...
When I did A lesson from aloes on Broadway, I went into the rehearsal room and I said to these three fucking difficult American actors – and believe me, mate, they were difficult – I said to them, “Listen” – and this is the first day of rehearsal – “I’ve got bad news.” They got silent, and I said, “I’ve just received a telegram to the effect that the playwright is dead. So, all you’ve got in the rehearsal room is a director.”
– Athol Fugard to Anthony Akerman, Amsterdam, December 1981
...
In 1981, I directed Athol Fugard’s A lesson from aloes (Een les van die aloë’s, translated by Willem Jan Otten) for Toneelgroep Sater in Amsterdam. I’d introduced Fugard’s work to the Netherlands when I directed Statements after an arrest under the Immorality Act (1976) (Verklaringen na een arrestatie onder de immoraliteitswet, translated by Bert Schierbeek) and Boesman and Lena (1980) (Boesman en Lena, also translated by Bert Schierbeek). By 1981, Fugard’s plays had been presented on Broadway, in the West End and at London’s National Theatre, and, as he always directed them himself, he was a busy man. I’d received a letter from him on 19 October saying he was fully committed to finishing a draft of a new play by the end of the month. So, when the company manager suggested inviting him to opening night, I said he’d be wasting his time. But he thought it was worth a try and sent him an invitation anyway.
 |
 |
 |
| Click to enlarge | Click to enlarge | Click to enlarge |
I’d first met Athol at a cast party after seeing a play he’d directed for the Serpent Players in the Rhodes University Little Theatre. By then, he was one of my favourite playwrights. In 1973, I renewed my acquaintance with him when we met up again after the first preview of Sizwe Bansi is dead at London’s Royal Court Theatre. That was the play that really launched his career, and it was followed by The island, Statements, the less-successful Dimetos and A Lesson from aloes.
I was pleasantly surprised when I heard in early November that Athol had accepted the invitation. I met him at Schiphol Airport on 18 November and took him back to my flat for breakfast. The first thing he did was describe the ending of the play he’d just finished. After the dramatic climax, the two black waiters in St George’s Park Tearoom – both competitive ballroom dancers – dance together as Sarah Vaughan sings “Little man”. I’d never heard of Sarah Vaughan, but I was impressed when Athol did a few twirls around my cramped flat.
The actors were nervous when Athol attended the final preview, but he gave them encouraging notes afterwards. I don’t think he was overly impressed. In a letter he wrote on his return, he thanked me for the “total decency” of my production, which was like being damned with faint praise. Maybe it wasn’t, but, in retrospect, I think it was fair comment.
Tradition dictates that Beaujolais Nouveau is on sale on the third Thursday in November, which was the day we opened. Athol was partial to wine and quickly acquired a taste for this new wine, which is why he slept through the opening night performance. Fortunately, no one noticed, as we were sitting in the gods next to the lighting box. I did have an anxious moment when he turned in his sleep and the full weight of his body came to rest on a profile spot, causing its beam to creep out of the acting area and up the wall of the theatre.
I asked if I could interview him about directing before he returned home, and he readily agreed. I opened a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau and turned on the tape recorder1. I was 32 and Athol was 49.
In December 1984, a translation of the interview appeared in the Dutch theatre magazine Toneel Teatraal under the title “Vroedvrouw bij de voorstelling”. Although I thought I’d lost the cassette with the original voice recording, I rediscovered it last year in the proverbial shoebox. It has never before been published in English.
I just want to talk to you as one director to another – a younger director to an older director. In Quarto Magazine, you said the important thing is to get the actors to understand the play before you can do anything. How do you go about getting actors to understand the script?
There’s something you’ve got to do very initially, which is – I don’t think there exists a single play in terms of which a few fairly definitive statements cannot be made right at the start, whether it’s Waiting for Godot or Mother Courage or a Pinter play or a Tennessee Williams play. I think there are a few very simple compass bearings – intellectually, as such – that can be laid down right at the start. I just do not know of a play that does not make that possible.
Tell me about those compass bearings.
I think it’s just to essentially establish – and that obviously varies in terms of whether you are doing a play by Samuel Beckett, or whether you are doing a play by Bertolt Brecht, or whether you’re doing a play by Arthur Miller – there are compass bearings that establish the essential direction, in terms of the experience, that you want the audience to have. I mean, I don’t think it’s possible to think about a play and think that a play – any play, be it Hamlet, Mother Courage, Waiting for Godot – that there is any startling new – we know, we know now what sort of territories those plays want to direct us as an audience into. And I think those first compass bearings, in terms of a rehearsal room, is simply just to find that, just to define the territory the play is going to occupy. And that’s a general statement. That is something you can just say from the pulpit in a rehearsal room. Then, something vastly more complex, more subtle, starts, which is – if you’re doing Mother Courage – talking to the actress who’s going to be Mother Courage. And then your vocabulary has just got to change from being general. The first statement in terms of compass bearings – that was a general statement. Then, having moved from an area which, you know, must include the actors, the set designer, the stagehands, the stage manager, the actors – from a statement as general as that, you then take on very specifically the actor and the vocabulary; no two actors have the same vocabulary. Talking in terms of my personal experience, there are actors who I need to actually take on an intellectual exercise. I need to actually say to them, “Listen, understand.” I must analyse, take apart, reassemble, examine – as if it was a piece of superb engineering – the structure of a role, before they can start to – or, as they need to – go into it. There are other actors who just work totally intuitively, and you just make a gesture.
How important do you regard the set – the work with the designer?
I’ve looked for a long time for designers who can understand and do the thing that I think is most important in terms of a play. I’ve got that man in London. I don’t have that man yet in New York. I look for a designer who does nothing, which I think is the hardest – hardest. But I’ve got that man in London. He knows how to do nothing. He knows how to do nothing the right way, which is to: do it all! And then the two of us just go through a process of elimination, and we take it away, and we take it away, and we take it – a play like Sizwe Bansi, which started upstairs – in the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court – went on tour. We came downstairs2, and God knows that what we did on the stage in the main theatre wasn’t very complex, but it only took us one run-through to realise there was too much out there, and I think one of my happiest images of myself in terms of this area of theatre is myself and that designer physically demolishing the set, so we could open that night with nothing on the stage. But we literally put our fists into it.
So, for you, it’s the actor in space, the actor in space and silence?
I’m interested in only one thing. I regard my essential role as director as being midwife – vroedvrou – to performance. I think that without performance – now, I can remember a moment in Belgrade when I took Statements after an arrest under the Immorality Act there with Yvonne Bryceland, Ben Kingsley and Wilson Dunster, and we did it the way we did it, which was nothing – nothing – a blanket and two naked bodies. At the same time, at the Belgrade Festival was a company from Russia – the Taganka Company – who were doing Don Giovanni. We went along to their performance eventually, and that was quite astonishing. I didn’t know that they had come to see our work; and there was an official reception, I think the day after or something like that, and suddenly this horde of what looked like bank managers and accountants descended on us. It was the Taganka Company – the Taganka Company actors – and, Jesus Christ, let me assure you that these were – were – actors, because I then went on to see their work later. But they just came, and one of the things they said to Yvonne, Ben Kingsley, Wilson Dunster and myself was that it was inordinately gratifying for them – having seen our performance the previous evening – to have seen a stage just handed over to performance and nothing else. And, actually, there was nothing else to look at on that stage, except the performance – and whatever personal truth that involved.
So, you think the essence –
For myself, for myself, for myself only – for myself, I just, I just talk in exactly the same way as we’ve talked about this question of living in South Africa or not living in South Africa. I don’t extend my rules equivalently in the theatre. I make theatre that way.
In the process of making theatre – I mean, apart from the fact you’ve done a lot of exercises with the Serpent Players, including The coat and Sizwe Bansi is dead and The island, where you use improvisation also as part of a method of writing3 – to what extent now do you use improvisation? What are you – what’s, for you, the usefulness of improvisation? Say, when you talked about improvising with the actors in Aloes when you first started rehearsing in Joburg. What sort of improvisation is that?
I have a sense – and I think this is to answer your question – I think I have a sense that they were incredibly important experiences for me; but I think that I have, and am still in the process of, returning very massively to my private identity as a writer. I don’t argue. I’m not invalidating anything in terms of the processes I used in the past. There was a period after Boesman and Lena when I dried up as a writer. I had a writer’s block and couldn’t write, so I just worked with actors and made theatre. And there’s been a slow, and for me a very significant – for myself again, personally – very meaningful return to the total privacy of blank paper and myself. Pen and ink. And leaving a totally private space only when I, in fact, have a play totally defined on paper. I’ve just finished a play like that, which is not to say the rehearsal room is obviously not going to enrich the text, but it is in no sense as flimsy a mandate as some of the things that lay behind me.
But, now, do you disregard improvisation, or do you still find a use for it? I mean, for other –
No, I’m too tired. I’m too old now to deal with improvisation.
You said that you did that with – for example, to find the name Xanadu4.
Yes, but that’s a simple exercise. That’s not to explore a major area of the play. I mean, that was just fun. That was just to liven up, you know, a day in the life of the rehearsal room. You know, it wasn’t a major exercise into the sort of content of the play. It was just fun.
For the last years – I mean, for quite a long time – you’ve only directed your own work. For you, then, it must be quite a significant switching of roles from being writer to handling – to handling a text as writer and then handling it as director. Do you have – I mean, is that a clear step? How objective are you with regard to the text?
I think that when I start to write a play, in the very first months – it takes me a year to write a play – in those early months, it is just me as a writer. And then, if the play is going to, in fact, live and be a play eventually, at a certain point the blank page goes on also to be a space in my head, in terms of which I, very dimly – in which I very dimly – see performance and the tempo and the rhythm of performance, and to have arrived – as I have now, just recently, at the completion of Master Harold – I am impatient to get in the rehearsal room. Not because I am impatient to discover something. I know it. I know how to direct this play. Absolutely. It’s already happened in my head. Obviously, there are going to be surprises. Obviously, actors, being what they are, are going to enrich the text, are going to lead me to discover values to moments that I don’t know about at this point.
Disappointments as well? From the ideal performance in your head?
No, I’ve never experienced that. Categorically, I have never experienced that.
So, do you –
But the essential outlines of the play which I have directed in my head at this moment, or sort of have blocked out – let me put it that way, blocked out in my head – ja, no, well, that’s there. I just go into a rehearsal room and do it.
Is it, for you, more a completion of a work that you start on?
Yes, ja, that’s a nice way – it’s not a question of changing gear. You see, I mean, I know I – in a way that no other major playwright at this time moves between – Brecht is dead – moves between writing the play and directing it as well. And at one point, I used to act in them as well. But I do not – there is no change of gear for me. It is one organic arc.
And when you – okay, so it’s one organic arc. So, there’s not a moment when you take on the play as a director as such, because it all belongs to –
I say things to the actors. When I did A lesson from aloes on Broadway, I went into the rehearsal room, and I said to these three fucking difficult American actors5 – and believe me, mate, they were difficult – I said to them, “Listen” – this is the first day of rehearsal – “I’ve got bad news.” They got silent, and I said, “I’ve just received a telegram to the effect that the playwright is dead. So, all you’ve got in the rehearsal room is a director.” Do you understand what I’m saying? You understand the point that I’m making, Anthony? And I –
In other words, you mean the text is not sacred – at that moment?
No. What I was saying: the text is complete! Because with these three buggers, I’d been through so many problems. Then, there came a time when, simply because the situation had relaxed that I could, I said to them – I think it was like about seven days later – I said, “Listen, I’ve received another telegram from Paris. They’d misinformed me the first time. He’s not actually dead. He’s in a coma, and we could possibly get messages through to him if it is necessary.” You know, which, I mean, so totally disarmed them.
Do you think, in terms of – and I don’t mean this in any sort of intellectual kind of way – “isms”. You know, when one talks about expressionism, realism, naturalism6. Do you think consciously –
I don’t know what those words mean at all. I’m sorry. I know that we’ve had a couple of conversations, and I’ve kept a deliberate silence in the hope that it would hide my ignorance, because you’ve used a couple of isms, telling me that you chose – what was it – a realism rather than a naturalism? I don’t remotely know what you’re talking about.
No, I was just curious to know whether you were consciously –
Come on, Anthony. No, of course not.
But in – ja, but sometimes, in tackling a new experience in making choices about what happens out there and what is allowed and –
I have used nothing onstage. At other times, I have felt the need to be very specific, and I just remain very simply governed by the circumstances under which I operate. I think my isms – if they exist at all – are dictated purely by external factors. Not choices. I mean, Sizwe Bansi – in order to live for its first year, two years, in South Africa – needed to be a play that you could put in a suitcase and carry around with you.
But, this is –
We couldn’t even fucking well carry a light. You know, you turn on the fluorescent lights and you turn off the fluorescent lights, and that lets the people know that the play has either ended or that we’ve arrived at interval. You take down the rope around the boxing ring and you put up an easel and a board with some photographs on it, and – okay, get on with it now, man. And performance, and only performance, can sustain anything under those circumstances. Only performance. There is not a trick I can add. I mean, the actor obviously, if he is going to be a photographer, must be in a position to point at photographs. So, he needs that.
Essential props?
There are essential props, but I can’t give them any other than – more than that. So, when they’re going to walk around New Brighton at night, I mean, just walk around New Brighton at night under these fluorescent lights, and make us believe it.
When did you last tackle a play by another writer?
Long time ago, and I don’t think I ever will, I don’t think I ever will again. No, no.
So, your directing is very specifically related to your plays?
Part of my one organic arc, ja.
And acting? Just film acting?
Yes, simply because film acting doesn’t require the savage discipline that stage performance does. Film performance does not impose that same absolutely ruthless demand.
We both know that every actor you work with is very different, and you have to find the key to that particular actor. How prescriptive, how challenging are you in terms of confronting actors? It’s a very vague sort of question.
No, no, I think I know what you’re asking. I’ll speak about a relationship I had, for example, over many years, and most probably one that I can never repay – my debt of gratitude to it is of an order that – which is with Yvonne Bryceland. I would just find myself finally in a rehearsal room with Yvonne and directing her, as our relationship grew and involved using fewer and fewer words. I mean, I got to know her so well that I just knew the precise five-word sentence to touch her pain button. When I touched it and I saw the pain flashing – to just use a gesture that she understood. From an experience like that, to actors I’ve had to be very patient with, who’ve asked for an intellectual analysis of the situation of the role, and you give that. Ja, just, you know, to direct adequately is to humbly attempt to master as many languages as you are likely to meet actors.
When you see other performances of other plays that are not yours directed by other people you don’t know, what are the qualities that you admire in performances and plays?
I’ve had some good experiences recently; but by and large, now, I think I’m sort of over the edge in terms of age, and what have you, and in an area where I’m just going to work out – certainly, as I get older, my sense of my writing is that each play involves me having kept an appointment that I made with myself. Now, if it’s as simple as that – and it is actually, for myself, as simple as that – I actually don’t need to know what Harold Pinter is doing about the keeping of his appointments, or Wesker or Osborne. I know I have appointments to keep. I’ve just kept a very important one recently. There might be others. I consider myself to have enough command of my craft to know what set of tools I need, to make an experience or to create a shape in terms of which I keep an appointment. So, it is with a certain sort of – there is no urgency – I do go to the theatre, but there is no urgency, as if somebody might know something I don’t know. I know as much as I need to know in order to keep – well, certainly, in order to keep the last appointment I’ve kept. I don’t know if there’s another one.
*
Athol kept many more significant writing appointments in the decades that lay ahead. Shortly after he arrived back home, he wrote thanking me for the week in Amsterdam and briefed me on preparations for the world premiere of “Master Harold” … and the boys.
 |
 |
| Click to enlarge | Click to enlarge |
Notes:
1 Ria Lavrijsen, the publicist for Toneelgroep Sater, sat in on the interview, and in the audio version you can hear her occasional interjection. Also in the audio version, Fugard occasionally refers to “your Yvonne” as opposed to Yvonne Bryceland. He is referring to Yvonne Petit, who played Gladys in Een les van de aloë’s.
2 In other words, to the main stage at the Royal Court.
3 These plays – notably Sizwe Bansi is dead and The island – were devised through improvisation. Fugard referred to this as an exercise in playmaking, and it was something he elected to do, as he said he’d experienced writer’s block after writing Boesman and Lena. Initially, there was no written script. In part, this was a stratagem to protect the plays from interference by the Directorate of Publications, who preferred to read scripts when deciding whether to ban a literary or theatrical work. Fugard had tape recordings of performances which he drew on when a script was required for publication. In 1974, the plays were published by Oxford University Press in a volume of three plays entitled Statements.
4 The name given to Piet and Gladys’s home in A lesson from aloes.
5 The actors referred to were James Earl Jones, Harris Yulin and Rachel Roberts. Mary Benson, who was present at the time, wrote in Athol Fugard and Barney Simon (Ravan Press, 1997) that Athol “had not been told that Rachel, obsessed by the failure of her marriage to Rex Harrison, was on the verge of a breakdown. A warning sign had been her late arrival for the read-through. The trauma of having to cope with Rachel intensified Athol’s habitual insecurity. With huge relief, he accepted her departure and found a gifted actress in Maria Tucci.”
6 At the time, Dutch theatre was obsessed with isms, and they were the stock-in-trade of all theatre critics.
- Photographs of Athol Fugard by Anthony Akerman, photographs of Anthony Akerman by Martin Cleaver
See also:
Playwright Athol Fugard receives award for lifetime contribution to theatre
Athol Fugard and the Serpent Players: The Port Elizabeth years
In memoriam: Athol Fugard delf na sy innerlike waarheid tot op die laaste dag
Athol Fugard is 90: A portrait of the artist as a man who jumped at opportunities