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Los Angeles Times
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Athol Fugard, South African theater artist whose works confronted apartheid, dies at 92
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Athol Fugard, South Africa's foremost dramatist who explored the pervasiveness of apartheid in such searing works as 'The Blood Knot' and ''Master Harold' … and the Boys' to show how the racist system distorted the humanity of his country with what he called 'a daily tally of injustice,' has died. He was 92. The South African government confirmed Fugard's death and said South Africa 'has lost one of its greatest literary and theatrical icons, whose work shaped the cultural and social landscape of our nation.' Six of Fugard's plays landed on Broadway, including 'The Blood Knot' and two productions of ''Master Harold'... and the Boys.' 'The Blood Knot' tells of how the relationship between two Black half-brothers deteriorates because one has lighter skin and can pass for white, which ultimately leads to him treating his darker half-brother as an inferior. '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,' South African Sports, Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie said of Fugard. Because Fugard's best-known plays center on the suffering caused by the apartheid policies of South Africa's white-minority government, some among Fugard's audience abroad were surprised to find he was white himself. He challenged the apartheid government's segregation laws by collaborating with Black actors and writers, and 'The Blood Knot' — where he played the light-skinned brother — was believed to be the first major play in South Africa to feature a multiracial cast. Fugard became a target for the government and his passport was taken away for four years after he directed a Black theater workshop, 'The Serpent Players.' Five workshop members were imprisoned on Robben Island, where South Africa kept political prisoners during apartheid, including Nelson Mandela. Fugard and his family endured years of government surveillance; their mail was opened, their phones tapped, and their home subjected to midnight police searches. Fugard told an interviewer that the best theater in Africa would come from South Africa because the 'daily tally of injustice and brutality has forced a maturity of thinking and feeling and an awareness of basic values I do not find equaled anywhere in Africa.' He viewed his work as an attempt to sabotage the violence of apartheid. 'The best sabotage is love,' he said. ''Master Harold'... and the Boys' is a Tony Award-nominated work set in a South African tea shop in 1950. It centers on the relationship between the son of the white owner and two Black servants who have served as his surrogate parents. One rainy afternoon, the bonds between them are stressed to a breaking point when the teenage boy begins to abuse the servants. 'In plain words, just get on with your job,' the boy tells one servant. 'My mother is right. She's always warning me about allowing you to get too familiar. Well, this time you've gone too far. It's going to stop right now. You're only a servant in here, and don't forget it.' Anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu was in the audience when the play opened in 1983 — at the height of apartheid. 'I thought it was something for which you don't applaud. The first response is weeping,' Tutu, who died in 2021, said after the final curtain. 'It's saying something we know, that we've said so often about what this country does to human relations.' In a review of one play in 1980, TIME magazine said Fugard's work 'indicts the impoverishment of spirit and the warping distortion of moral energy' that engulfed both Blacks and whites in apartheid South Africa. Fugard was born in Middleburg in the semiarid Karoo on June 11, 1932. His father was an English-Irish man whose joy was playing jazz piano. His mother was Afrikaans, descended from South Africa's early Dutch-German settlers, and earned the family's income by running a store. Fugard said his first trip into Johannesburg's Black enclave of Sophiatown — since destroyed and replaced with a white residential area — was 'a definitive event of my life. I first went in there as the result of an accident. I suddenly encountered township life.' This ignited Fugard's longstanding urge to write. He left the University of Cape Town just before he would have graduated in philosophy because 'I had a feeling that if I stayed I might be stuck into academia.' Fugard's theater experience was confined to acting in a school play until 1956, when he married actor Sheila Meiring and began concentrating on stage writing. He and Meiring later divorced. He married second wife Paula Fourie in 2016. He took a job in 1958 as a clerk with a Johannesburg Native Commissioner's Court, where Black people who broke racial laws were sentenced, 'one every two minutes.' Fugard said he was broke and needed the job, but it included witnessing the caning of lawbreakers. 'It was the darkest period of my life,' he said. He got some satisfaction in putting a small wrench in the works, by 'shuffling up the charge sheets,' delaying proceedings enough for friends of the Black detainees to get them lawyers. Later in life, Fugard taught acting, directing and playwriting at the University of California, San Diego. In 2006, the film 'Tsotsi,' based on his 1961 novel, won international awards, including the Oscar for foreign language film. He won a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011. More recent plays include 'The Train Driver' (2010) and 'The Bird Watchers' (2011), which both premiered at the Fugard Theatre named after him in Cape Town. As an actor, he appeared in the films 'The Killing Fields' and 'Gandhi.' In 2014, Fugard returned to the stage as an actor for the first time in 15 years in his own play, 'Shadow of the Hummingbird,' at the Long Wharf in New Haven, Connecticut. —— Kennedy reported from New York. Kennedy and Imray write for the Associated Press.
Euronews
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
South African anti-apartheid playwright Athol Fugard dies aged 92
By Sarah Miansoni The writer exposed the realities of apartheid in plays such as 'The Blood Knot' and "'Master Harold'...and the Boys', and refused to play for segregated audiences. ADVERTISEMENT Athol Fugard, the South African playwright whose work explored the racial oppressions of apartheid, died on Saturday at the age of 92. Throughout six decades, Fugard produced more than 30 plays, to great public and critical acclaim. 'South Africa has lost one of its greatest literary and theatrical icons, whose work shaped the cultural and social landscape of our nation', the South African Minister of Sport, Arts, and Culture said in a statement. "Athol Fugard was a fearless storyteller who laid bare the harsh realities of apartheid through his plays, giving a voice to those silenced by oppression.' Born in 1932 in Middelburg, Cape Province, Athol Fugard was the only child from a father of Irish and English descent and an Afrikaner mother, who ran a teashop and became the main breadwinner of the family. Athol Fugard was 16 when South Africa introduced the apartheid regime in 1948. 'I think at a fairly early age I became suspicious of what the system was trying to do to me', he told Interview Magazine in 1990. 'I knew the way it was trying to pull me. I became conscious of what attitudes it was trying to implant in me and what prejudices it was trying to pass on to me.' A target of government persecution Fugard moved to Johannesburg in early adulthood and worked as a clerk in a court that sentenced Black people who broke racial law. The experience opened his eyes to the realities of apartheid and ignited his desire to write. His first major play, 'The Blood Knot', premiered in 1961. Set in South Africa, it confronts two brothers who share the same Black mother but have different fathers: one of them can pass as a white man whilst the other is dark-skinned. Following the initial success of the play, it was banned in South Africa and the government made it illegal for interracial casts to play in front of interracial audiences. That did not hinder Fugard's determination. He continued to work with multiracial casts and refused to play for white-only audiences. In the 1960s, he created The Serpent Players, a theatre workshop for Black comedians that launched the careers of future South African stars John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Many of Fugard's co-workers were jailed for their theatrical activities. Due to his race, Fugard avoided prison, but his dissidence still made him the target of government surveillance and persecution. In 1967, after 'The Blood Knot' was broadcast on British television, Fugard's passport was confiscated, and he was unable to leave the country for several years. A sense of shame As his career progressed, Fugard's work found always greater critical acclaim. Six of his plays landed in Broadway, including "'Master Harold'...and the Boys", his first drama to premiere outside of South Africa. It is said to be his most autobiographical work. The play is set in a teashop, and centres on the relationship between white owners and their Black servants. In the climax of the play, Hally, the son of the owners, spits in the face of Sam, one of his parent's Black employees. The scene is derived from a real-life incident that took place in the Fugard family's teashop. "The young Athol Fugard did in fact spit in the face of a Black man to his eternal shame. Even as I sit here now, I can remember that moment in my childhood when it happened', Fugard told South African television in 1992. This sense of shame stayed with him throughout his life and infused his writing. Throughout his career, Fugard drew from his own experience and privilege to denounce the racial hierarchy instituted by the South African regime in stories that found resonance in audiences around the world. ADVERTISEMENT For his work, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2001 and received the Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011. He is survived by his wife Paula Faurie and his children Lisa, Halle and Lannigan.
