The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World

ONE: Early Work and Early Themes

One of the high points of New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s 1992 retrospective exhibition of the works of Henri Matisse was the attention devoted to his earliest works. There one could immediately see his origins in works of seventeenth -century Dutch still life painters and the subsequent French painters Courbet and Chardin.1 One could see as well the starting points for the directions his later work would take. With Athol Fugard, as with Matisse, the earliest works—No-Good Friday (1958) and Nongogo (1959)—have innate merit, suggest early literary influences on Fugard (e.g. O’Neill and Beckett), and indicate directions either taken or eschewed in his later work. Approaching No-Good Friday and Nongogo with a knowledge of the plays Fugard is to write in the decades that follow , one can recognize the markings of Fugard’s style and some situations and themes he will develop in later plays. At the same time, however, it is important to recognize and discuss the power and values of these plays in and for themselves. Born in Middleburg on 11 June 1932 the son of Harold Fugard and Elizabeth Magdalena Potgieter, Athol Fugard combines the two major European strains in South Africa. His father, a sometime jazz pianist and a cripple, was of Englishspeaking , Anglo-Irish ancestry; his mother, an Afrikaner, was a descendant of a Voortrekker family. In 1935, the Fugards moved to Port Elizabeth, where Athol Fugard grew up and where his mother ran a boardinghouse and later the St. George’s Park Tea Room, the setting for “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys. After attending a Port Elizabeth technical college, he enrolled at the University of Cape Town, which he left in 1953 shortly before he would have earned a degree.2 After hitchhiking from South Africa to Sudan, Fugard signed on for ten months as a hand on the SS Graigaur. That journey and his attempt to write a novel while at sea are recorded in The Captain’s Tiger (1998). Upon returning home in May 1954, he ONE Early Work and Early Themes took up a position as a freelance writer for the Port Elizabeth Evening Post; and in 1956, he married actress Sheila Meiring, also of mixed English and Afrikaner ancestry . Two years later, the couple moved to Johannesburg. Fugard was employed there as a clerk in the Fordsburg Native Commissioner’s Court, where pass law violations were tried. Very likely that experience and his time on the SS Graigaur, where he had met men of many races and nationalities, played a role in making him poignantly aware of South Africa’s racialism and its troubling effect on the lives of South Africans of all races. After Fugard arrived in Johannesburg in 1958, he was introduced by his Cape Town classmate Benjamin Pogrund, who had also come to Johannesburg, to Sophia Town, the black township (later razed) one could enter without a pass. There he became associated with a group of black artists that included Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, and saxophonist-actor Zakes Mokae. Together on 30 August 1958, they performed what was essentially Fugard’s first full-length play, NoGood Friday, at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre with Fugard directing and Sheila Fugard serving as manager of their African Theatre Workshop company.3 To produce a play with a racially mixed cast was a daring move in 1958; and when NoGood Friday had a one-night performance in Johannesburg’s Brooke Theatre, a white audience venue, Lewis Nkosi acted the role of Father Higgins, which Fugard had been playing. The members of the African Theatre Workshop seem to have been as much engrossed in the theory of drama as in production itself. As Vandenbroucke, quoting from an interview with Mokae, points out, the group members “were more theoretical than practical and would discuss what Beckett, for instance, was trying to say.”4 Eventually Fugard would profit from Beckett’s minimalist dramaturgy as well as from Beckett’s ideas; but in No-Good Friday with its eleven characters, Fugard crowds his stage, allowing the force of his drama to become diffuse. Nevertheless , much of that force does remain. No-Good Friday is a play bedeviled by a problem that has haunted the reception of Fugard’s work throughout his career. The play is set in Sophia Town, the black township, which would later be destroyed, at the edge of Johannesburg. As a white writer, Fugard necessarily sees black and coloured life...