In Memoriam: Athol Fugard (1932-2025)
Temple Hauptfleisch*
“I observe his face: at the ripe age of 85, it is less gaunt, the dark beard of yore is snowy white, the hair cropped short. Yet it is still recognizably the brooding face of the intense writer I first got to know in the 1960s and 1970s, whose sharp, dark eyes, peering from under those heavy brows, pin you to your chair, while his fiery energy and reflective words cast a spell. Like the best of his writing, the straightforward and unpretentious conversational style has something almost Zen-like about it, a strong sense of “less is more”. His distinctive voice and colourful South African English – hovering charmingly between English and Afrikaans – is complemented by the occasional, conscious and highly theatrical gesture … often arrested for just a moment, for emphasis, before being completed; or else it is completed in slow motion, to the rhythm of his speech.” (Excerpt from an interview by Temple Hauptfleisch for Stellenbosch Visio, Spring 2017)
Highly regarded by critics and the public, both nationally and internationally, since the mid 1960s, Athol Fugard is to be counted among the truly great playwrights of the 20th century and beyond. His output, an imposing list of 40 plays, includes some of the most influential and moving works of dramatic literature that we have in English.
Reviewing the 1982 New York production of Master Harold … and the Boys, Frank Rich of The New York Times (5 May 1982) said:
“There may be two or three living playwrights in the world who can write as well as Athol Fugard, but I’m not sure that any of them has written a recent play that can match Master Harold’… and the Boys. Mr. Fugard’s drama – lyrical in design, shattering in impact – is likely to be an enduring part of the theater long after most of this Broadway season has turned to dust.”
And he was right. The play would go on to make the Royal National Theatre’s published list of the 100 most significant plays of the 20th century (based on the works that received the most nominations from a survey of 800 playwrights, actors, directors, theatre professionals, and arts journalists) and also Entertainment Weekly’s 2013 survey of the 50 greatest plays of the past 100 years (1913–2013).
I happened to be in New York at that time and recall seeing that original Broadway production myself. Enthralled and deeply moved by the impact of its finely tuned mix of humour, humanity and dramatic content, I leapt to my feet as the performers took their bow to a standing ovation, just as my equally impressed neighbour turned to me in awe to exclaim that Fugard had saved Broadway!
Such spontaneous judgements have been supported before and since by the fact that his works are not only widely performed to this day and have been translated into a number of languages, but also that they have been used as set works for drama courses since the 1970s and productions are regularly found on the programs of festivals across the world. In addition, vast numbers of books, theses and articles about the playwright and the individual plays have appeared over the past 60-odd years, while Fugard received numerous theatre awards and honours for his work, among which are nine Honorary Doctorates and five Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Though his writing and directing career was from time to time spent in various other parts of the world, notably in the USA, there has never been any doubt that his true roots were indelibly linked to South Africa. And it was this commitment that made him a particularly influential figure in the shaping of South African theatre and performance culture since the late 1950s – not only as writer, director and performer, but also as a chronicler of his times, a catalyst for cultural innovation and engagement, and an agitator for socio-political change in South African society itself.
As a self-confessed “regional writer,” for whom sense of place was always a primary concern, Fugard worked assiduously over the course of 65 years to create his own, very distinctive, form of dramatic narration, one with which he could explore and bear witness to his particular experience of and insights into, the intimate lives of ordinary people living in the harsh and varied context and turmoil of his complex mother country. In each work, he sought to express in images and words the dreams and the despair, the agony and the ecstasy of the everyday individuals he discovered around him. A powerful driving force that fed his genius and shaped his art over the course of his career.
From the first productions of his plays, his working process entailed writing an initial text alone in his study before going to work on it collaboratively as director of the first production – often casting himself in one of the roles as well. This is a pattern that he would follow for much of his life and one that inspired a number of other theatre-makers to do the same. More importantly, what Fugard wrote and how he wrote would lead to new work by other writers, directors and performers, in a real sense helping to give shape to what has become a truly South African form of theatre and performance, deriving from and focused on the land and its peoples. Among those to follow his lead to some extent have been some of the more prominent playwrights of the South African cultural struggle, including Paul Slabolepszy, Reza de Wet, Deon Opperman, John Kani and Mike van Graan. There are a host of others.
His approach was not static of course, his creative periods going through many stages of experimentation, from the Greek-inspired symbolism of Orestes and Dimetos to his much-lauded excursions into full-on improvisational and collaborative works with performers like John Kani and Winston Ntshona, a process that gave us superb works like The Island and Sizwe Bansi is Dead. In recent years he also began to co-write plays with his wife Paula Fourie, including his first play in Afrikaans.
Ultimately though, the bulk of his work tended towards written texts in a basic realist – almost Chekhovian – mode, utilizing a small cast and simple set (or even an empty space), in which his articulate and highly verbal and metaphor-laden texts could focus on a few, clearly delineated and distinctive characters, observed at a critical moment in their lives. I suspect that this option arose partly in response to the conditions under which his career had started: writing and directing works for amateur and township players in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, to be mounted with little funding in found spaces by inexperienced performers – often with individuals and for audiences more accustomed to other (African) traditions of performance.
Mel Gussow, reviewing the New York première of The Blood Knot in 1982, suggested that this early play had become the model for almost all of Fugard’s subsequent works: “close, compacted studies of two or three people in a love-hate tie of blood, marriage, or friendship.” This was Fugard’s version of Grotowski “poor theatre,” i.e. plays focused on the dynamic interaction between words, performers and audience, rather than the externally added accoutrements and spectacle of performance that characterize what Grotowski refers to as “rich theatre.”
It was this kind of sparseness and concentration that would ultimately influence and even radically alter theatre in South Africa, shifting it from imported European and American models, to more home-grown, almost rough-hewn, models of theatre-making. In effect it was most often simply a fundamental and stripped-down version of realist theatre-making, but one which, in the hands of a master, became magical.
Fugard eventually went on to do that in 40 enthralling – and often award-winning – plays, four film scripts, a collection of short stories and two novels.
Not surprisingly, given the times and the prevailing socio-political conditions in South Africa, he was widely considered a political playwright, an active conscience in troubled times, and someone most often lauded for his fearless and uncompromising political stance in the face of the apartheid-driven opposition to, and persecution of, dissenting writers and artists. Not surprisingly so. His empathy for the oppressed was clear from his works, and he most certainly had his personal share of trouble with the state, the security police and the censorship system as any biography of him will point out. For example, he was one of the earliest proponents of a playwright’s boycott of South Africa (though he would later change his stance on this), his passport was withdrawn in view of his work with the radical theatre-maker Tone Brulin in Belgium and his own more militant plays, and – in a somewhat bizarre move – the published text of his play Master Harold…and the Boys was banned, even though the play was approved for performance in South Africa. Through this all and more he continued writing, continued making theatre.
Yet I believe the true essence of each Fugard work is something more profound and lasting than political opposition, and is to be found in the quality of his craftsmanship and the more universal and philosophical thrust that underlies every one of his plays, films and novels. While all his plays are infused with an acute sense of moral outrage, he once told me in an interview that he never saw himself as a militant political writer or an aspiring saviour of society – for to him the role of the writer is something less presumptuous, yet equally important:
“I feel I have an obligation in terms of our time to bear witness. That’s it!”
Indeed, each work seems to me to offer the audience a meticulous dissection of an intimate, even fraught, moment in time, exploring the many joys and sorrows of everyday South Africans, and the multiple failures and triumphs of the human spirit. He deals with matters that often seem to carry far more weight than a time-bound response to a particular political situation, important as that may also be in its time and place.
In my reckoning, no more than a half-dozen of his 40 known plays may be seen as primarily and justifiably politically activist in intent – angry and effective indictments of an inhumane socio-political system and its devastating impact on the lives of people. Among them, one obviously must include a number of his best-known works. Yet, even in those works, it is precisely the impact of the diabolical system on the intimate lives of individual people that becomes the real focus, the playwright exploring the immense burden to be borne by the individual. In essence, Fugard was at his best when simply chronicling significant everyday events – with themes drawn from his own life and that of people he had either observed or read about.
Besides his legacy of plays, Athol Fugard was also, directly and indirectly, a prime mover in and collaborator on a loosely-linked set of new and exciting performance initiatives, spaces and festivals over the course of the past half century, initiatives where experimentation and audacious performance could thrive. Among them — his Serpent Players, The Rehearsal Room at Dorkay House, the Space Theatre, the Market Theatre, the Baxter Theatre and, of course, the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town. All became part of an ever-expanding South African alternative theatre movement, one inspired by the society’s own cultural struggle, the global experimental movement of the 1970s and the international playwright’s boycott. Fugard-inspired, all ultimately became the essential infrastructure of South African theatre in the new millennium.
*Temple Hauptfleisch is a retired South African drama teacher, playwright and theatre researcher, the former head of the Centre for SA Theatre Research (CESAT, 1979-87), Chair of the University of Stellenbosch Drama Department (1995-2005) and director of the Centre for Theatre and Performance Studies at Stellenbosch (1994-2009). Founder-editor of the South African Theatre Journal (1987-) and the online Encylopaedia for South African Theatre, Film, Media and Performance (ESAT, 2005). This piece was written specifically for Critical Stages.
Copyright © 2025 Temple Hauptfleisch
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
