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Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard ( ; 11 June 19328 March 2025) was a South African playwright, novelist, actor and director. Widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright and acclaimed as "the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world" by Time magazine in 1985, he published more than thirty plays. He is best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system of apartheid, some of which have been adapted to film. His novel Tsotsi was adapted as a Tsotsi, which won an Academy Award in 2005. Three plays he wrote, and two plays he co-authored, were nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play.
Fugard also served as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.
Fugard received many awards, honours and honorary degrees, including the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver from the government of South Africa in 2005 "for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre". He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1986. Fugard was honoured in Cape Town with the 2010 opening of the Fugard Theatre in District Six. He received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.
In 1935, his family moved to Port Elizabeth.Athol Fugard (2026). 9780192829252, Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 9780192829252 (Google Books limited preview.) In 1938, he began attending primary school at Marist Brothers College.
Fugard attended Port Elizabeth Technical College for his secondary education from 1946 to 1950, then studied philosophy and social anthropology at the University of Cape Town on a scholarship. However, he dropped out of the university in 1953, just a few months before final examinations.
Fugard left home, hitchhiked to north Africa with a friend and in Port Sudan, aged 18, enrolled in the crew of the steam ship . On board, and bound for Japan, he began writing a novel, but deciding it was terrible, threw the manuscript into the sea. He "celebrated" his two years as a merchant seaman in his 1999 autobiographical play The Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage. (Google Books limited preview.)
In September 1956, he married Sheila Meiring, a University of Cape Town Drama School student whom he had met the previous year. In 1958, the couple moved to Johannesburg, where Fugard worked as a clerk in a Native Commissioners' Court. He became "keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid", and befriended local anti-apartheid activists, an experience that was to colour his earliest work.
After returning to Port Elizabeth in the early 1960s, Athol and Sheila Fugard started The Circle Players, which derives its name from the production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht.
In 1961, in Johannesburg, Fugard and Mokae starred as the brothers Morris and Zachariah in the single-performance world première of Fugard's play Blood Knot (revised and retitled Blood Knot in 1987), directed by Barney Simon. In 1989, Lloyd Richards of The Paris Review declared The Blood Knot to be Fugard's first "major play".
Fugard publicly supported the call of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain for an international boycott of racially segregated South African theatres. The results were additional restrictions and surveillance. He began to have his plays published and produced outside South Africa. Lucille Lortel's production of The Blood Knot at the Off Broadway Cricket Theater in New York City in 1964 "launched" Fugard's "American career".
In an interview in California, Ntshona and Kani were asked why they were doing the play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, considered a highly political and telling story of the South African political landscape at the time. Ntshona answered: "We are just a group of artists who love theatre. And we have every right to open the doors to anyone who wants to take a look at our play and our work...We believe that art is life and conversely, life is art. And no sensible man can divorce one from the other. That's it. Other attributes are merely labels." They mainly performed at the St Stephen's Hall, adjacent to St Stephen's Church, and other spaces in and around New Brighton, the oldest Black township in Port Elizabeth.
According to Loren Kruger, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago,
Clive Barnes of The New York Times panned People Are Living There (1969) in 1971, arguing: "There are splinters of realities here, and pregnancies of feeling, hut sic nothing of significance emerges. In Mr. Fugard's earlier plays he seemed to be dealing with life at a proper level of humanity. Here—if real people are living there—they remain oddly quiet about it...The first act rambles disconsolately, like a lonely type writer looking for a subject and the second act produces with pride a birthday party of Charlie Chaplin bathos but less than Chaplinesque invention and spirit..The harangue one another in an awkward dislocation between a formal speech and an interior monologue." Mark Blankenship of Variety negatively reviewed a 2005 revival of the same work, writing that it "lacks the emotional intensity and theatrical imagination that mark such Fugard favorites" as "Master Harold"...and the Boys. Blankenship also stated, however, that the performance he attended featuring "only haphazard sketches of plot and character" was perhaps the result of Fugard allowing director Suzanne Shepard to revise the play without showing him the changes.
Several of Fugard's early works were performed at the Space Theatre in Cape Town, founded in 1972. The theater mounted almost 300 productions, starting with the premier of Athol Fugard's Statements After an Arrest under the Immorality Act. It hosted the first productions of the Kani/Ntshona/Fugard collaborations The Island and Sizwe Bansi is Dead. (Free excerpt; registration required for full access.)
The Serpent Players conceptualised and co-authored many plays that it performed for a variety of audiences in many theatres around the world. The following are some of its notable and most popular plays:
Fugard developed these two plays for the Serpent Players in workshops, working with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, publishing them in 1974 with his own play Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (1972). The authorities considered the title of The Island, which alludes to Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela was being held, too controversial, so Fugard and the Serpent Players used the alternative title The Hodoshe Span ( Hodoshe meaning "carrion fly" in Xhosa language).
Fugard's play A Lesson from Aloes (1978) was described as one of his major works by Alvin Klein of The New York Times, though others have written more lukewarm reviews.
The Road to Mecca was presented at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut, in May 1984. Directed by Fugard, the cast starred Carmen Mathews, Marianne Owen, and Tom Aldredge. Along with Master Harold, it proved to be one of Fugard's most acclaimed works.Frank Rich. "Stage: 'To Mecca,' By Athol Fugard" The New York Times, 15 May 1984. It is the story of an elderly recluse in a small South African town who has spent 15 years on an obsessive artistic project.
Fugard appeared in his A Place With the Pigs at the Yale Rep in New Haven in 1987. Inspired by the true story of World War II Soviet deserter, Fugard plays a paranoid who spent four decades hiding with his pigs. As with The Road to Mecca, Fugard's critics readily appreciated the metaphor for a life of internal exile. He himself suggested that it was a reflection on his long battle with alcoholism. From the early 1980s Fugard was a teetotaler.
In January 2009, Fugard returned to New Haven for the premiere of Coming Home. Veronika, the granddaughter of Buk, the coloured farmer in Valley Song, leaves the Karoo to pursue a singing career in Cape Town but then returns, after his death, to create a new life on the land for her young son.
The Fugard Theatre, in the District Six area of Cape Town opened with performances by the Isango Portobello theatre company in February 2010 and a new play written and directed by Athol Fugard, The Train Driver, played at the theatre in March 2010.
In April 2014, he returned to the stage in the world premiere of his The Shadow of a Hummingbird at the Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven. This short play was performed with an "introductory scene" compiled by Paula Fourie from Fugard's journal writings. With "the playwright digging through these diaries on a set which resembles an old, busy writer's workspace", the scene blends into the main play, which begins when Boba, the grandson of the story-telling grandfather character Oupa (played by Fugard) comes to visit.
His film debut as a director occurred in 1992, when he co-directed the adaptation of his play The Road to Mecca with Peter Goldsmid, who also wrote the screenplay. The film adaptation of his novel Tsotsi, written and directed by Gavin Hood, won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006.
Outside of his own work, Fugard had a number of cameo film roles, most notably as Jan Smuts in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), and as Doctor Sundesval in Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields (1984). Spalding Gray, who befriended Fugard on the set of The Killing Fields, conjured the writer as a sage figure in his theatrical monologue and subsequent film Swimming to Cambodia (1987).
In 2012, Fugard was the subject of a documentary, Falls the Shadow, directed by Tony Palmer and produced by Eric Abraham and David Elstein.
Although increasingly disillusioned with the course of post-Apartheid politics – he regarded it as a tragedy that Nelson Mandela had not taken a second term as President to "entrench his vision" – in 2012 Fugard returned to South Africa.
In 2015, after almost 60 years of marriage, Athol and Sheila Fugard (who had become a novelist and poet) divorced. The following year, Fugard married Paula Fourie, a younger South African writer and academic. The couple lived in the Cape Winelands region of South Africa with their two children, daughter Halle and son Lanigan.
Fugard died at his home in Stellenbosch, Western Cape, on 8 March 2025, at the age of 92. In 2006, Fugard had reserved a grave plot for himself in Nieu-Bethesda, a village in the Karoo where he had a home and where the preserved Owl House and statuary gardens of the reclusive artist Helen Martins inspired his play The Road to Mecca. He had also expressed the wish to have his gravestone inscribed with the remark of a black child he had passed on an uphill run in the Karoo: "Hou so aan, Oubaas – jy kom eerste!" ("Keep going, boss – you’re coming first!").
In addition to his children with Paula Fourie, Fugard is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, the writer Lisa Fugard. Born in 1961, she moved to the United States in 1980 to pursue an acting career. Her 2013 debut novel, Skinner's Drift, is the tale of a daughter's return to post-Apartheid South Africa.
Career
Early period
In 1958, Fugard organised "a multiracial theatre for which he wrote, directed, and acted", writing and producing several plays for it, including No-Good Friday (1958) and Nongogo (1959), in which he and his colleague, black South African actor Zakes Mokae, performed. In 1978, Richard Eder of The New York Times criticized Nongogo as "awkward and thin. It is unable to communicate very much about its characters, or make them much more than the servants of a noticeably ticking plot." Eder said, "Queenie is the most real of the characters. Her sense of herself and where she wants to go makes her believable and the crumbling of her dour defenses at a touch of hope makes her affecting. By contrast, Johnny is unreal. His warmth and hopefulness at the start crumble too suddenly and too completely."
Loren Kruger (2026). 9780521817080, Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press. . ISBN 9780521817080 (Google Books.)
Refusal to stage for "Whites Only" audiences
In 1962, Fugard found the question of whether he could "work in a theatre which excludes 'Non-Whites'—or includes them only on the basis of special segregated performance—increasingly pressing". It was made more so by the decision of British Equity to prevent any British entertainer visiting South Africa unless the audiences were allowed to be multi-racial. In a decision that caused him to reflect on the power of art to effect change, Fugard decided that the "answer must be No" to segregation.
That old argument used to be so comforting; so plausible: 'One person in that segregated, white audience, might be moved to think, and then to change, by what he saw'.
I'm beginning to wonder whether it really works that way. The supposition seems to be that there is a didactic—a teaching through feeling element in art. What I do know is that art can give meaning, can render meaningful areas of experience, and most certainly also enhances. But teach? Contradict? State the opposite to what you believe and then lead you to accept it?
In other words, can art change a man or woman? No. That is what life does. Art is no substitute for life.
Of the few venues in the country where a play could be presented to mixed audiences, Fugard noted that some were little better than barns. But he concluded that under these circumstances, "every conceivable dignity—audience, producer, act, 'professional' etc.—" was "operative" in the white theatre except one, "human dignity".Fugard (1984), p. 60
The Serpent Players
In the 1960s, Fugard formed the Serpent Players, whose name derives from its first venue, the former snake pit (hence the name) at the Port Elizabeth Museum, "a group of black actors worker-players who earned their living as teachers, clerks, and industrial workers, and cannot thus be considered amateurs in the manner of leisured whites", developing and performing plays "under surveillance by the Security Police", according to Loren Kruger's The Dis-illusion of Apartheid, published in 2004.Loren Kruger (2026). 9780521817080, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521817080 (Google Books limited preview.) The group largely consisted of black men, including Winston Ntshona, John Kani, Welcome Duru, Fats Bookholane and Mike Ngxolo as well as Nomhle Nkonyeni and Mabel Magada. They all got together, albeit at different intervals, and decided to do something about their lives using the stage. In 1961 they met Athol Fugard, a white man who grew up in Port Elizabeth and who recently returned from Johannesburg, and asked him if he could work with them "as he had the know-how theatrically—the tricks, how to use the stage, movements, everything"; they worked with Athol Fugard since then, "and that is how the Serpent Players got together."Art is Life and Life is Art'. An interview with John Kani and Winston Ntshona of the Serpent Players from South Africa", in Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies Internet, 6(2), 1976, pp. 5–26. Available from: eScholarship, University of California. Retrieved 26 July 2017. At the time, the group performed anything they could lay their hands on in South Africa as they had no access to any libraries. These included Bertolt Brecht, August Strindberg, Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare and many other prominent playwrights of the time.
the Serpent Players used Bertolt Brecht's elucidation of Gestus, dis-illusion, and social critique, as well as their own experience of the satiric comic routines of urban African vaudeville, to explore the theatrical force of Epic Theatre, as well as the immediate political relevance of a play about land distribution. Their work on the Caucasian Chalk Circle and, a year later, on Antigone led directly to the creation, in 1966, of what is still 2004 South Africa's most distinctive Lehrstück learning: The Coat. Based on an incident at one of the many political trials involving the Serpent Players, The Coat dramatized the choices facing a woman whose husband, convicted of anti-apartheid political activity, left her only a coat and instructions to use it.
Athol Fugard (1983). 086852011X, Craighall: A. D. Donker, 1983. 086852011X Less pleased than Fugard, the South African government of B. J. Vorster confiscated Fugard's passport.Walder, Dennis, "Crossing Boundaries: The Genesis of the Township Plays", Special issue on Athol Fugard, Twentieth Century Literature (Winter 1993); rpt. findarticles.com. Retrieved 4 October 2008.
Yale Rep premieres, 1980s
"Master Harold"...and the Boys, written in 1982, incorporates "strong autobiographical matter"; nonetheless "it is fiction, not memoir", as and some of Fugard's other works are subtitled. (Google Books limited preview.) The play deals with the relationship between a 17-year-old white South African and two African men who work for the white youth's family. Its world premiere was performed by Danny Glover, Željko Ivanek and Zakes Mokae, at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, in March 1982.
Post-apartheid plays
The first play that Fugard wrote after the end of apartheid, Valley Song, premiered in Johannesburg, in August 1995, with Fugard in the role of both a white, and of a Coloureds, farmer. While they dispute property titles, both share a reverence for the land and fear change. In October 1995, Fugard took the play to the United States with a production by the Manhattan Theatre Club at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.
Film
Fugard's plays are produced internationally and have won multiple awards, and several have been made into films (see Filmography below). Fugard himself performed in the first of these, as Boesman alongside Yvonne Bryceland as Lena, in Boesman and Lena directed by Ross Devenish in 1973.
Later life and death
In the 1990s, Fugard lived in San Diego, California, where he taught as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting, and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). ''Times For the academic year 2000–2001, he taught at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, as the IU Class of 1963 Wells Scholar Professor. (RealAudio clip of interview.)
Plays
In chronological order of first production and/or publication:Fisher observes in the Fugard "Biography" section of Athol Fugard: Statements that South African writer and critic Gray, Stephen classifies many of Fugard's dramatic works according to chronological periods of composition and similarities of style: "Apprenticeship" (1956–1957); "Social Realism" (1958–1961); "Chamber Theatre" (1961–1970); "Improvised Theatre" (1966–1973); and "Poetic Symbolism" (1975–1990). (1991). 9780413645807, London: Methuen Drama. ISBN 9780413645807Athol Fugard (1990). 9781868141173, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. ISBN 9781868141173
Bibliography
Filmography
Selected awards and nominations
See also
General and cited references
Further reading
Reviews
External links
Categories: 1932 Births, 2025 Deaths, 20th-century South African Male Actors, 21st-century South African Male Actors, 21st-century South African Writers, Afrikaner People, Fellows Of The Royal Society Of Literature, People From Middelburg, Eastern Cape, Recipients Of The Order Of Ikhamanga, South African Anti-apartheid Activists, 20th-century South African Dramatists And Playwrights, South African Male Dramatists And Playwrights, South African Male Film Actors, South African Male Novelists, South African People Of Dutch Descent, South African People Of English Descent, South African People Of French Descent, South African People Of Irish Descent, Special Tony Award Recipients, White South African Anti-apartheid Activists, Writers Guild Of America Award Winners
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