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

Introduction

Introduction If one were to list the six or seven most significant English-language playwrights alive in the last decade of the twentieth century, that list would undoubtedly include the names of Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and perhaps August Wilson and David Hare. It would also surely include South African playwright, director, and actor Athol Fugard. Beginning with his first extant play, No-Good Friday, initially performed on 30 August 1958 at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre in Johannesburg, Fugard has made a name for himself as a serious playwright who has often dared to challenge the social system of his country and the ways whites, blacks, and coloureds think of race; and who has expanded our horizons about the nature of human psychodynamics. To this one should add that his plays provide illuminating, important insights into the nature of art, creativity and the ways in which acting in the theatrical sense and acting in the political one are identities. No-Good Friday was staged ten years after the 1948 initiation of apartheid in South Africa, and from that time to the present Fugard’s plays have been milestones and signposts of apartheid’s devastating progress, its demise, and the future that is unfolding in its wake. A thorough discussion of his plays, which this book proposes, will reveal the development and growth of a major playwright of our time as well as his reaction to the vexed questions of art, politics, and race both in his country and more universally. Happily, Fugard, like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, is a keeper of notebooks, in which he records his ideas, his thoughts for possible plays, and some record of how his work germinates. It is our good fortune that the very fine scholar and personal friend of Fugard, Mary Benson, has edited and published Fugard’s 1960–1977 notebooks, and that she has also published her own memoir of Fugard.1 Fugard himself has likewise been generous to interviewers, and thus newspaper, magazine, television, and playbill interviews abound. In preparing this book, I have had the benefit of consulting the original typescripts for many of Fugard’s plays (often amended in the author’s hand) held by the National English Literary Museum 1. Athol Fugard, 1983. Photo by Ruphin Coudyzer. (NELM) in Grahamstown. These and other Fugard materials have recently been sold to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Thus when the text that follows indicates material held at NELM, the originals are now at Indiana University and copies at NELM. Fugard’s plays and the ideas expressed in his work are the main concern of this study. But Fugard is no reclusive, ivory-tower playwright. He is an engaged, consummate genius of the theater who has struggled with the staging of each production ; fought the authorities to produce his plays; striven to end the racial segregation in South Africa on the stage and in the seating areas of the theatre; initiated the careers of at least three brilliant black actors, John Kani, Zakes Mokae, and Winston Ntshona; and found it necessary to premiere some of his plays in America , especially at the Yale Repertory Theatre under the aegis of Lloyd Richards, in order to have them produced without banning in South Africa. There is little need for this study to rechart the history of Athol Fugard as director and actor or recount the vicissitudes of his actors and productions since that has already been done extremely well in two fine books, both published in 1985, one by Russell Vandenbroucke and the other by Dennis Walder.2 At the same time, however, in considering Fugard’s dramatic works, it is important to remember that they are written by someone whose connection with theatre practice is immediate. He has been the manager of theatre groups, such as the Serpent Players and the Space Theatre, and has directed numerous plays, including most of his own. He has trained actors, and his own experience as an actor is wide-ranging. And he has frequently appeared in his own plays, acting major roles in The Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena, A Lesson from Aloes, The Road to Mecca, A Place with the Pigs, Valley Song and The Captain’s Tiger. And some of the plays, most notably Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island, are directly derived from acting exercises. Unlike dramatists who are not themselves theatre...