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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
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Athol Fugard caught the impact of apartheid's full-on attack on humanity
Athol was always there. There were other South African playwrights, of course, such as Pieter-Dirk Uys, who pilloried the absurdities of apartheid, and the prolific and commercially successful Gibson Kente or theatrical storytellers such as Gcina Mhlophe. But year after year, for as long as I can remember, Athol wrote the plays that, earlier and more consistently than anyone else, expressed in the public arena the suffering caused by apartheid's full-frontal attack on what it means to be a human being. We were never close but, over many decades, we'd run into each other from time to time in Cape Town or in London. Once, as we stood together in a crowded theatre foyer, he shared his view that all South Africans, everyone, whatever power they wielded or how much cash they'd piled up in their bank account, they were all – we were all – thoroughly fucked up ('opbefok' in his words) by apartheid. If you were born there you couldn't escape the damage living within racism did to your sensibility, to your soul. I think he was right about this and all his plays said it in one way or another. He was just 20 years older than me but I remember as a teenager my parents discussing a play of his they'd seen directed by his early close collaborator Barney Simon. Blood Knot, a play he came back to and revised late in his life, is about two brothers, Morris and Zachariah, raised by the same black mother but with different fathers. One of them is able to pass for white, the other is not. In those days it was amazing and thrilling to my parents and, at one remove, to me that anyone was courageous enough to speak in a theatre about the scandalous possibility that white and black people might be, in some fundamental way, the same. That the characters were brothers was the whole point. For Athol, I think, the horror and the pain that it was his life's task to express were principally caused by the ways in which apartheid insinuated itself into and poisoned the most intimate relationships – with friends, with lovers, even, as in this very early play, within one's closest family. It was, I think, his rage at this outrageous brutalisation of the most delicately experienced aspects of life that powered his best plays such as the wonderful, under-applauded Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act. Statements was developed from improvisations between Athol and Yvonne Bryceland, his longstanding lead actor in Cape Town in the early 1970s. As an acting student, I helped paint the walls of the new theatre, The Space, that the photographer Brian Astbury created for Athol and for Yvonne, who was Brian's wife. On the upper floors many workshops took place in which Athol explored with actors his ideas for new plays, such as one about John Harris, the member of the African Resistance Movement who tried to strike a blow against apartheid by placing a bomb at a railway station; he was hanged for killing a woman and injuring many others. One workshop grew into Dimetos, performed eventually at the Royal Court with Paul Scofield. Athol was a compulsively bold and original writer but, by and large, a conventional director, a 'stager'. When I was writer-in-residence at the Royal Court in the mid-1990s I persuaded the artistic leadership to produce his Valley Song, not a masterpiece but, I thought, an effective play and, I argued, the Court had a tradition of loyalty to its writers that should apply in Athol's case. Under Athol's direction the play seemed even more ephemeral than, perhaps, it is. Even so, loyalty was owed because, two decades earlier, Athol had given the Court a tremendous success, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead. And Sizwe was also – life being full of paradoxes and surprises – directed by Athol with as much verve and style as any show I've ever seen. Written by Athol, John Kani and Winston Ntshona it is, as a play, as great as Sophocles and, as an example of directing panache, right up there with Tadeusz Kantor or Peter Brook. Receiving an award for her 1985 performance as a recluse sculptor in Athol's The Road to Mecca, Yvonne Bryceland held the trophy high and announced modestly 'I accept this on behalf of all the little people', but one wanted to shout out 'What the play says is that there are no little people'. I think that's what Athol wanted to tell the world through his whole writing life.
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.
