Litnet

Birdwatchers. Picture of Athol Fugard and dog, Solo: Paula Fourie

The playwright sits on the stoep and watches the Cape robins and company flock into the back garden as objects around him in the cold dawn claim their shapes back from the night. The feathered visitors know when his wife has refilled the bird feeders, all cleverly designed to deny grey squirrels access. Having had their fill, the diners start the morning’s grooming and noisy chattering.

Now the timid sun helps to warm his gnarled hands around the coffee mug depicting Vincent van Gogh with his famed one-eared profile. The playwright looks up into the face of a man walking along the Eerste River on the other side of the fence with a collapsed cardboard box and a tattered grey blanket draped across his back. The old urge to step into the laceless shoes figuratively and follow the destitute man to wherever he is heading, reasserts itself and the writer takes his binoculars from the table next to his armchair.

The passerby encounters an early morning jogger along the river path. He rubs his stomach with his free hand and brings it to his mouth in a gesture of hunger, but the jogger looks the other way and runs faster. Just before the rough sleeper disappears from view, the playwright follows him, struggling up the footpath to the bridge where the morning traffic is growing louder. There is a garbage can where the river path meets the street. The man throws down his load and rummages through its contents, his upper body all but disappearing into the drum. It seems a disappointing exercise, and he disgustedly throws an empty package on the ground before picking up his bedding and heading across the street without waiting for the traffic light to change.

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Having returned from America, where he may be better known than in his native country, the writer remembers the day he finally reconnected to his formerly disenfranchised fellow South Africans. That was when, alongside an old woman carrying a bag of groceries, he waited for motorists to stop at a pedestrian crossing.

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Having returned from America, where he may be better known than in his native country, the writer remembers the day he finally reconnected to his formerly disenfranchised fellow South Africans. That was when, alongside an old woman carrying a bag of groceries, he waited for motorists to stop at a pedestrian crossing. None of the drivers was in the mood or time frame to do so. He impulsively decided to take matters into his own hands, stepping forward into the road with his hand outstretched to force them to stop. For him, this bold move became symbolic of staking his claim back in a society he had helped to change through years of protest against the political system in the only way he knew how. The woman, surprised, thanked him, and they talked a while after having safely reached the other side.

He reminisces how, as a student in the last year of a university degree, he gradually found it all meaningless and abruptly left to seek his fortune in the way depicted in fairy tales, to leave everything that he had known until then behind and hitchhike through Africa, Cape to Cairo with only a kerchief on a stick – actually, it might have been a shoulder bag. Eventually, he found himself travelling around the world on a tramp steamer. Being a sailor was a good school of life for the young writer, but not always plain sailing. He recalls being so hungry after his time on the road that he used to beg rotten meat pies off the other sailors.

When, two years later, his ship docked for the last time in Glasgow, he was in a hurry to get back home, but first he had to reach London. Miscalculating the departure time, he ran to catch a train in hand-me-down shoes, a gift from a companion when his own pair had worn out. Alas, they were much too big. He nearly missed the train, but in the split second when doors still stand open and daredevils are separated from more cautious folk, he didn’t hesitate to jump on board. But he jumped right out of the shoes, leaving them lying forlornly on the platform, a powerful symbol of his readiness to jump back into the realities of life in South Africa.

He had to beg a return fare from his mother, Betty, who was Afrikaans. She had always been his confidante and supporter, channelling her own frustrated ambitions into her youngest son who she knew, early on, was destined for greater things. She was rewarded when, many years later, the queue to use the ladies’ room during a performance of his play Blood knot parted reverently to give her preference once the news trickled down that the playwright was her son.

During a talk at a university, he once spoke about how, as a young dramatist honing his craft, he was visited by two black activists late at night who asked for his direction in their own stage performance to mobilise township audiences to play a more active role in their own fate. He recalls being woken late one night by the security police hammering away at his door after the modest success of one of his plays – which had turned up the heat of young black South Africans’ political protests.

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During a talk at a university, he once spoke about how, as a young dramatist honing his craft, he was visited by two black activists late at night who asked for his direction in their own stage performance to mobilise township audiences to play a more active role in their own fate. He recalls being woken late one night by the security police hammering away at his door after the modest success of one of his plays – which had turned up the heat of young black South Africans’ political protests.

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“I was blessed with a liberal conscience,” he told his audience, as if this were the only condition that needed to be met to know when a system was unjust and unsustainable and plain morally wrong.

After years of hard work as a dramatist, mostly directing and sometimes acting in his own plays while also caring for a small family, he was propelled overseas again by his success, this time to Broadway, where he received great acclaim, leading to Time Magazine later describing him the greatest living playwright in the English language. He chuckled about what his practical mother and his musically gifted Irish father, Harold, would have said of this future distinction. Young Hally, as he was called then, was a teenager in the hard years during which his parents managed a boarding house and, later, a tearoom in Port Elizabeth. It was during these years that he first became aware of the political strains of this country, in which his most acclaimed dramas are rooted.

He went on to rub shoulders with other great names in theatre and music, such as Leonard Cohen, an insomniac who once stayed next to him in the Chelsea Hotel in New York and complained when the writer’s alarm clock woke him just as ordinary people were getting up to start a workday.

Then, after the big political change in South Africa when a surge of optimism and goodwill made his country the best place on earth to be, a government minister of the old order approached him in an airport departure hall and humbly asked the pardon he felt the playwright was qualified to grant. They started talking and got so engrossed in their conversation that they almost missed their flight.

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This month, Athol Fugard turns 90 and has earned the right to be reclusive about his birthday. He has declined to be interviewed for this tribute. “Why don’t you want anybody to make a fuss about your birthday?” is the only question he would answer. "Because it has no significance," he replied. "All I know is that I’m still very much alive."

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This month, Athol Fugard turns 90 and has earned the right to be reclusive about his birthday. He has declined to be interviewed for this tribute. “Why don’t you want anybody to make a fuss about your birthday?” is the only question he would answer. “Because it has no significance,” he replied. “All I know is that I’m still very much alive. I also know that my life has taken turns I never anticipated and which I’m sure society thinks of as anachronistic – like marrying my beautiful wife, Paula, six years ago. For that matter, exciting developments are still to come this year,” he says with a mischievous glint in his eyes. “Paula and I have stretched across generations to find each other. What is a 90-year-old exactly? How should he act? These are questions I don’t want to waste time trying to answer. Looking at that number means nothing to me. My mind and body have been good to me so far – now I’m celebrating what they still can and want to do with the time left to them.”

What he clearly doesn’t want are the things young would-be celebrities crave: neither accolades, as he has grown used to them, nor invasion of his privacy, because it is hard won and precious. His admirers, though, will find a way to wish him a happy birthday.

Also read:

Athol Fugard 90: Teatergedigte

van die mond na die hand om verweer (om) te keer