ATHOL FUGARDPoet, Actor, Conscience

fromSOUTH AFRICA

(Sources: Craig McLuckie, Okanagan College, The Literary EncyclopediaIain Fischer, Statements: An Athol Fugard Website)

Athol Fugard is a dramatist of enormous power, particularly adept at full length plays with a small cast. A one time student of philosophy, Fugard’s works are marked by an experientially driven search for truth and an attendant celebration of humanity, no matter how circumscribed the individual’s material conditions.

Fugard, in the 1992Academy Award

winning film GHANDIas South AfricanGeneral Smuts.

While Fugard has written works set in other locales than South Africa, his evocation of the Karroo region of the Eastern Cape is inimitably his landscape. In a language that reaches the poetic, Fugard has charted the lives of the region’s dispossessed. His work has a universal application to audiences that arises from its precise grounding in the South Africa of the latter part of the twentieth century

His post-apartheid works have less power and evenness in their dramatic impact than those with a historic touchstone. In addition to some 20 dramatic works (including the stellar collaborations with John Kani and Winston Ntshona), Fugard has written a novel, Tsotsi, memoirs, and several film scripts (with Ross Devenish). Fugard directs and acts in his work, though the general reader is perhaps more aware of Fugard’s brief roles in the films Gandhi and The Killing Fields.

Athol Harold Lannigan Fugard was born inMiddelburg, South Africa on June 11, 1932. He iswhite with English and Afrikaner parents. Hismother, Elizabeth Magdalena (née Potgieter), ageneral store, then a lodging house operator,was an Afrikaner; his father, Harold, a formerjazz pianist, was of Irish, English and Huguenotancestry.

Afrikaners (including the Boer subgroup) are a Germanic ethnic group in Southern Africa descended from Dutch (including Flemish), French and German settlers ...

Fugard has described himself as an Afrikaner writing in English. He was brought up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, the setting for many of his plays. He entered the Marist Brothers College in 1938 for elementary schooling with a Catholic flavour. Fugard’s secondary education, funded in part by a scholarship, was at the technical college. He attended Cape Town University, where his deep-rooted interest in the writings of Albert Camus began.

Fugard left university a few months shy of his final examinations in 1953. Travel with a fellow student through Africa was followed by Fugard signing on the SS Graigaur as a seaman for two years, spent in the Far East. On returning to South Africa, Fugard worked as a freelance reporter for the Evening Post (Port Elizabeth).

In September 1956 he married SheilaMeiring (now, a novelist and poet). Inthe late 1950s Athol and Sheila Fugardbegan the Circle Players in PortElizabeth. In 1958 they moved toJohannesburg where Fugard worked ina “Native Commissioners’ Court” as aclerk, an experience that made himkeenly aware of the injustices ofapartheid. In that same year, heorganized a multiracial theatre forwhich he wrote, directed, and acted.

Sheila Fugard

Lisa Fugard

As Dennis Walder notes:

It is his great strength to move us deeply by showing the plight of ordinary people caught up in the meshes of social, political, racial and even religious forces which they are unable to understand or control. It is his weakness that he cannot reflect upon or analyse these forces himself. [. . .] As actor, director and playwright, he is obsessed with the idea that what he has to say can only be said indirectly, as an image, embodied in the ‘living moment’ on stage.

(Walder, Athol Fugard, New York: Grove, 1985: 3)

Athol Fugard

Athol Fugard people

Go to a website which profiles most of Fugard’s most important collaborators.

Athol Fugard at Signature Theatre

SIGNATURE CENTER INAUGURAL SEASON

PRODUCTIONSBlood Knot

My Children! My Africa!

The Train Driver

MASTER HAROLD and the boys

NYC, Roundabout Theatre, 2003 with Danny Glover

Original NYC production with Lonny Price, Zakes Mokae and Danny Glover

Matthew Broderick and Zakes Mokae in 1986

2010 film

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234546/

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Plays of Athol Fugard

A Lesson from AloesBoseman and LenaThe Captain’s TigerThe CellThe CoatComing HomeDimetosThe DrummerExits and EntrancesFriday’s Bread on MondayHave You Seen Us?Hello and GoodbyeThe IslandKlaas and the DevilThe Last BusMaster Harold and the boysMille Miglia

My Children! My Africa!No-Good FridayNongogoThe OccupationOrestesPeople are Living ThereA Place With The PigsPlaylandRamzy Abul MajdThe Road to MeccaSizwe Banzi is DeadSorrows and RejoicingsStatements After an Arrest Under the Immorality ActThe Train DriverValley SongVictory

http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsF/fugard-athol.html