W.H. Auden, meditating on the position of the artist in a poem by W.B. Yeats, concluded that poetry “makes nothing happen.” Whereas typically true, the principle doesn’t maintain within the case of playwright Athol Fugard, whose physique of labor helped remodel the historical past of his nation.
Born in Middelburg, South Africa, in 1932 to an immigrant English father of Irish descent and a mom from an Afrikaner household, Fugard lived by way of the rise and fall of apartheid. His profession introduced a world highlight to this method of racial segregation in performs that consciences and fomented activism at residence and overseas.
Fugard, who died Saturday at age 92, was a part of a resistance motion in South Africa that discovered its voice within the theater.
The stage grew to become one of many few locations the place the flames of dissent, militantly stomped out in different quarters of society, grew to a conflagration seen around the globe.
“At the height of the apartheid era, the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and the Space Theatre in Cape Town, both defiantly nonracial venues in a racially divided country, produced shattering plays about black life under the apartheid regime,” recalled playwright and director Emily Mann in a Instances article reflecting on Nelson Mandela’s legacy to the humanities. Fugard, who was on the entrance strains of this exercise, later acknowledged that, within the South African case, the pen was certainly mightier than the sword.
Citizenship had provided Fugard along with his mission as a author. However he understood the distinction between artwork and politics and resisted anybody dictating his agenda as a playwright.
“No writer must ever presume to tell another writer what his or her political responsibilities are,” he advised the Paris Assessment. “It is a poet’s right in South Africa to write a poem that seemingly has no political resonance.”
On the identical time, he acknowledged, in a chat he gave at Rhodes College in 1991, that it most likely wasn’t potential to “tell a South African story accurately and truthfully and for it not to have a political spin-off.” Complacency for him was unthinkable when a majority of his fellow residents have been denied their basic liberties.
However Fugard, who although primarily often known as a playwright was additionally an completed novelist, director and actor, understood the boundaries of propaganda. Solely artwork, unflinchingly dedicated to the reality, has the potential to affect hearts and minds. He was decided to grow to be, in all his work, a witness.
The contradictions inherent in his place as a white South African dissident grew to become a supply of dramatic battle in his performs. Fugard couldn’t resign his id, however he may scrutinize it with ruthless honesty, topic it to imaginative checks and share his moral findings.
For all of the political freight of Fugard’s works, he was a deeply private author. It wasn’t a lot concepts or arguments that impressed his performs however human beings in all their messy issues.
His notebooks, bursting with pictures and anecdotes of real-life people whose tales caught his consideration, supplied a storehouse for his performs. Fugard wasn’t in a rush to translate this materials to the stage. The figures in his journals must wait till one thing inside him summoned them into theatrical motion.
Earlier than he may inhabit the psychology of his characters, his personal psychology needed to be stirred. As he defined in his speech at Rhodes College, “The Swedish poet [Tomas] Tranströmer has a line to the effect that when the external event coincides with the internal reality the poem happens. That is how it works for me as a playwright.”
Again and again it was the fact of what Fugard referred to as “human desperation” that infected his creativeness. “Nobody has ever written a good play about a group of happy people who started off happy and who were happy all the way through,” he elaborated. “And in South Africa if you have found a desperate individual, nine times out of 10 you have also found a desperate political situation.”
But the autobiographical aspect is current even in locations the place it might sound conspicuously absent. “Blood Knot,” the breakthrough play through which he discovered his voice as a dramatist, is about two brothers from the identical mom, one dark-skinned, the opposite light-skinned. Fugard, who took on the position of the light-skinned brother reverse Zakes Mokae within the 1961 Johannesburg premiere, has these siblings wrestle for his or her dignity and autonomy in a one-room shack.
The genesis of the play, as Fugard advised the Paris Assessment, “had absolutely nothing to do with the racial situation in South Africa.” He described the “seminal moment” because the wrenching sight of his brother sleeping one evening, a picture that crammed his coronary heart with pity.
“My brother is a white man like myself,” he defined. “I looked down at him, and saw in that sleeping body and face, all his pain. Life had been very hard on him, and it was just written on his flesh. It was a scalding moment for me. I was absolutely overcome by my sense of what time had done to what I remembered as a proud and powerful body.”
The play, which radically recasts the fraternal relationship, developed far past its originating impetus. “Blood Knot” parodies the charade of official racial variations in scenes through which the brothers take turns donning a swimsuit of white man’s garments bought for a romantic encounter with a white girl launched by way of a private advert.
An early masterpiece, “Blood Knot” established a paradigm for Fugard, whose performs are distinguished by their small casts, static places and tinderbox feelings. Simply as essential is the position of playacting. His characters could also be confined by their circumstances however their imaginations are let out in theatrical video games, pantomimes and nostalgic reveries.
The brothers of “Blood Knot” lampoon the that means of whiteness with costume decisions. Younger Haley tyrannically conducts “the boys” in “ ’Master Harold’…and the Boys” to reenact recollections of his childhood. The Black prisoners of “The Island” flip to Sophocles’ “Antigone” to know the injustice of their very own state of affairs.
Theatrical craft was of preeminent significance for Fugard, who was a much less typical dramatist than is usually assumed. His poetic fashion different along with his thematic content material, each of which have been contingent on the idiosyncrasies of his characters. The voices of his protagonists, which is to say the cadences of their social identities, decide not simply the sound however the form of their tales. In upholding the sanctity of the spoken phrase, Fugard took his place within the oral custom of Homer.
Stylistically, he contained multitudes. His early dramas from the Nineteen Sixties — “Blood Knot,” “Hello and Goodbye” and “Boesman and Lena” — evoke the existential issues of the Absurdist playwrights from the period. But the stark metaphysical truths of those performs are inseparable from their brutal South African context.
Fugard’s “workshop” performs from the early Seventies, devised with actors Winston Ntshona and John Kani, opened a extra direct channel to the lived actuality of Black South Africans. “Sizwe Bansi Is Dead” and “The Island” have the propulsive vitality of efficiency artwork, registering their shocks to the viewers by way of compression and uncooked theatricality. “Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act,” though credited to Fugard alone, was developed alongside comparable strains of guided improvisation and different strategies geared toward, within the writer’s personal phrases, “releasing the creative potential of the actor.”
Working in opposition to apartheid legal guidelines positioned Fugard in authorized jeopardy. His passport was seized after a televised efficiency of “Blood Knot” in London in 1967 and never returned till 1971. His work was banned by the authorities and he and his household have been positioned underneath surveillance.
Producing “Sizwe Bansi Is Dead” required not solely braveness however ingenuity. “We felt that the play was far too dangerous for us to go public with it; there was the problem of mixed audiences,” Fugard recounted within the Paris Assessment. “So we launched the play by underground performances to which people had to have a specific invitation — a legal loophole in the censorship structure in South Africa, and one we continued to exploit for many years.”
This “underground period” introduced a lot interference from the police. “They rolled up once or twice and threatened to close us down, arrest us — the usual bully tactics of security police anywhere in the world,” Fugard mentioned. “We just persisted, carried on, and survived it. We eventually did go public with ‘Sizwe Bansi,’ many years later, but only after it had played in London and New York. After that, we felt that the play’s reputation protected us.”
The tip of apartheid within the early Nineties remodeled Fugard’s playwriting however didn’t rob him of his goal. At all times deeply private, his work grew to become extra conspicuously autobiographical. The determine of the writer, usually a crotchety older man with an impish humorousness and unabashed literary fervor, grew to become a staple of his later work. However age didn’t mellow his subversive spirit. The inquiry into social justice merely continued down extra inward byways.
“Valley Song,” the best of the post-apartheid works, gives a lyrical meditation on the human price of change, the losses exacted by progress. Fugard, who was a potent ethical drive on stage, carried out the double position of Writer and Buks, a mixed-race tenant farmer who should give his granddaughter the liberty to depart their residence in order that she will pursue her dream of being a well-known singer.
Fugard developed a robust relationship with L.A.’s Fountain Theatre, the place his late performs discovered welcome within the type of grassroots setting of his early years. “After being impressed by the company’s L.A. premiere of “The Road to Mecca,” Fugard entrusted Stephen Sachs with the world premiere of “Exits and Entrances.” “Victory,” “The Blue Iris” and “The Train Driver” notably had their U.S. premieres on the Fountain.
“The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek,” which had its West Coast premiere on the Fountain, brings the Nelson Mandela-era mandate of reality and reconciliation to the area of particular person conscience. A relatively small addition to his oeuvre, the drama gives complicated characterizations which can be a present to actors — a continuing of Fugard’s playwriting.
Fugard outlined the essence of what he referred to as “pure theater” as nothing extra “than the actor and the stage, the actor in space and silence.” As an artist he resisted labels, however he conceded that if his work is to be categorized “then it must be as ‘actors’ theatre.’ ”
Humanity was at all times on the core of Fugard’s artwork. In “A Lesson From Aloes,” a personality quotes Thoreau: “There is a purpose to life, and we will be measured by the extent to which we harness ourselves to it.” By this customary, Fugard was a mannequin to us all.
