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OBITUARY: Athol Fugard — global playwright who shone a light into dark corners of the SA psych
Many of his plays were shaped by the politics of the 1970s and ’80s
09 March 2025 - 19:44
by Kyle Zeeman
https://t.co/V7TOh9kKB1
Before its closure in March 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the
Athol Fugard Theatre in Cape Town attracted thousands of patrons a
year: a beacon in the turbulent waters of SA politics and the arts,
much like the man it was named after.
Athol Harold Lanigan Fugard was born on June 11 1932 in Middelburg, in
the Great Karoo region of the Eastern Cape. He and his two siblings,
an older brother and younger sister, moved with their parents to Port
Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) in 1935.
His father, Harold David, was a jazz pianist who struggled with a
childhood accident that left him increasingly unable to work. His
mother, Elizabeth Magdalena (Potgieter), ran a small boarding house
and later a cafe, to try to make ends meet for the family. These
places and experiences would later inspire several Fugard plays,
including Hello and Goodbye, The Captain’s Tiger and “Master Harold”
... and the Boys.
The boy everyone called “Hally” was fun-loving and enjoyed playing
pretend, hinting at a calling that would one day see him become one of
SA’s greatest playwrights.
In a career spanning more than six decades, Fugard would use his
talent to bring a voice to the voiceless, lift those trodden down by
society and speak out against the apartheid system.
“A little white boy dealing with his indoctrination in SA, turning me
into a little racist — because that is what that society tried to do
to me. Thank God I had a mother who fought against it,” he told author
Alan Shelley in 2002, praising those who had “liberated” him.
He attended the Catholic Marist Brothers College and a local technical
college, where he would spend much of his free time writing stories
inspired by tales his father would tell him and from the books he
read. He later studied philosophy at the University of Cape Town, but
yearned to see the world beyond the fences of the apartheid system.
Just months before his final exams in 1953 Fugard dropped out,
hitchhiking through Africa with a friend, Perseus Adams, with £60 in
his pocket and 10 tins of sardines. He later became a deck hand on a
ship bound for Asia. He spoke fondly of his experience living and
working side-by-side with men of all races on the vessel, and said it
helped liberated him from prejudice.
Throughout this time Fugard missed home and within a few months
returned to Port Elizabeth.
He worked as a journalist and took a role with the SABC in Cape Town.
It was here he met, and in 1956 married, actress Sheila Meiring and
started cultivating his love for theatre.
The pair founded the group The Circle Players, and Fugard soon penned
his first plays: The Cell and Klaas and the Devil.
The pair moved to Johannesburg, where Fugard got a job as a clerk at
the Native Commissioner’s Court. He described witnessing the constant charging of black people for violating pass laws that restricted their movements as “the ugliest thing” he had ever been a part of, and the
source of his pessimism.
Fugard began using his pen to highlight the injustice. He started
working in the late 1950s with a group of actors in Johannesburg,
including Zakes Mokae, and wrote the plays No-Good Friday and Nongogo.
Fugard’s plays were part of the bustling cultural melting pot that
brewed in Sophiatown at the time and helped prepare the ground for one
of his most famous pieces: the international hit production The Blood
Knot.
Returning to SA in 1960 after a brief spell living abroad, Fugard used
his experiences over the previous few years to finish The Blood Knot
and present it on stage in Johannesburg in 1961.
At the same time, Fugard and his wife welcomed a baby girl, Lisa, who
would go on to be an author in her own right.
The Blood Knot’s criticism of apartheid soon caught the attention of
the government, who withdrew Fugard’s passport for a time. The secret
police also began monitoring his theatre company after he joined calls
for a boycott of segregated theatre audiences.
The SA production of The Blood Knot was closed by authorities, but the
play’s reputation spread with Mokae’s performances in London, and in
New York with a young James Earl Jones and JD Cannon. The New York
Times voted it play of the year in 1964.
Fugard’s international career had begun.
In the early 1960s Fugard began working with a group of actors and
creatives in East London and formed The Serpent Players, which got its
name from performing in an abandoned snake pit.
In the years that followed, he produced Hello and Goodbye, People are
Living There, The Last Bus and the popular Boesman and Lena.
But after travelling to appear in a BBC television production of The
Blood Knot in 1967, his passport was again confiscated for several
year and his family put under surveillance.
The government eventually relaxed his passport restrictions, allowing
him to visit England a few years later to direct Boesman and Lena for
an international audience.
By the 1970s Fugard’s plays regularly premiered in theatres across SA,
London and New York and soon his name was known across the world for
both his talent and advocacy against the apartheid government.
He also formed a kinship with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona,
who co-authored and played leading roles in his plays: Sizwe Banzi is
Dead, The Island, Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act
and, later, My Children! My Africa.
Like much of his previous work, the plays were shaped by the politics
of the 1970s and 1980s. The Island was taken to allude to Robben
Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, and considered too
controversial by the apartheid government.
Sizwe Banzi is Dead won the London Theatre Critics Award in 1974 and
was nominated for a prestigious Tony Award in 1975, with Kani and
Ntshona walking away with best actor awards at that year’s ceremony.
Dimetos was performed at the 1975 Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, and
another play from the time, A Lesson from Aloes, won Fugard an
international award in 1981 from the New York Critics Circle.
Fugard’s semi-autobiographical play “Master Harold” ... and the Boys received Best New Play awards from both London and New York critics,
and won Mokae a Tony Award.
In 1982 Fugard came to the realisation that he was an alcoholic and
started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in New York. He said
he felt better writing under the influence, believing in some ways it
helped his creativity, but he knew that it was fracturing his
relationship with his wife and daughter. He feared that he could lose
the ones he loved and end up a drunk like his father, whom he was
reflecting on at the time with his work in “Master Harold” ... and the Boys.
Besides getting professional help, Fugard decided to start writing
sober — a process he found frustrating and difficult at times, while
fearing his career would never be the same again.
He channelled his struggles into his work, including playing the role
of poet and drug addict Eugene Marais in The Guest.
He earned a Writers Guild of America award in 1986 for his
contribution to American theatre and spent much of his time in the US.
Despite the international fame, acclaim and premieres of The Road to
Mecca and A Place With the Pigs abroad, Fugard continued to invest his
time in developing SA theatre and providing a safe harbour for thought
in a suppressive apartheid system. He would stage plays by other
writers and mentor many.
Fugard did not reserves his criticism just for the apartheid
government, and in 1989’s My Children! My Africa! seemingly criticised
the ANC for their calls to boycott black schools, believing it would
deeply affect black pupils.
“I always write out of love — not hatred for the villain but
compassion for the victim,” he told writer Alan Shelley.
As the dismantling of apartheid began in the early 1990s, Fugard
started to reflect more on his own life.
He published the memoir Cousins in 1994 and wrote several plays that
touched on his life, including Playland, Valley Song, The Captain’s
Tiger and Sorrows and Rejoicings.
And as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission sat in the 1990s to
deal with apartheid atrocities, Fugard’s work increasingly reflected
on post-apartheid SA through works such as Exits and Entrances,
Victory, The Train Driver, The Blue Iris and The Painted Rocks at
Revolver Creek.
Beyond the stage, Fugard acted in several films, including as Jan
Smuts in Gandhi, Marigolds in August, The Road to Mecca, Meetings with Remarkable Men, The Guest at Steenkampskraal, Boesman and Lena and The
Killing Fields.
Marigolds in August was awarded a Silver Bear at the prestigious
Berlin International Film Festival in 1980.
That same year Fugard published the novel Tsotsi, and the film
adaptation won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
In 2011 Fugard received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement and in
2014 he became the first African recipient of Japan’s highest honour
in the arts, the Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award. He was
an Honorary Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature, the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Dramatists Guild and the
Mark Twain Society.
He received honorary degrees from several universities across the
world, including Rhodes, Stellenbosch, Cape Town, Pretoria, Natal, Witwatersrand, Georgetown, Wittenberg, Brown, Princeton, Yale and the prestigious Juilliard School for the performing arts in New York.
In 2005 he was given the Ikhamanga Medal in Silver by the SA
government for his contribution to theatre.
In 2010, the Fugard Theatre opened in Cape Town. It debuted with
Fugard’s play The Train Driver. The theatre also hosted the premiere
of The Bird Watchers and Die Laaste Karretjiegraf — Fugard’s first
play in Afrikaans written to fulfil a promise he made long ago to his Afrikaans-speaking mother.
It was around this time this time that he and Meiring got divorced. He
later married Paula Fourie, with whom he worked on the play The Shadow
of the Hummingbird, in New York.
Fugard spent several of his later years in California, working as an
adjunct professor of playwriting, acting, and directing at the
University of California, San Diego, before returning to SA and moving
with Fourie to Nieu-Bethesda, a small village in SA’s semi-arid Karoo
region, and the wine lands of the Western Cape.
Source: <
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2025-03-09-obituary-athol-fugard-global-playwright-who-shone-a-light-into-dark-corners-of-the-sa-psych/>
or
<
https://t.co/V7TOh9kKB1>
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web:
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog:
http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
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