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I have no formulas for success. None at all. All I've learned is to try and be honest on the page.
Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement
Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard was born in 1932 in Middelburg, in the Karoo desert region of South Africa, the second of his parents’ three children. His father, Harold David Fugard, was a native English speaker of English and Irish descent. His mother, Elizabeth, was an Afrikaner, a descendant of earlier European settlers. Her first language was Afrikaans, the language derived from the Dutch spoken by 17th century settlers from the Netherlands. Young Harold Athol spoke both languages from childhood and has described himself as “an Afrikaner writing in English.”
The family, which included an older brother and a younger sister, moved to Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. The elder Fugard was a jazz pianist. Crippled by a childhood accident, his disability was compounded by alcoholism. As he was increasingly unable to work, Mrs. Fugard took responsibility for supporting the family. She operated a small boarding house, and later a small cafe or tearoom that provided the setting for one of her son’s most popular plays,“Master Harold”… and the Boys.
As young Fugard was growing up, South Africa’s National Party was instituting the system of apartheid — compulsory racial separation — that systematically barred black Africans from education, housing and employment opportunities in white areas. Black citizens were required to carry passbooks — identification papers — to work in white areas, and were otherwise required to remain in designated locations, “homelands” or “townships,” with grossly inadequate housing and services. Violations of the law were severely punished and dissent was gradually suppressed. Fugard’s father shared many of the prejudices of other white South Africans, but his mother never accepted the injustice of the system and communicated her values to her son.
Athol Fugard, as he preferred to be called, started writing seriously in his school years, inspired by stories his father had told him, and by his own voracious reading. His mother made great sacrifices to send him to the University of Cape Town, where he studied philosophy, but he longed to see the outside world and absorb the experiences he believed he would need for a writing career. Leaving the university, he hitchhiked the length of Africa from Cape Town to Cairo. In Port Sudan, he joined the crew of a cargo ship and spent the next years steaming in and out of the ports of Asia as a merchant seaman.
Returning to South Africa, he tried his hand at radio journalism in Port Elizabeth, then moved to Cape Town, where he fell in with a group of young actors and theater workers and began to write his first plays. He married an English-born actress, Sheila Meiring, and the couple moved to Johannesburg. While working at the Native Commissioner’s Court in Johannesburg, Fugard became intimately familiar with the oppressive passbook system used to control the movements of the country’s black citizens, and to limit their access to housing and employment opportunities. He augmented his knowledge of the theater working as a stage manager. Black friends introduced him to the street life of Sophiatown, the segregated township that inspired his playsNo-Good Friday andNgogo. At this time, Fugard could not interest producers in South Africa or Britain in his work. He staged these plays in private performances with non-professional black actors and developed an especially close working relationship with one, Zakes Mokae. Together, they performed the play that proved to be the turning point in Fugard’s writing career,The Blood Knot.
Meanwhile, Fugard began working with a group of black actors in Port Elizabeth, staging plays by other writers, and creating new works through improvisation with his actors. He traveled to London to appear in a BBC television production ofThe Blood Knot in 1967. The broadcast was better received than the initial London stage production of the play, but on his return to South Africa, the authorities confiscated his passport, to prevent him from traveling abroad for future productions, or from returning to South Africa if he did. The government placed increasingly severe restrictions on his work and movements, prohibiting publication and performance of his plays. Even the titleThe Island was considered too controversial as it was taken to allude to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. Fugard and his family endured years of government surveillance; their mail was opened, their phones tapped, and their home subjected to midnight police searches. InThe Blood Knot, Fugard and Mokae played mixed-race half-brothers, one identifiably “colored” and the other light enough to evade the passbook laws. The brothers’ complex and ambivalent relationship served as both a rich metaphor for the uneasy interdependence of black and white South Africa, and as a visceral dramatization of the system’s human cost. Although the South African production was closed by the authorities after a single performance, the play’s reputation spread, and productions were mounted in London, with Zakes Mokae, and in New York with the youngJames Earl Jones. London critics and audiences did not immediately warm to Fugard’s work, but he developed a substantial following in the United States.
But the plays he developed in Port Elizabeth, such asBoesman and Lena, were being performed in New York, London and elsewhere. In 1973 he was permitted to travel to London with two of his actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, to perform one of the works they had developed through improvisation,Siswe Bansi Is Dead. The play won the London Theater Critics Award, and the following year, the trio took the play to New York where it was performed on alternate nights withThe Island.
During the 1980s, Athol Fugard appeared as an actor in a number of feature films, includingThe Killing Fields andGandhi, in which he played South African General (and later Prime Minister) Jan Smuts. In 1985, Fugard and Zakes Mokae reunited in New York to perform their original roles in a revised version ofBlood Knot (Fugard omitted “The” from the title). Critics hailed the play and the actors’ performances as never before. In 1980, he published a novel,Tsotsi, about gang life in Sophiatown, which he had first written in 1961. The year 1982 saw the premiere of his most popular and frequently produced work,“Master Harold” … and the Boys (1982), a dramatization of Fugard’s childhood friendship with Sam Semela, set in his mother’s teashop in Port Elizabeth.“Master Harold” received Best New Play Awards from both London and New York critics, and brought Zakes Mokae a Tony Award for his portrayal of Sam.
At the end of the decade, Fugard surprised many admirers with implied criticism of the African National Congress inMy Children! My Africa! (1989). Despite his disagreement with the ANC’s boycott of South Africa’s segregated schools, he continued to support the organization’s long-term goals: a multiracial democracy and the release of its long-imprisoned leader, Nelson Mandela.
In South Africa, the winds of change had become irresistible. In 1991, State President F. W. de Klerk made the decision to legalize the ANC and negotiate a transition to multiracial democracy. Nelson Mandela was freed from Robben Island, and the longed-for transformation of South Africa was underway. For a time, Athol Fugard believed that the triumph of democracy would mean the end of his usefulness as a playwright and social observer, but the trials and traumas of a country’s newfound freedom continue to provide him with material for compelling drama.
While Athol Fugard pursued his career as a playwright on three continents, his wife Sheila, a novelist and poet in her own right, became increasingly immersed in the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism. As Athol Fugard sought to define his role in the new South Africa, Sheila Fugard made a life for herself in California and the couple went their separate ways. Their daughter, Lise, became a novelist and actress herself and has acted in a number of her father’s plays.
He established a working relationship with the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. His playsComing Home (2008) andHave You Seen Us (2009) both premiered at the Long Wharf. More recent plays,The Train Driver (2010) andThe Bird Watchers (2011), premiered at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town, a multi-space performance venue named for the country’s greatest playwright.Die Laaste Karretjiegraf(“the last donkey cart grave”), which also premiered at the Fugard, is his first play in Afrikaans, written to fulfill a promise he made long ago to his Afrikaans-speaking mother. In 2011, he received Broadway’s top honor, a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. Since the downfall of the apartheid system and the inauguration of multiracial democracy in South Africa, Athol Fugard has been honored by his country’s government with the Ikhamanga Medal, and is an Honorary Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature. In 2006, the filmTsotsi, based on Athol Fugard’s 1961 novel, won international awards, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
In 2014, Fugard returned to the stage as an actor for the first time in 15 years to act in his new play,Shadow of the Hummingbird, at the Long Wharf. He dedicated the play to his nine-year-old grandson, Gavyn Fugard Scranton. Athol Fugard’s published work includes more than 30 plays, as well as journals, novels, short stories and screenplays. In 2015, his playThe Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek opened in New York to critical acclaim.
In addition to traveling around the world for productions of his plays, for a number of years Athol Fugard taught acting, directing and playwriting at the University of California, San Diego. He still spends time regularly in Cape Town, and takes an interest in the theater there that bears his name, but the place he calls home is the house he shares with his partner Paula Fourie in Nieu-Bethesda, a small village in the semi-arid Karoo region of South Africa, not unlike the one where he was born over 80 years ago.
On March 9, 2025, Athol Fugard died at his home in Stellenbosch. He was 92.
- Career
- Date of Birth
- June 11, 1932
- Date of Death
- March 9, 2025
Hailed as “the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world,” South Africa’s Athol Fugard has won international praise for creating theater of “power, glory, and majestic language.” In more than 20 plays, written over six decades, he has chronicled the struggles of men and women of all races for dignity and human fulfillment.
Born and raised in the Eastern Cape, he founded a multiracial theater company in the 1950s in defiance of the South African government’s apartheid system. When he and a black colleague appeared as mixed-race brothers in his playThe Blood Knot, it was closed after a single performance. In the 1960s, his work found an audience in other English-speaking countries, but after he appeared inThe Blood Knot on BBC Television, the government seized his passport.
Since the downfall of the apartheid system, Fugard has been honored by his country’s government and by critics and audiences the world over. An Honorary Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature, in 2001 he received Broadway’s Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. His novelTsotsi was adapted into the film of the same name, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 2006. He has appeared as an actor in the feature filmsGandhi andThe Killing Fields. In 2014, he returned to the stage for the first time in 15 years to act in his new playShadow of the Hummingbird at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut.
Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement
Can you tell us about the first play where you think you really found your voice?
Athol Fugard:The Blood Knot. It’s about two brothers in that segment of our society called “the colored people,” people of mixed racial descent. And as tragically happened very often to families in that group, one brother can be born — or one sibling can be born — dark-skinned, and another one can be white, white enough to try to pass for white. And that is a temptation that is faced in that society, in that group of people in those years. And my play, which was really written not so much to — but then this has happened with so many plays I’ve written — not written so much to make a comment about or to say something about the racial tensions in my country. It was written to explore the relationship with my elder brother, about whom I felt very guilty because I was the smart one in the family. And Royal — his name was Royal Fugard — and Royal struggled very hard with his education and then subsequently with his attempts to get work and things like that. And that is whatThe Blood Knot was about. And it’s a play, as I first wrote it, which is flawed enormously by a young man’s enthusiasm for language. It’s grossly overwritten as first written. It has now been pruned down, and there’s a very, very good — not version — the soul of the play lives now in a very severely edited version of the play, and that is the one I did at the Signature Theatre, for example, in New York at the opening of their first season in that wonderful new premises they have.
After your first success withThe Blood Knot, you started an integrated theater company in South Africa. How did that come about?
One night there was a knock on my door. And into my life trooped five black people from the black ghetto of Port Elizabeth called New Brighton. And they had come to ask me — they’d read about me and my success in the local newspaper, and they’d come to ask me if I would help them start a theater group. At first I thought, “God, no. The last thing I want to do is teach people how to act or what theater is about. I’m a writer. I just want to write my play.” But my guilty liberal conscience got the better of me, and I said, “All right, let’s try something.” And that started a very, very important and defining period in my life when I realized — because at that moment the apartheid laws were all powerful in the country. And one of the consequences of it was there was a silence. Free speech did not exist. It’s as simple as that. The Americas cherished free speech. We knew nothing about that. If you spoke up too loudly about the injustice or anything like that, you were in trouble. And what those five people taught me, as we began to work together then, was that theater was a way of breaking that conspiracy of silence. That you could use the stage to talk about things that would have landed you in trouble if you talked about them openly and publicly in any other context. As it turned out, there were consequences, because although the police had already targeted me to a certain extent as being a liberal — a dreaded word in South African politics in that period — the black people were defenseless. I was protected by my white skin. And a large number of my actors were arrested during — not a large number — about five or six were arrested during rehearsals and carted off to Robben Island.
On what pretext?
Athol Fugard: That they were members of a banned organization, which was completely false.
Then what happened?
Athol Fugard: We just kept on working, because by then my plays were starting to be recognized abroad, particularly in America. The publicity associated with my name began to act as a defense against official action against me.
Were your plays ever banned or censored?
Athol Fugard: Some plays of mine were banned. A play of mine calledBoesman and Lena, which got published in South Africa and then ended up being banned. And libraries were told, believe it or not, to burn —schoollibraries were told to burn the copies of the book! And another play of mine, which is arguably one of my most successful in terms of the frequency with which it is done, is called“Master Harold”… and the Boys. That also landed me briefly in trouble until we discovered loopholes in the law which allowed us to proceed with performances that they hadn’t anticipated and hadn’t been plugged up yet. You know, closed.
It was still brave of you to put them on.
Please, and I mean this very honestly, I’m not a brave man. That’s the last adjective that should ever be used in terms of me. But you know, when your conscience forces you to do something, no matter how frightened you are of doing it, you sometimes get around to doing it, and that is the way it was with me.
You were a boy when the system of apartheid was instituted in South Africa. What was that like?
Athol Fugard: It happened shortly, very early in my young years, that the policies of apartheid were implemented, were defined, put onto the law books, and those 40 years of darkness — because that’s the only way to describe them — as one law after another went onto the statute books about Parliament defining the privileges that went to the white people, and what was left over went to the people of color in my country. Even though the white population at that point was only a few million and that the people of color in my country — black and, as we name them, colored — numbered over almost 25 million people. So it was a grossly, grossly unfair period. And it was very dark. Those were cruel draconian laws that really stifled free speech, free assembly, defined who your friends could be, defined who you could marry, who you could have as a partner. It was unbelievable. I mean it was rightly likened in some respects to the worst aspects of Hitler’s period in Germany. It was an institutionalized form of race prejudice. That’s what it amounted to.
How did they keep people from intermarrying? What happened?
Athol Fugard: There was a law quite simply called — and I wrote a play about it — called the Immorality Act. A white person was not allowed to have any sort of physical or sexual relationship with a person of color. It was as simple as that. There was a special branch of the police who implemented that law and arrested people and sent them to jail. It was awful.
The privileges that came to you by benefit of having a white skin ranged from your education to your health care to everything. All the privileges that were denied to the others came to you simply by virtue of having a white skin. There was a piece of legislation called the Job Reservation Act, which meant that certain categories of work in the country were reserved for whites. There was another act called the Group Areas Act, which meant that the best parts of the country were reserved for white occupancy.You could build houses there, but no colored person or African person could build there. Those townships, as we called them — or “locations” was also a South African word — were always on the periphery of the big cities. And although we depended very, very much on them as a labor source to keep our country ticking over, they had to travel miles and miles every day of their lives to get into the city where they could work, where they would work for us.
So we gather you were not in an integrated school situation.
Athol Fugard: Oh no, no, no. Not at all. “Whites only.”
As a child, what did you feel about apartheid? How did you become aware of it?
Athol Fugard: That’s a very important question. At the core of my life is a magnificent woman, my mother, an Afrikaner, almost illiterate. You know, when it was a case of writing letters to our debtors, you know, I used to have to sit down with pencil and paper and she would tell me what she wanted to say to them and how she was going to ask for more time before we had enough money to pay this bill or that bill. And that lady, my mother, as to this day, to this very day — last night I spent a lot of time thinking about her — was gifted with a natural sense of justice. She looked — as ill-equipped as she was by any intellectual standards to recognize what was happening in the country — — she knew that something was wrong, that injustice was rampant. And because I was very close to both my mother and my father, she shared probing questions with me, and in this way shaped my awareness of the world in which I was growing up.
What kind of work did she do?
Athol Fugard: She had all sorts of jobs to start with, but she ended up with a little boarding house in a side street in Port Elizabeth called the Jubilee Residential Hotel. It wasn’t as splendid as its name, believe me! That was the source of the family income for many, many years. Eventually she moved out of boarding houses because we ended up having two, ultimately. Then she got hold of the license to a little tearoom in a park in the center of Port Elizabeth called the St. George’s Park. That then became the family’s source of income.
“Master Harold”… and the Boys is a fascinating play in the way the relationships alter during the course of it in a subtle way that becomes very powerful. Can you talk a little bit about the structure of that play?
Athol Fugard: That play is most probably, up to that point, the most nakedly autobiographical play I had ever written, because that little schoolboy in the tearoom on that rainy afternoon when his company is the two black servants who work in the tearoom, that whole setting comes directly from my youth. I used to go to a school, and after school I would come back to that tearoom. I mentioned it earlier. It’s the tearoom my mother ran in the St. George’s Park. And there was Sam and Willie. I was this very pompous little schoolboy who had learned wonderful things that day at school and wanted to show off and also wanted to be a writer. I was already writing, filling schoolbooks with stories that I made up and things like that. And to my lasting shame, that moment, that shocking moment in the play where that little boy spits in Sam’s face, that happened. That was me. And yes, nakedly autobiographical.
At first there’s camaraderie, almost a kind of familial tone.
Athol Fugard: Oh, of course. Joy! But then, his mother is on the telephone saying that his father — who complicates his life enormously because he both loves and hates. It’s one of those double bind situations. And his mother’s on the telephone to say that his father, who had been tucked away safely in a hospital, leaving the house calm and quiet at home, was coming back, was being discharged from hospital. And that is when the little boy can’t cope with the confusion of emotions, the conflicting emotions he has in his head. And he turns nasty as people do when they lose control of any situation. And he has a ready-made target for his juvenile form of venom, which is the black man, the beautiful black man, Sam Semela. I’ll never forget his name because he was so beautiful. He was the father I wanted, a decent good man, generous, full of laughter, caring. Not that my father was not caring, but it wasn’t the same thing. He was a flawed, flawed human being, and Sam was — but how can a white boy in the apartheid years have a black man as a surrogate father? Absolutely impossible. So that’s how the play shifts once those telephone calls build up and that agitation in him begins to take over.
Your name is Harold too.
Athol Fugard: Yes, that’s correct.
Have you forgiven yourself for that unfortunate youthful experience?
Athol Fugard: No. I think I’ll pay penance all my life for them, even through the years that still lie ahead. The sad ending to that story was that, fine, I eventually wrote the play and Sam Semela, who was passionate about ballroom dancing, was living in that black township I mentioned earlier, the black ghetto, New Brighton. And Sam was alive, and I was going to do the play in Johannesburg, and I had arranged for Sam to be flown up to Johannesburg so that — and I think that if he had sat and seen that play, I wouldn’t still be feeling as guilty as I do now. But the truth is Sam died a week before coming up to Johannesburg.
What did your father do?
Athol Fugard: My father was a jazz musician. He was also a cripple. I know that’s not a polite word to use, but he walked with crutches. He was a wonderful pianist, and he had a band of his own called the Melodians. He also had a problem in terms of alcohol. Very early on in my childhood my father just sort of gave up on life and left the breadwinning to my mother. He just sat on the sidelines and waited very patiently for his end.
When did that come?
Athol Fugard: I think he was 71 when finally all sorts of things started to go wrong with him physically and he died in the hospital.
Did you have siblings?
Athol Fugard: I had an elder brother, who passed away a good few years ago, and a younger sister, who is still alive and living in South Africa, but is very ill now.
When did you first have a vision of becoming a writer, going into theater?
Athol Fugard: I suppose that debt of gratitude I owe to my father. My full name is actually Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, which suggests an Irish connection, which was very definitely there. And the memory I have of storytelling and the power of storytelling — because that is how I think of myself, as a storyteller. I tell stories. I tell stories about people. My dad was always in pain because of what we called his gammy leg. And sometimes in the middle of the night I would hear him groaning in bed because of the pain, and I would crawl out of bed, light a candle, and sit at his bedside and massage the leg. And in return for that he would tell me stories, tell me the potted versions of the great books, the wonderful books he had read as a child because he was a great reader, he was an avid reader. And I think that the Irish connection gave him a gift with language, just as he had a gift with the keyboard of a piano. I think that’s really where it all started, just listening to his stories and acquiring I suppose my first sense of what storytelling involved and how to do it, how to hold somebody’s attention, build it up to a climax, all of which were very, very good lessons for the playwright, the playwright I went on to try to be.
What happened to his leg?
When he was a little boy, the family were returning from a visit overseas to the English branch of the family. He fell down a stair — what you call a gangplank onboard a ship — and damaged his hip severely. But they were out at sea, and in those days there was no helicopter to come and pick you up or anything like that. By the time they got to Cape Town, very serious damage had been done to his hip, and that leg got progressively shorter and shorter, so eventually crutches became his mode of transport.
You yourself spent some time on the sea as a young man, didn’t you?
Athol Fugard: That’s right. I was a student at the University of Cape Town. I was a good student. I must say that my writing always paralleled everything else that I was doing in life. It was always there, scribbling away at stories and notebooks and all of that. I was at the University of Cape Town studying philosophy and anthropology and social economics. I was a good student. I got class medals in all my subjects at the university. And I was in my third year when I realized that I had a sense that completing that degree that I was studying for, a bachelor of arts degree, was a trap. And it was a very, very difficult decision to make on my side, because my mother had scraped together as much cash as she could to get me into university because she singled me out as someone who was going to compensate for the frustrated ambitions in her own life. She invested in me. I was at university, and I sensed that getting this degree was potentially a trap to me as a writer, because in addition to enjoying my work in philosophy and all of that, there was the writer in me. And I wrote to my mother, who had really struggled to get me to university, and I said, “Mom, I’m not going to take my degree. I want to be a writer, and I am leaving the university because writers have to see the world.” I still remember using that phrase, “Writers have to see the world, and so I’m going to see the world.” After all the sacrifices she had made in order to get me at university, she wrote back to me and said — she was in Port Elizabeth, I was in Cape Town — she wrote back to me and said, “Hally,” because that was my nickname as a child, “Hally, if that’s what you must do, you must do it.” Her faith in me was extraordinary and incredibly motivating in all the years that were to come ahead of me.
I left university. I stayed around in Cape Town for a little while trying to sort out my head, and then decided the best way to see the world is to start traveling. So I hitchhiked up through Africa, Cape Town to Cairo. Standing on the side of the road, thumbing lifts when they came along, but sometimes you’d wait on the side of that road for days in the middle of nowhere, the Belgian Congo or the Sudan, Kenya, Tanganyika, and then eventually Cairo. I eventually landed up — after quite a lot of trouble because I sneaked into Egypt. I jumped a border. I didn’t have a passport. They sent me back to the Sudan. In Sudan I found my way down to Port Sudan, and I was just frittering away time there wondering, “What next? Do I stow away onboard a ship?” when I happened to meet the captain of a tramp steamer. Those were the days of tramp steamers still, the world of Joseph Conrad. You know,Youth and all those magnificent novels of his.
He said he was the captain of a ship, a tramp steamer, that was taking a load of salt to Japan and would I like to go along for the ride. So that was the start of my seafaring period. And when I came out of that, eventually, I realized I had to get back to my country, to my people, which I did. I worked as a journalist for a few years with the Broadcasting Corporation of South Africa, South African Broadcasting Corporation. But that urge to try and really make my way in the world solely on the basis of my own creative writing was very, very urgent and very strong. I eventually left that job with the SABC, as they were called, and one lucky break after another. I’ve been incredibly lucky in my career. One lucky break after another led me to writing a few apprenticeship plays in Johannesburg, and then finally the important play, the play that in which — the writing of which — I realized had led me to discovering my own voice, because every writer has his or her own unique voice. And in writingThe Blood Knot, I knew I had found my voice and from then on.
What attracted you to the form of drama, to the theater?
Athol Fugard: Spoken word, language. What happens to language in people’s mouths when they try to hide these secrets or reveal them? I’m endlessly fascinated by the way people talk and how they talk, what they’re hiding and what they’re revealing.
You also had a broadcasting background, so you must have been attuned to the power of spoken language.
Athol Fugard: Exactly. That’s right.
Were there books or playwrights that you were particularly drawn to as a kid growing up?
Athol Fugard: I regard what I call my apprenticeship period, out of which came two plays, one calledNo-Good Friday, the other calledNongogo. Both plays had required African — just exclusively African — actors. My apprenticeship, my masters in my apprenticeship were the great American playwrights, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, you name them. Somehow I learned the craft of playwriting, because it’s a craft, you know. It’s a little time mechanism that you wind up and put on a stage and it runs for 90 minutes and then the little mouse stops running around. And I learned my craft. Profound debt of gratitude I have to America at so many levels of my life. You know, thanks to America nowadays I earn enough. And it is America that has made it possible for me, the generosity and the perceptiveness of Americans, because somehow I think the magic was that the South African situation — the problem of race — is something Americans know only too well all about. I think that is the bridge which allowed them to enter into and engage with my writing.
You’ve acted in some of your plays as well. What was the attraction to acting? When did that happen?
Athol Fugard: Oh, I suppose it happened just now recently with this latest play of mine that Paula and I did in South Africa,The Shadow of the Hummingbird. I think there’s a kind of a conceit in me to get up there and show off on the stage.
To be the actual storyteller yourself.
Athol Fugard: Absolutely. I was so conscious of it when I came back to acting after laying off it for about 15 years, came back to it forThe Shadow of the Hummingbird, how much I enjoyed having an audience in the palm of my hand and doing what an actor has to do. And I do know that I have a considerable craft as an actor, but at the age of 82 I was chancing a lot in getting out onto the boards again, and I don’t think I will ever go back to them.
Too much pressure?
Athol Fugard: Enormous pressure. And at 82 I don’t cope well with pressure anymore.
Did you study acting?
Athol Fugard: No. I’ve studied nothing except writing. I just had a flair for it. In those days in South Africa also I had to go it alone because nobody ever thought that a South African story was worthy of a stage. You must understand, if it wasn’t George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde or Shakespeare or Marlowe or one of the great English playwrights, the stage belonged to those wonderful names from English theater. A South African story just didn’t make sense at all untilThe Blood Knot, because South Africans responded to the play in a very, very powerful way, and so did the critics.
What do you think sparked the great reception to“Master Harold” … and the Boys? How did it speak to people?
Athol Fugard: Well firstly, I think for Americans, again, that bridge I mentioned earlier between the American experience of race — you know, the Civil War fought over race, slavery, what have you — that helped Americans at one level to identify. But then I suppose the story just of childhood and confusion and how easily you can lose your way in life in a moment of confusion. I think that’s one of the reasons why that story to this day still works. It still works. As I said before, that is one of my most successful plays. It gets done again and again and again and again, and thank God for that because that keeps me going. But yeah. I never really quite worked out how audiences receive and take in a play, and either embrace it or reject it — embrace the experience or reject the experience. I think thank goodness for that. I have no formulas for success. None at all. All I’ve learned is to try and be honest on the page. That’s all I know about.
How do you know to trust where you’re going in a play? I’m sure you edit yourself. How do you know what works and what doesn’t?
Athol Fugard: Well, there was a moment in the writing of“Master Harold”… and the Boys which possibly touches on this question of “How do you watch what is happening on the page?” Now when I got to the moment where Hally, as he’s called in the play, spits in Sam’s face, I had reached the point where I was going to define that moment with a stage direction. And I remember putting down — this is a very precise memory because it was so important to me — putting down my pen and thinking, “Oh for God’s sake, Athol,” as I then called myself already, “you’re not going to be as ugly as that. Heavens man, there’s some other way of dealing with this moment and bringing it to a climax. No. You can’t possibly have a little boy spitting in a black man’s face.” And suddenly I said to myself, “You’re censoring yourself. You are censoring yourself. There are enough people in the government who are trying to do that to you. Put that pen back on the page and write those unspeakable words: ‘Hally spits in Sam’s face,’ close brackets. Carry on writing.” And it is that awareness, because there’s a part of you as you are writing — it’s just a strange sort of dualism you have in your relationship to the page. You’re always watching, watching what happens. Part of you is watching that part of you which is engaged in the story and telling it. And then there’s this other part that is watching what the storyteller does and checking him out.
Is it difficult sometimes to go forward because of that sort of judging, critical voice?
Athol Fugard: It can be very exhausting, and there comes a moment in the writing of any play where you just wish, “Oh for God’s sake, do I have to go on? Can’t I just push this aside?” But you get back to it. And there’s one sort of touchstone. If you know what you’ve put on that page is truthfully how you feel, what you understand about a character you’re writing about, if it rings true, that’s the only yardstick you’ve got. I phrased it once or twice in interviews as saying — attempting — to be a truly honest witness that will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
That’s a very noble pursuit as an artist.
Athol Fugard: Well, in the years of apartheid that was a very, very important consideration.
You’ve lived to see such changes in South Africa. How does the country today differ from the country you knew as a child?
Athol Fugard: The South Africa of my childhood was before that miracle that happened in ’91 when the then Prime Minister of South Africa stood up in parliament and announced that he was unbanning an organization that had represented the aspirations of the black citizens of my country. He was unbanning it and was also going to be releasing Nelson Mandela from his 27 years in prison. Nelson came out of that prison, and the new South Africa, as we now call it, was born.
What was the organization that was unbanned?
Athol Fugard: The African National Congress, the ANC.
Tell us about that day in 1991 you mentioned. Where were you? How did you receive that news?
Athol Fugard: Well, I was in the country. I was in the country. And the buildup to it had been going on for many years. Somehow or other the writing was on the wall: “South Africa, you cannot go on being an example of institutionalized race prejudices. Radical change has to happen.” And the pressures on South Africa were very considerable. I mean there were boycotts in terms of sport. There were economic boycotts. The South African economy was going downhill very fast. So even the diehards in the ranks of the then-government realized there have got to be changes. And there had already started to be secret encounters, hush-hush encounters between the (South) African government and the African National Congress in exile. They had been meeting and feeling each other out in parts of Africa where it was possible to sit down and talk. And so that pressure, really it didn’t come as all that great a surprise, but yet it was unbelievable that the Prime Minister, the then-Prime Minister, F. W. de Klerk, could stand up in Parliament and say that ANC, African National Congress, is being unbanned and we are considering and looking at the date for releasing Nelson Mandela from prison.
Did you see it live on TV?
Athol Fugard: Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh yeah.
What was your reaction?
Athol Fugard: Well, it was a start of a period of euphoria for all of us in the country: black, white and colored. I mean those five years of Nelson Mandela’s presidency, and I always think that one of the tragedies of South Africa’s recent history is that Nelson didn’t serve a second term because he just did the first five years. On the day that we had to vote in our first ever free and totally open general election, I was one of the people that stood in a queue miles long as we shuffled towards the voting booths. For the next five years it was a question of, “My God, the miracle!” because it was rightly described as a miracle. A little nation that had become the sort of polecat of the world, that the classic example of prejudice had turned itself around 180 degrees, formulated a constitution — which is recognized as one of the most extraordinarily liberal in the western world to this day, granting freedoms to every conceivable group based on race, color, or creed, sexual preference, all of those covered up, looked after in this constitution. And for five years… I know I was once talking to a group of foreign journalists in Johannesburg during that very period, the general election and the formation of the first government, and I remember saying — it was a silly thing to say — but I remember saying that I felt that I was now going to be South Africa’s — because of the changes — first literary redundancy. My job as a playwright was over and done. Now, I couldn’t have been more wrong, of course, because to this day, after Nelson went, things became very, very shaky, and at the moment we are living with a situation in South Africa which at times feels like such a betrayal of all that we fought for.
How so?
Athol Fugard: Well, under President Jacob Zuma attempts are being made to muffle the press, rights are being tampered with, and even our cherished constitution is being eyed, and attempts have already been made to try and manipulate it and change it. These are difficult times in South Africa, testing times.
Your playVictory was written in 2007, many years after the end of apartheid, but it suggests that there are still social issues to be dealt with in South Africa. Could you tell us how that play came about?
Athol Fugard: Well, the background toVictory is that it is set and I was — there’s a period in my writing where I wrote a string of plays based on or set in the little village where I had my home in South Africa, now called Nieu-Bethesda, and I have a home there together with Paula. And that little house has been burgled I think about seven or eight times in the course of the past few years. And in fact, when we started rehearsals onThe Shadow of the Hummingbird in Cape Town, my caretaker in Nieu-Bethesda phoned me to say that the house had been burgled again. And so that experience gave me — the succession of robberies and burglaries — gave me the kernel of a play in which I also wanted to explore and make people understand what is it that drives people to — if they have no other options in life, who’s to say they are wrong to break in and steal a loaf of bread if their family is hungry, because crime is a very serious issue in South Africa today. Very serious and not in any way under control yet. AndVictory gave me a chance of exploring that side.
How so?
Athol Fugard:Victory gave me a chance of exploring that side of the situation in South Africa. And then in the presence of the old white man whose house has been — he comes home to find the robbers in his house — gave me a chance to explore the incredible and marvelous heritage that goes with a concept of liberalism. You know what I mean? Education and the balance between those two, that dynamic between the liberal white man and his cherished books and his beautiful little house, you know, which is sort of like a little shrine to enlightenment, and these two young people the world had lost in a world which offers them nothing, gives them no hope. You know, to live without hope is the fate of a lot of people in South Africa.
It really points out that the end of apartheid was not a panacea for a troubled country.
Athol Fugard: No. You’re absolutely right. The social reforming that was necessary has not taken place. Millions of my fellow South Africans, black and colored, live in appalling conditions and squalor, no water and it’s awful. And we just are not putting our hands on the problem and truly trying to deal with it.
Your novelTsotsi was made into a film which won an Oscar. Could you tell us about the decision to write a longer work in that form?
Athol Fugard: That was quite a crossroads way, way back. I’m writingThe Blood Knot, but I’m also, based on the experience I have had in Johannesburg where a set of, again, lucky coincidences led me to forming a friendship with a group of extraordinary young black intellectuals who in turn introduced me to the world of Sophiatown, and that whole world where lost generations of young people form gangs and what-have-you. And I remember very clearly thinking to myself at one point, or maybe it’s only now that I look back at it, that I think this thought, which is thatTsotsi is not all that bad a novel because I had looked into its pages in the years since writing it. It’s not all that bad a novel. Maybe you could have gone on to be a novelist! There was the fascination of the stage, the spoken language, because, you know, when you write a novel, it’s that wonderful situation where you produce a work that is finally going to be dependent on one-on-one relationship between a reader and the words on the page. Whereas in theater, it’s not a one-on-one situation. It’s the audience and the stage. And for better or for worse, for right or for wrong, I chose to pursue — although I did keep my hand in as a prose writer by way of my daily notebooks and also by way of occasional short stories that I wrote. And I’m proud of all of that work, but my essential identity is that of the playwright.
How did the film come about so many years after you had written the novel?
Athol Fugard: That is my profound gratitude to Gavin Hood, who directed it and who had the uncanny ability to see that that story written right at the beginning of my writing career portrayed a world that still exists now. And with minor adjustments, and with himself handling the screenplay, because I don’t know anything about writing for the screen or television or anything like that. And I must admit that at first I didn’t want to see the film, and he nagged and begged. And finally, I was in San Diego at the time, he came to San Diego with the two or three reels of the film under his arm. He had rented a cinema for the afternoon so that he could put me down in a seat and say, “See it, and tell me if you approve.” And I was blown away by what he did as a director. And I feel so sad that Gavin’s not back in South Africa now doing another South African film and not living in Los Angeles.
Could you briefly tell us what the film portrays?
Athol Fugard: What the film portrayed, whew, that’s a hard one. Well, what it portrays, the central focus, is on a group of young men, uneducated, what-have-you, who have come together and formed a gang and who survive and live by way of robbing people, and that the leader of the gang is a traumatized — what appears to be psychopathic — killer, who will single out his victim for the day’s robbery. And then there is Butcher, who knows how to take a sharpened bicycle spoke and insert it just under a rib and push it up into a man’s heart and stir it around and he’s dead before you know it. So it portrays an actual situation that prevails in the townships today in South Africa. And that is what Gavin dealt with. How that young man, that seeming psychopathic killer who was actually traumatized in his youth by an experience, and who actually tries to redeem himself because circumstances have involved him in ending up with a little baby. A botched robbery and he’s got a baby who he tries to keep alive, and who in turn starts to work on him, the fact that there’s a young life, and that leads to his — well, as Gavin created it in the film, his redemption.
The element of surprise seems like an important aspect of your storytelling.
Athol Fugard: Yes, I suppose. I’ve never focused on that, or else, just subconsciously in learning my craft, I understood that there has to be that moment. There has to be a moment where the story goes somewhere you didn’t think it was going to go.
We are very interested in what sparks creativity. Do you relate at all to the concept of a muse?
Athol Fugard: Do I have a muse? Well, I don’t know if this is an adequate answer, but I suppose my muse is the people of South Africa. I’ve often said that the little — or maybe the lot — I know about loving and hating was taught me by South Africa. Now that’s a big debt. When you owe that much to a situation that has shaped your conscience, your heart, your whole life, you’re profoundly indebted. As I walk around South Africa — I’ll be back in South Africa sometime next week — I will see the stories on the pavements, stories that need to be told, and it goes on.
South Africa and the world, we’re lucky to have you telling those stories.
Athol Fugard: Thank you very much.
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