Latest news with #TheTrainDriver
The Hindu
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Gnatak theatre group to stage Athol Fugard's play, ‘The Train Driver', in Thiruvananthapuram
In 1979, a group of young people in Bengaluru — undergraduate students, doctors, engineers, and scientists — came together to form Gnatak, a theatre collective staging English plays that highlighted the lives of those on the margins. The group remained active for nearly eight years before going dormant, only to be revived in the early 2000s with a series of productions inspired by the works of leading international playwrights. On May 10, Gnatak will stage The Train Driver in Thiruvananthapuram. The 70-minute play, written by recently deceased South African playwright Athol Fugard, is directed by Anikh Ghosh — an independent filmmaker and writer who also directed Gnatak's inaugural production, The Island (also by Fugard), in 1979. MetroPlus caught up with the Gnatak team currently in the city: actors Abraham Karimpanal and Rohit Dave, and members of the technical crew, Michael Joseph (lighting) and Sutosom Chakraborthy (sound). Abraham and Michael, both 65, have been with Gnatak since its inception. Abraham, also a director and lighting designer, has worked with stalwarts such as Kavalam Narayana Panikkar, Gracias Devaraj, and Prakash Aswani. Michael, a filmmaker and educator known for his pioneering work with various institutions, is director at the Datsi School for Storytellers in Thiruvananthapuram, a collaboration between Zebu Animation Studios and Additional Skill Acquisition Programme (ASAP) Kerala. Rohit, 53, was formerly with Rafiki Theatre and has also worked extensively as a voice artist. Sutosom, in his late 20s, is a CG lighting artist and mentor at Datsi; this production marks his first collaboration with Gnatak. Reality on stage The Train Driver is based on a harrowing real-life event — a mother who died by suicide on a railway track with her three young children. In the play, Roelf Visagie, an Afrikaner train driver, is haunted after his train runs over a Black woman and her baby, still strapped to her back. Wracked with guilt, he turns up at a graveyard and meets Simon, the Black gravedigger tasked with burying the nameless dead. As their conversation unfolds, Roelf slowly begins to make sense of his inner turmoil and the world around him. Abraham and Rohit have been portraying Simon and Roelf respectively since the play's first staging in 2014. 'One of the reasons we chose this piece is its logistical ease — it has only two actors and can be performed in any space,' says Rohit. 'But more than that, although it was written in post-apartheid South Africa, the theme still resonates. It's about two people — from very different backgrounds — trying to understand one another.' Abraham adds, 'It's an emotional work and a challenge for any actor. It suits our style.' Michael expands on this. 'We've been influenced by the likes of Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and Eugenio Barba — pioneers who moved away towards 'physical theatre which celebrated the body and dislodged the centrality of the spoken word'. Our productions have always focused on those pushed to the margins. What's interesting is how much energy each actor brings — it feeds into the other's performance. For us, it's always been about intense collaboration.' As for lighting, Michael says it evolves with each performance. 'Fugard plays with time while remaining in the same physical setting. A scene may begin at dusk and slip into night — so I have to make subtle changes.' Sutosom sees this experience as a growth opportunity. 'It's a chance to push myself and contribute a different dimension to the production,' he says. Abraham notes that The Train Driver will offer audiences in Kerala a different kind of theatre. 'This isn't conventional professional theatre, nor is it the stylised, experimental kind. It is about ordinary people and raw emotion. We don't use masks or exaggerated movements to hide the narrative.' The team sees the production as a tribute to Fugard and his body of work. 'It's been remarkable to see him mature into a masterly playwright. The craft he developed as a writer was so exquisite and nuanced,' Michael says. The Train Driver, produced by Datsi School for Storytellers and Zebu Animation Studios, will be staged at Ganesham, Thycaud, on May 10. For tickets, contact 9447112918.
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.
