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Athol Fugard: The Great South African Playwright Who Captured What It Means to Be Human

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I was shocked to learn that the famous South African writer Athol Fugard had passed away. I had known his age to be 92 but somehow I never expected him to die. He was always a survivor.

When I think about Fugard, the first thing that comes to mind is the first time I interviewed him in Port Elizabeth (today’s Gqeberha) in South Africa. It was for the first of three books I’ve written on his plays.

I had just seen his play Boesman and Lena in London. It absolutely knocked me out with its emotional power.



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Boesman and Lena are two mixed-race people who are outcasts and are wandering the mud flats of a river trying to work out where they’ve been and where they come from. They argue and fight and then out of the darkness comes a black man. He tries to tell them his story but they don’t speak the same language.

The black man dies next to their fire. Before they wander off into the darkness there’s a moment when Lena decides to dance and sing a song. It’s a transcendent moment in the bleakness, but it’s only a moment. It gave you a sense that even when people are at their lowest, there is the possibility of some kind of transcendence.

At the end of the day of interviewing Fugard, he stopped. He put Bach’s cello suites on and we sat in the darkness. And he said:

Theatre is like music. The important thing is the rhythm. If you can catch the rhythm correctly then you can express what you want to say.

That would stay in my mind forever.

Early years

Fugard was born in a town called Middelburg in 1932 in South Africa’s semi-desert Karoo area. His mother was Afrikaans (originally Dutch) and his father seems to have had an Irish background.

The family moved to the coast when he was three. They were never well off, in fact they were close to poverty a lot of the time. His mother helped to run a boarding house in Port Elizabeth. Although it was an Afrikaans home, he was sent to an English school and then university. He studied anthropology and philosophy. He decided that to be a writer he had to just leave when the time came, so he didn’t finish his degree.

He and a friend hitchhiked up Africa to the far north. After that he found various jobs and spent 10 months as a deckhand on a ship. He said that working on that ship with all the different races and cultures on it enabled him to see who people are. That in the end ethnicity didn’t matter. What mattered was who you were and how you connected with each other.

He managed to find work in Johannesburg, as a clerk in a special court set up in the apartheid system. Apartheid divided the races. Under white minority rule black people had to have passes if they wanted to travel or work anywhere at all. This Native Commissioners Court held trials for those who had broken the pass laws. He said that this was where his fundamental pessimism grew.

Making plays

He began to make friends with people in a township called Sophiatown that was racially mixed but became a black settlement under apartheid as white people were moved out. He began to make plays with these friends.

I’ve called these early plays “the Sophiatown plays” because they were based on the experiences of these black people. One was Nongogo (a slang term for a sex worker) and another was No Good Friday (Friday being pay day) about small town gangsters – called tsotsis, a title later used for his novel that would become a film and win an Oscar.

His real breakthrough came a few years later. At the time of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 he was moved to write a play called The Blood Knot about two half-brothers, one of whom looked more white than the other, and the struggles between them.

What’s important is that he didn’t approach any commercial theatre. It was put on at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, where black and white actors and audiences could mix.

There was a thread through almost his whole career of using black actors. There were no drama schools for black South Africans so these plays became a place of training.

International fame

What I call “the Statement plays” – including Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island – made his reputation worldwide. Time magazine would call him the greatest living playwright writing in English.

These two plays were workshopped with black actors from the New Brighton township – John Kani and Winston Ntshona and others. They had a theatre group but they came to request that he help them make better plays. The Serpent Players were formed and they workshopped their own life experiences. Like on the ship, ethnicity didn’t matter, what mattered was who you were and how you connected with each other.

Sizwe Banzi must take on the role of a dead man in order to survive – to use his pass book to be able to find work. The Island is about staging a Greek tragedy on Robben Island, the political prison where South Africa’s first black president Nelson Mandela was held. Mandela would later say how important this play was as a reflection of the struggle for democracy and how people managed to survive despite the worst conditions.

Later plays

Unlike mainstream commercial theatre, Fugard’s plays continued to be intended for small-scale, rough conditions. This is seen even in later plays like ‘Master Harold’ and the Boys.

This is even though his plays were being put on worldwide, in translation as well. I once saw a production of Sizwe Banzi in Arabic done by Palestinians.



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He once said that the thing that mattered to him was to raise the problem of how we may love one another without exploitation.

‘Master Harold’ and the Boys is about his childhood as a white boy in the boarding house his mother worked at, with two black male servants. At the climax of the play, the boy Hally (using the author’s own nickname) spits in one man’s face. When the two black men dance together at the end they show the possibilities for harmony despite white anger and resentment. How black people had to come together in order to survive.

Fugard produced over 30 plays in his life, some in collaboration and with the help of his favourite actors. He relied enormously on his fellow performers. He created many great female roles, especially with the actress Yvonne Bryceland.

Bearing witness

A final play to mention is The Train Driver (2010), a post-apartheid play. Two actors, one black, one white, play several different roles in a cemetery for people whose names were not known when they died.

A white train driver has witnessed a mixed-race woman commit suicide by standing in front of the train on the tracks with her children. He is tormented by what he witnessed. It’s a very bleak play and yet there’s a sense that somehow something will survive despite the worst conditions.

After formal apartheid, it didn’t mean that racism or exploitation had disappeared. Fugard saw what was beneath the laws. He saw the people who were affected.

Something he said right at the beginning of his career was that all his theatre needs is:

The actor and the stage. The actor on the stage. Around him is space, to be filled and defined by movement and gesture. Around him is also silence, to be filled with meaning, using words and sounds. And at moments, when all else fails him, including the words, the silence itself.

He used the phrase “bearing witness” quite often. It can be applied to a lot of great art, it bears witness to the times. Bearing witness to something with such depth and intensity that there’s a recognition of what it means and an understanding of the situation out of which it arises.

All Fugard’s people – tramps, discarded people, poor people, people on the fringes – they are connected with all the people we know of today who are refugees. Who are going around the world looking for a safe home. His work helped people to understand the world we live in and the human condition.

The Conversation

Dennis Walder does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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