wrote after the playwright's death last weekend. 'He pointed us to the boxes containing our past and urged us to rifle through them in order to learn more about ourselves.' Fugard understood, Abraham continued, 'that divisions can only be overcome by a realization of a shared humanity, a palpable sense that we must look after one another if we are to make it through an often cruel and unforgiving world.' Fugard moved back to South Africa soon after the Fugard Theater opened, first living in New Bethesda, where 'The Road to Mecca,' about the outsider artist Helen Martins, was set; later he and his wife, Paula Fourie, moved to the university town of Stellenbosch. I met and interviewed him several times over the years; he was sometimes intense, but always jovial, unpretentious, humble. Once he told me that he considered himself an outsider artist, without formal training or a degree, starting to write at a time when no one thought it worthwhile to put a South African story onstage. But by being determinedly local, Fugard transcended the specifics of one country. As Abraham noted, his plays demonstrate the value of every human life. 'Come over for a glass of wine,' Fugard would inevitably say at the end of an interview. I wish I had.
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Athol Fugard, South African political dissident playwright, dies aged 92
The South African playwright and director Athol Fugard, whose works included the plays Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island and the novel Tsotsi, has died at the age of 92. A major political dissident playwright of the 20th century, Fugard wrote more than 30 dramas including Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (in 1972) and 'Master Harold' … and the Boys (1982). Both of those drew upon the time in the 1950s when he could only find employment as a clerk in one of the courts where black South Africans were charged (and inevitably convicted) of breaches of the 'pass laws', designed to control the movements of a racially segregated population under the apartheid system. There, he witnessed hourly the dehumanisation of those who had chosen the 'wrong' streets or people. Fugard's cultural and political impact was rivalled elsewhere only by the dramas of Václav Havel in what was then Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. Havel was jailed and, when released, abandoned theatre to become the first president of the Czech Republic. Fugard – despite setting up two theatre companies in the segregated black townships and courageously refusing to play to the state-mandated 'whites only' audiences – avoided prison, due to being white and therefore not a primary target of the racist government. The worst direct personal persecutions Fugard suffered were the removal of his passport and the occasional banning of plays and burning of books. He was always conscious, though, of benefiting from the immoral hierarchy his writing decried. The writer's race would also have made him an impossible political leader in the new Republic of South Africa: its dissident turned president in the Havel manner was Nelson Mandela, who had a strong background presence in Fugard's plays, especially The Island (1972), set on Robben Island, the penitentiary for political prisoners where Mandela had spent some of his 27 years of incarceration. Born in 1932, Fugard was the only child of Harold, from an immigrant family of Irish descent, and Elizabeth, whose Potgieter clan were among the early Afrikaans settlers of Dutch stock. A jazz pianist turned shopkeeper, Harold moved his family in 1935 to Port Elizabeth, an urban industrial town that remained Fugard's main home and most regular dramatic setting for the next nine decades. During his childhood, the family ran a hotel and cafe in Port Elizabeth where 'Hally' (as the young Athol was known) grew up. There, as a teenager in the late 1940s, an incident occurred that would lie at the heart of his psychology and creativity. In published extracts from his notebooks, Fugard explained how Sam Semela, a black employee in the family businesses, became 'the most significant – the only – friend of my boyhood years'. But, after a 'rare quarrel', Hally pulled racial rank and spat in Semela's face. While confiding to his journal that he would never be able to 'deal with the shame that overwhelmed me the second after', Fugard made literary recompense with 'Master Harold' … and the Boys, its title acknowledging a racist hierarchy between white people and their servants that is overturned by a devastatingly apologetic depiction of how the demon of superiority can rise even in the mind of someone who defines as a liberal: the spitting scene is its climax. One of the dedicatees of the published play is 'Sam', with whom Fugard had been reconciled. Public admission of this shaming story was typical of Fugard's personal honesty, but can also be seen as an attempt to forestall any 'saint' or 'saviour' interpretation of his work. The contemporary pejorative term 'white saviour', with its implication of credit stolen and virtue claimed, was not yet widely used, but, once it was, Fugard faced retrospective accusation. A complication arose with the working methods of the African Theatre Workshop and Serpent Players, two multi-racial companies Fugard and his wife, Shiela (also a writer) formed either side of 1960, first in Johannesburg and then Port Elizabeth. Early Fugard plays such as No-Good Friday (1958), Nongogo (1959) and The Coat (1966) improvised scenes with actors based on their own experiences and then created a fixed text for performance. As a major Fugard scholar, Professor Dennis Walder, has pointed out, it was yet another horror of the system that the writer could only work with colleagues of colour at his home by registering them, for bureaucratic purposes, as his domestic staff. Fugard's desire to collaborate with the wronged community, rather than writing anti-apartheid stories from an isolated study in a white area (a criticism of some contemporaries), can reasonably be seen as another compensating response to the Sam shame. But a majority black co-operative run by a white man subsequently raised issues of 'appropriation' to which Fugard was alert: editions of The Island and its companion play, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972), in which someone takes on the identity of a dead man in order to use his 'pass book' (ID papers), have the credit 'devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona', with royalties split three ways. The circumstances in which Fugard's early plays were made now sound like something from dystopian fiction. The South African police would raid rehearsals, check scripts and take the names of actors; it became standard for performers to be listed in programmes and on posters under the identities of fictional characters they had previously played. The end of apartheid and Mandela's presidency removed, from 1994, what the novelist Nadine Gordimer had called 'the only subject' for white liberal writers in South Africa. Fugard, though, wrote plays that effectively reflected the country's 'truth and reconciliation' phase of attempted restorative justice. In The Train Driver (2010), his strongest late work, the white title character seeks out the family of a black mother and child who died when they stepped in front of his train; in Sorrows And Rejoicing (2001), the family of a dead, white anti-apartheid writer reflect on the evasions of his life. That Fugard continued as a dramatist even when the driving cause of his first plays was achieved was due to the incompleteness of the victory. Whereas anti-Soviet dramas now have only historical interest – as relative democracy has continued in Russia's former bloc – the 2021 revival of Fugard's Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, at the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond, remained disconcertingly relevant. While the specific evil it dramatised – the ban on interracial sex in South Africa from 1927 to 1985 – was gone, the play now served a new purpose: a metaphor for the continuing inequalities of opportunity and security suffered by people of colour around the world. The unexpected longevity of Statements continued a paradox that ran through Fugard's career: situations that he detested as a citizen were his dramatic fuel. Parents leaving the London production of Statements could be heard explaining to appalled children that the immorality laws had existed in a Commonwealth country during the lifetime of anyone older than 36. That duty of education will keep Fugard's plays in the theatrical canon, as will the broader lessons of Statements, 'Master Harold' … and the Boys and The Island in how racism roots and grows. His 1980 novel Tsotsi, about crime in Johannesburg, was adapted as an Oscar-winning 2005 film, directed by Gavin Hood. Fugard would have been the first to acknowledge that others, such as Kani and Ntshona, were the theatrical Mandelas of free South Africa, but the man who called himself 'a classic example of the impotent, white liberal' was an epitome of the good people who, in Hannah Arendt's formulation, must act if evil is not to prevail.
