Fugard, Athol (1932– ), South African playwright, director, and actor, born of Anglo-Irish and Afrikaner parents, who studied philosophy and social anthropology at the University of Cape Town. His first play,
No Good Friday (1959), was closely followed by
Ngogo (translatable as ‘a 35-cent woman’), the story of a mine-worker's whore.
The Blood Knot (1961; London, 1963; NY, 1964) tackled the bitter topic of the temptation to pass for white in a racially segregated society. In 1963 Fugard and his wife were invited to help a group of non-white actors in the African township of New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, to form an amateur drama group, the Serpent Players. His first production there,
Machiavelli's The Mandrake, was followed by productions of plays by
Brecht,
Büchner,
Sophocles, and others, and work with the group concurrently enriched his own writing.
Hello and Goodbye (1965; NY, 1969; London, 1973) and
Boesman and Lena (1969; NY, 1970; London, 1971) form with
The Blood Knot a trilogy about the lives of poor people in Port Elizabeth;
People are Living There (1969; NY, 1971; London, 1972) is set in a cheap boarding house in Johannesburg. Working with the Serpent Players, Fugard explored
improvisation and
Collective Creation to put on plays presenting the Black South African point of view. This resulted in
The Coat (1971),
Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972), dealing with the effects of the pass laws, and
The Island (1973), a dialogue between two prisoners on Robben Island. The last two, played by the two actors credited as co-authors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, were seen at the
Royal Court Theatre and in New York in 1974. The
Edinburgh Festival of 1975 commissioned
Dimetos, a poetic allegory with an unlocalized setting; a production at the
Nottingham Playhouse in 1976, with Paul
Scofield, transferred to London.
A Lesson from Aloes (NY and
National Theatre, 1980) was a triumphant return to the South African environment.
Master Harold … and the Boys (NY, 1982; NT, 1983) portrays a conflict between White and Black South African teenage friends;
The Road to Mecca (NT, 1985) is about an elderly Afrikaner sculptress; but
A Place with the Pigs (NT, 1988), in which a Red Army deserter hides in a pigsty for 41 years, marks a sharp change of setting and theme.
