Harold Athol Lanigan FugardOIS (/ˈæθəlˈfjuːɡɑːrd/;[1] 11 June 1932 – 8 March 2025) was a South African playwright, novelist, actor and director. Widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright[2] and acclaimed as "the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world" byTime magazine in 1985,[3] he published more than thirty plays. He is best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system ofapartheid, some of which have been adapted to film. His novelTsotsi was adapted as afilm of the same name, which won anAcademy Award in 2005.[4] Three plays he wrote, and two plays he co-authored, were nominated for theTony Award for Best Play.
Fugard was born as Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, inMiddelburg, Cape Province (nowEastern Cape),Union of South Africa, on 11 June 1932. His mother, Marrie (née Potgieter), anAfrikaner, operated a general store and then a lodging house; his father, Harold Fugard, of Irish, English and FrenchHuguenot descent, was a formerjazz pianist who had become disabled.[4][10][11]
Fugard attended Port Elizabeth Technical College for his secondary education from 1946 to 1950, then studied philosophy and social anthropology at theUniversity of Cape Town on a scholarship.[14][15] However, he dropped out of the university in 1953, just a few months before final examinations.[4]
Fugard left home, hitchhiked to north Africa with a friend and inPort Sudan, aged 18, enrolled in the crew of the steam shipSS Graigaur.[4] On board, and bound for Japan, he began writing a novel, but deciding it was terrible, threw the manuscript into the sea.[16] He "celebrated" his two years as a merchant seaman in his 1999 autobiographical playThe Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage.[17]
In September 1956, he marriedSheila Meiring, aUniversity of Cape Town Drama School student whom he had met the previous year.[4][18] In 1958, the couple moved toJohannesburg, where Fugard worked as a clerk in a Native Commissioners' Court. He became "keenly aware of the injustices ofapartheid",[4] and befriended local anti-apartheid activists, an experience that was to colour his earliest work.[18][19]
In 1958, Fugard organised "a multiracial theatre for which he wrote, directed, and acted", writing and producing several plays for it, includingNo-Good Friday (1958) andNongogo (1959), in which he and his colleague, black South African actorZakes Mokae, performed.[4] In 1978,Richard Eder ofThe New York Times criticizedNongogo 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 said, "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."[20]
In 1961, inJohannesburg, Fugard and Mokae starred as the brothers Morris and Zachariah in the single-performance world première of Fugard's playThe Blood Knot (revised and retitledBlood Knot in 1987), directed byBarney Simon.[22] In 1989, Lloyd Richards ofThe Paris Review declaredThe Blood Knot to be Fugard's first "major play".[23]
In 1962, Fugard found the question of whether he could "work in a theatre which excludes 'Non-Whites'—or includes them only on the basis of special segregated performance—increasingly pressing". It was made more so by the decision ofBritish Equity to prevent any British entertainer visiting South Africa unless the audiences were allowed to be multi-racial. In a decision that caused him to reflect on the power of art to effect change, Fugard decided that the "answer must be No" to segregation.
That old argument used to be so comforting; so plausible: 'One person in that segregated, white audience, might be moved to think, and then to change, by what he saw'.
I'm beginning to wonder whether it really works that way. The supposition seems to be that there is a didactic—a teaching through feeling element in art. What I do know is that art can give meaning, can render meaningful areas of experience, and most certainly also enhances. But teach? Contradict? State the opposite to what you believe and then lead you to accept it?
In other words, can art change a man or woman? No. That is what life does. Art is no substitute for life.[24]
Of the few venues in the country where a play could be presented to mixed audiences, Fugard noted that some were little better than barns. But he concluded that under these circumstances, "every conceivable dignity—audience, producer, act, 'professional' etc.—" was "operative" in the white theatre except one, "human dignity".[25]
Fugard publicly supported the call of theAnti-Apartheid Movement in Britain for an international boycott of racially segregated South African theatres. The results were additional restrictions and surveillance. He began to have his plays published and produced outside South Africa.[19]Lucille Lortel's production ofThe Blood Knot at theOff Broadway Cricket Theater in New York City in 1964 "launch[ed]" Fugard's "American career".[26]
In the 1960s, Fugard formed theSerpent Players, whose name derives from its first venue, the former snake pit (hence the name) at the Port Elizabeth Museum,[19] "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'sThe Dis-illusion of Apartheid, published in 2004.[27] The group largely consisted of black men, includingWinston Ntshona,John Kani,Welcome Duru, Fats Bookholane and Mike Ngxolo as well asNomhle 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 fromJohannesburg, 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."[28] 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 includedBertolt 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 playSizwe Banzi Is Dead, 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."[28] They mainly performed at the St Stephen's Hall, adjacent to St Stephen's Church,[29] and other spaces in and around New Brighton, the oldest Black township in Port Elizabeth.[30]
the Serpent Players usedBrecht's elucidation ofgestic acting, dis-illusion, and social critique, as well as their own experience of the satiric comic routines of urban Africanvaudeville, to explore the theatrical force ofBrecht's techniques, as well as the immediate political relevance of a play about land distribution. Their work on theCaucasian Chalk Circle and, a year later, onAntigone[19] led directly to the creation, in 1966, of what is still [2004] South Africa's most distinctiveLehrstück [learning play]: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.[27]
Clive Barnes ofThe New York Times pannedPeople Are Living There (1969) in 1971, arguing: "There are splinters of realities here, and pregnancies of feeling, hut [sic] 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 ofChaplinesque bathos but less than Chaplinesque invention and spirit..[The characters] harangue one another in an awkward dislocation between a formal speech and an interior monologue."[31]Mark Blankenship ofVariety 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.[32]
Several of Fugard's early works were performed at the Space Theatre in Cape Town, founded in 1972.[33] The theater mounted almost 300 productions, starting with the premier of Athol Fugard'sStatements After an Arrest under the Immorality Act. It hosted the first productions of the Kani/Ntshona/Fugard collaborationsThe Island[33] andSizwe Bansi is Dead.[34]
The Serpent Players conceptualised and co-authored many plays that it performed for a variety of audiences in many theatres around the world. The following are some of its notable and most popular plays:
InThe Coat, Kruger observes, "The participants were engaged not only in representing social relationships on stage but also on enacting and revising their own dealings with each other and with institutions of apartheid oppression from the law courts downward", and "this engagement testified to the real power of Brecht's apparently utopian plan to abolish the separation of player and audience and to make of each player a 'statesman' or social actor...Work onThe Coat led indirectly to the Serpent Players' most famous and most Brechtian productions:Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972) andThe Island (1973)."[27]
Fugard developed these two plays for theSerpent Players in workshops, working withJohn Kani andWinston Ntshona,[27] publishing them in 1974 with his own playStatements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (1972). The authorities considered the title ofThe Island, which alludes toRobben Island, the prison whereNelson Mandela was being held, too controversial, so Fugard and the Serpent Players used the alternative titleThe Hodoshe Span (Hodoshe meaning "carrion fly" inXhosa).[35]
These plays "espoused a Brechtian attention to the demonstration ofgest and social situations and encouraged audiences to analyze rather than merely applaud the action"; for example,Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, which infused a Brechtian critique andvaudevillian irony-–especially in Kani's virtuoso improvisation-–even provoked an African audience's critical interruption and interrogation of the action.[27]
While dramatising frustrations in the lives of his audience members, the plays simultaneously drew them into the action and attempted to have them analyse the situations of the characters in Brechtian fashion, according to Kruger.[27]
Blood Knot was filmed by theBBC in 1967, with Fugard's collaboration, starring the Jamaican actorCharles Hyatt as Zachariah and Fugard himself as Morris, as in the original 1961 première in Johannesburg.[36] Less pleased than Fugard, the South African government ofB. J. Vorster confiscated Fugard's passport.[10][37]
Fugard's playA Lesson from Aloes (1978) was described as one of his major works byAlvin Klein ofThe New York Times,[38] though others have written more lukewarm reviews.
The Road to Mecca was presented at theYale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut, in May 1984. Directed by Fugard, the cast starredCarmen Mathews, Marianne Owen, andTom Aldredge. Along withMaster Harold, it proved to be one of Fugard's most acclaimed works.[42][43] It is the story of an elderly recluse in a small South African town who has spent 15 years on an obsessive artistic project.[44]
Fugard appeared in hisA Place With the Pigs at the Yale Rep in New Haven in 1987. Inspired by the true story of World War II Soviet deserter, Fugard plays a paranoid who spent four decades hiding with his pigs. As withThe Road to Mecca, Fugard's critics readily appreciated the metaphor for a life of internal exile.[45] He himself suggested that it was a reflection on his long battle with alcoholism.[30] From the early 1980s Fugard was a teetotaler.[46]
The first play that Fugard wrote after the end of apartheid,Valley Song, premiered in Johannesburg, in August 1995, with Fugard in the role of both a white, and of acoloured, farmer. While they dispute property titles, both share a reverence for the land and fear change.[47] In October 1995, Fugard took the play to the United States with a production by theManhattan Theatre Club at the McCarter Theatre inPrinceton, New Jersey.[47]
In January 2009, Fugard returned to New Haven for the premiere ofComing Home. Veronika, the granddaughter of Buk, the coloured farmer inValley Song, leaves the Karoo to pursue a singing career in Cape Town but then returns, after his death, to create a new life on the land for her young son.[48]
TheFugard Theatre, in theDistrict Six area of Cape Town opened with performances by theIsango 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.[49]
In April 2014, he returned to the stage in the world premiere of hisThe Shadow of a Hummingbird at theLong Wharf Theatre, New Haven. This short play was performed with an "introductory scene" compiled by Paula Fourie from Fugard's journal writings. With "the playwright digging through these diaries on a set which resembles an old, busy writer's workspace", the scene blends into the main play, which begins when Boba, the grandson of the story-telling grandfather character Oupa (played by Fugard) comes to visit.[50]
Fugard's plays are produced internationally and have won multiple awards, and several have been made into films (seeFilmography below). Fugard himself performed in the first of these, as Boesman alongsideYvonne Bryceland as Lena, inBoesman and Lena directed byRoss Devenish in 1973.[51]
In the 1990s, Fugard lived inSan Diego, California,[57] 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 (UCSD).[5][19] For the academic year 2000–2001, he taught atIndiana University inBloomington, Indiana, as the IU Class of 1963 Wells Scholar Professor.[58]
Although increasingly disillusioned with the course of post-Apartheid politics – he regarded it as a tragedy thatNelson Mandela had not taken a second term as President to "entrench his vision" –[59] in 2012 Fugard returned to South Africa.[60][61]
In 2015, after almost 60 years of marriage, Athol andSheila Fugard (who had become an established novelist and poet) divorced. The following year, Fugard married Paula Fourie, a younger South African writer and academic.[62] The couple lived in theCape Winelands region of South Africa with their two children, daughter Halle and son Lanigan.[63][64][65]
Fugard died at his home inStellenbosch, Western Cape, on 8 March 2025, at the age of 92.[66][30] In 2006, Fugard had reserved a grave plot for himself inNieu-Bethesda, a village in theKaroo where he had a home and where the preservedOwl House and statuary gardens of the reclusive artist Helen Martins inspired his playThe Road to Mecca. He had also expressed the wish to have his gravestone inscribed with the remark of a black child he had passed on an uphill run in theKaroo: "Hou so aan, Oubaas – jy kom eerste!" ("Keep going, boss – you’re coming first!").[67]
In addition to his children with Paula Fourie, Fugard is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, the writerLisa Fugard. Born in 1961,[68] she moved to the United States in 1980 to pursue an acting career.[69] Her 2013 debut novel,Skinner's Drift, is the tale of a daughter's return to post-Apartheid South Africa.[70]
The Guest: an episode in the life of Eugene Marais. By Athol Fugard and Ross Devenish. Craighall: A. D. Donker, 1977.ISBN0-949937-36-3. (Die besoeker: 'n episode in die lewe van Eugene Marais. Trans. intoAfrikaans by Wilma Stockenstrom. Craighall: A. D. Donker, 1977.ISBN0-949937-43-6.)
^ab"Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard (1932 -)".2005 National Orders Awards. South African Government Online (info.gov.za). 27 September 2005. Archived fromthe original(World Wide Web) on 21 November 2008. Retrieved4 October 2008.
^abFisher, Iain."Athol Fugard: Biography".Athol Fugard: Statements. iainfisher.com. Retrieved1 October 2008.
^Fisher gives Fugard's full birth name as "Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard", spelling Fugard's middle name asLanigan, following Dennis Walder,Athol Fugard, Writers and Their Work (Tavistock: Northcote House in association with theBritish Council, 2003). It is spelled asLannigan in Athol Fugard,Notebooks 1960–1977 (New York:Theatre Communications Group, 2004) and in Stephen Gray'sAthol Fugard (Johannesburg and New York:McGraw-Hill, 1982) and many other publications. The former spelling (singlen) seems more authoritative, however, as it is also used by Marianne McDonald, a close UCSD colleague and friend of Fugard, in"A Gift for His Seventieth Birthday: Athol Fugard'sSorrows and Rejoicings"Archived 24 July 2008 at theWayback Machine, Department of Theatre and Dance,University of California, San Diego, rpt. fromTheatreForum 21 (Summer/Fall 2002); in Fugard's National Orders Award (27 September 2005) from the government of South Africa, presented to "Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard (1932 –)"; and in his "Full Profile" inWho's Who of Southern Africa (2007).
^Fugard, Athol (2000). Dennis Walder (ed.).The Township Plays. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. pp. xvi.ISBN978-0-19-282925-2. (Google Books limited preview.)
^Wertheim, Albert (2000).The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 215,224–38.ISBN978-0-253-33823-5. (Google Books limited preview.)
^abcdeMcDonald, Marianne (April 2003)."Introd. of Athol Fugard"(YouTubeVideo clip).Times Topics,The New York Times. Retrieved1 October 2008. [Times Topics menu includes link to UCSD YouTube clip of Athol Fugard's lecture, "A CatholicAntigone: an episode in the life ofHildegard of Bingen", Eugene M. Burke C.S.P. Lectureship on Religion and Society, University of California, San Diego (UCSD).]
^abcdefKruger, Loren (2004). "Chapter 5: The Dis-illusion of Apartheid: Brecht in South Africa".Post-Imperial Brecht Politics and Performance, East and South. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 217–18.ISBN978-0-521-81708-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link) (Google Books limited preview.)
^ab"'Art is Life and Life is Art'. An interview with John Kani and Winston Ntshona of the Serpent Players from South Africa", inUfahamu: A Journal of African Studies [Internet], 6(2), 1976, pp. 5–26. Available from:eScholarship, University of California. Retrieved 26 July 2017.
^Marie Rose Napierkowski (ed.)."Sizwe Banzi Is Dead: Introduction".Drama for Students. 14. (January 2006). Detroit: Gale, eNotes.com. Retrieved9 March 2025. (Free excerpt; registration required for full access.)
^Van Weyenberg, Astrid (2008). "Antigone on the African stage: "Wherever the call for freedom is heard!"". In Aydemir, Murat (ed.).Migratory Settings. Leiden: Brill. pp. 119–137.ISBN9789042024250. Retrieved9 March 2025.. As precautions against government intervention, the performance lacked a script and was presented under an alternative title, Die Hodoshe Span ('The Hodoshe work- team'), chosen because the intended "The Island" would have referred to Robben Island too explicitly
^Fugard, Athol (1983).Notebooks 1960–1977. Craighall: A. D. Donker, 1983.ISBN0-86852-011-X.Back in S'Kop after five weeks in London for BBC TV production of The Blood Knot. Myself as Morrie, with Charles Hyatt as Zach. Robin Midgley directing. Midgley reduced the play to 90 minutes...Midgley did manage to dig up things that had been missed in all the other productions. Most exciting was his treatment of the letter writing scene – 'Address her' – which he turned into an essay in literacy...Zach sweating as the words clot in his mouth...
^Wertheim, Albert (2000).The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 225.ISBN978-0-253-33823-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link) (Google Books limited preview.)
^Fisher observes in the Fugard "Biography" section ofAthol Fugard: Statements that South African writer and criticGray, Stephen classifies many of Fugard's dramatic works according to chronological periods of composition and similarities of style: "Apprenticeship" ([1956–]1957); "Social Realism" (1958–1961); "Chamber Theatre" (1961–1970); "Improvised Theatre" (1966–1973); and "Poetic Symbolism" (1975[–1990]).
The Amajuba Resource Pack (Archived 14 June 2011 at theWayback Machine).The Oxford Playhouse and Farber Foundry: In Association with Mmabana Arts Foundation.Oxford Playhouse, October 2004. Retrieved 1 October 2008. DownloadablePDF. ["Photographs by Robert Day; Written by Rachel G. Briscoe; Edited by Rupert Rowbotham; Overseen by Yael Farber." 18 pages.]
Athol Fugard. Special issue ofTwentieth Century Literature 39.4 (Winter 1993).Index.Findarticles.com. <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_n4_v39>. Retrieved 4 October 2008. [Includes: Athol Fugard, "Some Problems of a Playwright from South Africa" (Transcript. 11 pages).]
Blumberg, Marcia Shirley, and Dennis Walder, eds.South African Theatre As/and Intervention. Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: EditionsRodopi B.V., 1999.ISBN90-420-0537-8 (10).ISBN978-90-420-0537-2 (13).
Wertheim, Albert.The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.ISBN0-253-33823-9 (10).ISBN978-0-253-33823-5 (13).
Wertheim, Albert, ed. and introd.Athol Fugard: A Casebook. [Casebooks on Modern Dramatists]. Gen. Ed., Kimball King. New York:Garland Publishing, 1997.ISBN0-8153-0745-4 (10).ISBN978-0-8153-0745-7 (13). (Out of print; unavailable.) [Hardcover ed. published by Garland Publishing; the series of Casebooks on Modern Dramatists is now published byRoutledge, an imprint ofTaylor & Francis, and does not include this title.]
"Athol Fugard". Faculty profile. Department of Theatre and Dance.University of California, San Diego. (ListsAthol Fugard: Statements: An Athol Fugard site by Iain Fisher as "Personal Website"; see below.)
Athol Fugard atTimes Topics inThe New York Times. (Includes YouTube Video clip of Athol Fugard's Burke Lecture "A CatholicAntigone: An Episode in the Life ofHildegard of Bingen", the Eugene M. Burke C.S.P. Lectureship on Religion and Society, at theUniversity of California, San Diego, introduced by Professor of Theatre and Classics Marianne McDonald, UCSD Department of Theatre and Dance, April 2003 [Show ID: 7118]. 1:28:57 [duration].)
