Athol Fugard


Athol Fugard is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director widely regarded as “South Africa’s greatest playwright.” He is best known for his political plays opposing the system of apartheid and for the 2005 Oscar-winning film of his novel Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood. Acclaimed as “the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world” by Time Magazine in 1985, Fugard continues to write and has published over thirty plays. Fugard was an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. He is the recipient of many awards, honours, and honorary degrees, including the 2005 Order of Ikhamanga in Silver "for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre" from the government of South Africa. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was honoured in Cape Town with the opening of the Fugard Theatre in District Six in 2010, and received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.

Personal history

Fugard was born as Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, in Middelburg, Eastern Cape, South Africa, on 11 June 1932. His mother, Marrie, an Afrikaner, operated first a general store and then a lodging house; his father, Harold Fugard, was a disabled former jazz pianist of Irish, English and French Huguenot descent. In 1935, his family moved to Port Elizabeth. In 1938, he began attending primary school at Marist Brothers College. After being awarded a scholarship, he enrolled at a local technical college for secondary education and then studied Philosophy and Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, but he dropped out of the university in 1953, a few months before final examinations. He left home, hitchhiked to North Africa with a friend, and then spent the next two years working in east Asia on a steamer ship, the SS Graigaur, where he began writing, an experience "celebrated" in his 1999 autobiographical play The Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage.
In September 1956, he married Sheila Meiring, a University of Cape Town Drama School student whom he had met the previous year. Now known as Sheila Fugard, she is a novelist and poet. The couple have since divorced. Their daughter, Lisa Fugard, is also a novelist.
The Fugards moved to Johannesburg in 1958, where he worked as a clerk in a Native Commissioners' Court, which "made him keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid." He was good friends with prominent local anti-apartheid figures, which had a profound impact on Fugard, whose plays' political impetus brought him into conflict with the national government; to avoid prosecution, he had his plays produced and published outside South Africa. A former alcoholic, Athol Fugard has been teetotal since the early 1980s.
For several years Fugard lived in San Diego, California, where he taught as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting, and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. For the academic year 2000–2001, he was the IU Class of 1963 Wells Scholar Professor at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana. In 2012, Fugard relocated to South Africa, where he now lives permanently. In 2016, in New York City Hall, Fugard was married to South African writer and academic Paula Fourie. Fugard and Fourie presently live in the Cape Winelands region of South Africa.

Career

Early period

In 1958, Fugard organised "a multiracial theatre for which he wrote, directed, and acted", writing and producing several plays for it, including No-Good Friday and Nongogo, in which he and his colleague black South African actor Zakes Mokae performed. In 1978, Richard Eder of The New York Times criticized Nongogo as "awkward and thin. It is unable to communicate very much about its characters, or make them much more than the servants of a noticeably ticking plot." Eder argued, "Queenie is the most real of the characters. Her sense of herself and where she wants to go makes her believable and the crumbling of her dour defenses at a touch of hope makes her affecting. By contrast, Johnny is unreal. His warmth and hopefulness at the start crumble too suddenly and too completely".
After returning to Port Elizabeth in the early 1960s, Athol and Sheila Fugard started The Circle Players, which derives its name from their production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, by Bertolt Brecht.
In 1961, in Johannesburg, Fugard and Mokae starred as the brothers Morris and Zachariah in the single-performance world première of Fugard's play The Blood Knot, directed by Barney Simon. In 1989, Lloyd Richards of The Paris Review declared The Blood Knot to be Fugard's first "major play".
In 1962, Fugard publicly supported the Anti-Apartheid Movement, an international boycott of South African theatres due to their segregated audiences, leading to government restrictions on him and police surveillance of him and his theatre, and leading him to have his plays published and produced outside South Africa.
Lucille Lortel produced The Blood Knot at the Cricket Theatre, Off Broadway, in New York City, in 1964, "launch" Fugard's "American career."

The Serpent Players

In the 1960s, Fugard formed the Serpent Players, whose name derives from their first venue, the former snake pit at the Port Elizabeth Museum, "a group of black actors worker-players who earned their living as teachers, clerks, and industrial workers, and cannot thus be considered amateurs in the manner of leisured whites", developing and performing plays "under surveillance by the Security Police", according to Loren Kruger's The Dis-illusion of Apartheid, published in 2004. The group largely consisted of black men, including Winston Ntshona, John Kani, Welcome Duru, Fats Bookholane and Mike Ngxolo as well as Nomhle Nkonyeni and Mabel Magada. They all got together, albeit at different intervals, and decided to do something about their lives using the stage. In 1961 they met Athol Fugard, a white man who grew up in Port Elizabeth and who recently returned from Johannesburg, and asked him if he could work with them "as he had the know-how theatrically—the tricks, how to use the stage, movements, everything"; they worked with Athol Fugard since then, "and that is how the Serpent Players got together." At the time, the group performed anything they could lay their hands on in South Africa as they had no access to any libraries. These included Bertolt Brecht, August Strindberg, Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare and many other prominent playwrights of the time. In an interview in California, Ntshona and Kani were asked why they were doing the play Sizwe Banzi is Dead, which was considered a highly political and telling story of the South African political landscape at the time. Ntshona answered: "We are just a group of artists who love theatre. And we have every right to open the doors to anyone who wants to take a look at our play and our work.... We believe that art is life and conversely, life is art. And no sensible man can divorce one from the other. That’s it. Other attributes are merely labels." They mainly performed at the St Stephen's Hall – renamed the Douglas Ngange Mbopa Memorial Hall in 2013 – adjacent to St Stephen's Church, and other spaces in and around New Brighton, the oldest Black township in Port Elizabeth.
According to Loren Kruger, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago,
the Serpent Players used Brecht's elucidation of gestic acting, dis-illusion, and social critique, as well as their own experience of the satiric comic routines of urban African vaudeville, to explore the theatrical force of Brecht's techniques, as well as the immediate political relevance of a play about land distribution. Their work on the Caucasian Chalk Circle and, a year later, on Antigone led directly to the creation, in 1966, of what is still South Africa's most distinctive Lehrstück :'The Coat. Based on an incident at one of the many political trials involving the Serpent Players, The Coat dramatized the choices facing a woman whose husband, convicted of anti-apartheid political activity, left her only a coat and instructions to use it.

Clive Barnes of The New York Times panned People Are Living There in 1971, arguing, "There are splinters of realities here, and pregnancies of feeling, hut nothing of significance emerges. In Mr. Fugard's earlier plays he seemed to be dealing with life at a proper level of humanity. Here—if real people are living there—they remain oddly quiet about it. The first act rambles disconsolately, like a lonely type writer looking for a subject and the second act produces with pride a birthday party of Chaplinesque bathos but less than Chaplinesque invention and spirit. harangue one another in an awkward dislocation between a formal speech and an interior monologue." Mark Blankenship of Variety negatively reviewed a 2005 revival of the same work, writing that it "lacks the emotional intensity and theatrical imagination that mark such Fugard favorites" as "Master Harold"...and the Boys. Blankenship also stated, however, that the performance he attended featuring "only haphazard sketches of plot and character" was perhaps the result of Fugard allowing director Suzanne Shepard to revise the play without showing him the changes.
The Serpent Players conceptualised and co-authored many plays that they subsequently went on to perform for a variety of audiences in many theatres around the world. The following are some of their notable and most popular plays:
Fugard developed these two plays for the Serpent Players in workshops, working with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, publishing them in 1974 with his own play Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act. The authorities considered the title of The Island, which alludes to Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela was being held, too controversial, so Fugard and the Serpent Players used the alternative title The Hodoshe Span.
Fugard's play A Lesson from Aloes was described as one of his major works by Alvin Klein of The New York Times'', though others have written more lukewarm reviews.

Later period

"Master Harold"...and the Boys, written in 1982, incorporates "strong autobiographical matter"; nonetheless "it is fiction, not memoir", as and some of Fugard's other works are subtitled. The play is one of Fugard's best-known works, along with The Road to Mecca.
His post-apartheid plays, such as Valley Song, The Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage and his 2007 play, Victory, focus more on personal than political issues.
The Fugard Theatre, in the District Six area of Cape Town opened with performances by the Isango Portobello theatre company in February 2010 and a new play written and directed by Athol Fugard, The Train Driver, played at the theatre in March 2010.
Fugard's plays are produced internationally, have won multiple awards, and several have been made into films, including among their actors Fugard himself.
His film debut as a director occurred in 1992, when he co-directed the adaptation of his play The Road to Mecca with Peter Goldsmid, who also wrote the screenplay.
The film adaptation of his novel Tsotsi, written and directed by Gavin Hood, won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006.

Plays

In chronological order of first production and/or publication:

Filmography

;Films adapted from Fugard's plays and novel
;Film roles
;Theatre
;Honorary awards
;Honorary degrees