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The island, created at the height of apartheid repression, is a remarkable play for various reasons. In order to sidestep the authorities, it was workshopped but not initially scripted; it has no single author, and when a script did finally emerge, it provided actors with sufficient latitude as to re-interpret the play’s core messaging in subsequent productions, notably in the 1980s and 1990s.
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Athol Fugard is rightly venerated as one of South Africa’s greatest playwrights. As he turns 90, he has every right to look back on a life of extraordinary achievement in the world of theatre. Of all his plays, arguably the most interesting was his production of The island, his treatment of Sophocles’s Antigone brought to a South African political space. The “island” was, of course, a reference to Robben Island, prison home of Nelson Mandela, and as a play it was also a magnificent realisation of the improvisational workshopping method that was Fugard’s trademark. But The island also threw up, for the interested bystander, interesting parallels with Jean Anouilh’s version of Antigone, set in occupied France in World War II.
The island was first performed on 2 July 1973 in The Space, Cape Town; then in September 1973 at Sussex University, England; and finally on 12 December 1973 at The Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, London. Since then, it has rarely been out of production in numerous countries around the world.
Fugard’s oeuvre can be divided into two very distinct parts – a body of work in the early days (the so-called township plays), when he improvised many of his most powerful themes collaboratively with black South African actors, and then a distinct later body of work on his own, after the key black actors on his original team, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, left him to perform their own interpretations of, inter alia, The island. His township plays were the only time when Fugard actively worked with black actors, and so they are peculiarly relevant to our discussion.
For today, even though apartheid has given way to democracy, it is the earlier plays we are most interested in, and especially the posture Fugard adopted of preferring in his work to be a “witness” to the dark events in South Africa, rather than getting involved as an “activist”. He was not interested in “protest” theatre, which is what some of his critics and even his actors would have preferred. “I am a story-teller, not a political pamphleteer,” he asserted (Fugard, quoted in Athol Fugard by Dennis Walder, Northcote House Publishers, 2003, 60.)
There is another, deeper reason why Fugard resisted the notion of turning his plays exclusively on apartheid violence and manipulating them into “weapons of struggle” (Njabulo Ndebele, quoted in Walder 2003, 2), and this has to do with the playwright’s enduring belief in the concept of intertextuality in “nationalised” treatments of the classics, as in his 1973 adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone as The island, a play which bears witness to what ordinary mortals had to suffer under apartheid. In The island, Fugard is faithful to the original version by Sophocles, even if it is heavily truncated – in fact, compressed to a single scene. Fugard’s exemplar in this regard was Jean Anouilh, who had also written a version of Antigone. Fugard recognised in the French playwright a fellow classicist whose work had a universal application beyond the narrow focus either of Pétain’s France, or of apartheid South Africa, in Fugard’s case.
As with Anouilh’s Antigone, Fugard’s version of Antigone in The island enabled him to challenge the draconian status quo in South Africa by taking on apparently innocuous classical identities (Walder 2003, 59).
The argument is advanced (below) that while Athol Fugard and Jean Anouilh were condemned by their severest critics as “apologists” for the status quo (Fugard, because it was felt he hadn’t been active enough in the fight against apartheid; Anouilh, likewise, because he had apparently given comfort to collaborating French interests under German occupation by dint of his writing), this link between the two playwrights has hitherto been neglected and never fully explored, even though they share a common thread which, it can be posited, exonerates them from the central charge.
The misreading of their respective positions can be traced to their refusal to “nationalise” and tailor their adaptations of classic works to the prevailing political orthodoxy, even when this brought them into conflict with admirers and sympathetic critics of their plays. For Fugard and Anouilh, the golden thread back to the source was inviolable and had to run through the work and be recognisable as such, even when uncomfortable truths were tackled.
Like Anouilh, Fugard paid a heavy price for his refusal to be anything other than a universal playwright. His earliest works (eg The blood knot) were dismissed by critic Kenneth Tyler (Walder 2003, 4) as a reflection of “white guilt”, the mere fact of his plays appealing to white liberals proving this as a case in point. Even more devastatingly, critics like Hilary Seymour argued that Fugard’s “township plays” (of which The island is one) “encourage the delusions and self-delusions of the black working class”, providing them with fantasies that “serve to maintain a system of economic and racial exploitation” (Seymour, quoted in the chapter “Race and class 21”, Winter, 1980, 273–281 from Fugard by Albert Wertheim, Indiana University Press, 2000). Critics also noted that The island had a “passive” conclusion, implying acceptance of the reality of the prevailing authority, cruel though it was. Was Fugard too supportive of King Creon?
Fugard himself did nothing to discourage the unworthy suspicion that he was an inadvertent supporter of aspects of the status quo. For example, he made no secret of the fact that he was opposed to the cultural and academic boycott of South Africa, a stand that distressed some of his most influential supporters, like writer Mary Benson (David Willers, interview with Dennis Walder, Fugard’s biographer, 2012). Such a stance was almost a heresy.
It is possible to discern, too, that Fugard’s classical bent also led directly to something of a fork in the road with his activist-inclined fellow actors and collaborators, John Kani and Winston Ntshona. It was they, not Fugard, who took advantage of the broad remit offered by the workshopping methodology of the Serpent Players to impose their own interpretation on The island and turn it into a much angrier protest against apartheid. And, as history has moved on, so has The island been re-interpreted time and again to reflect the changing political context, since the stage instructions allow a very broad verbal improvisation by the actors (Interview, Walder 2012).
Original creative process: 1973 production
The island, created at the height of apartheid repression, is a remarkable play for various reasons. In order to sidestep the authorities, it was workshopped but not initially scripted; it has no single author, and when a script did finally emerge, it provided actors with sufficient latitude as to re-interpret the play’s core messaging in subsequent productions, notably in the 1980s and 1990s. Its location is Robben Island, the notorious prison where Nelson Mandela and his fellow Rivonia Trialists were incarcerated; and finally, it is based on Antigone, with its claims of individual conscience in conflict with the law, placing the principled individual against the perceived tyranny of the state.
The island is about two prisoners on Robben Island, one sentenced to life for burning his pass book, the other imprisoned for belonging to a banned organisation. They perform pointless tasks under the direction of the warder, Hodoshe. John persuades Winston to play Antigone in an “authorised” prison concert. At the end of the performance, Winston rips off his wig and becomes himself as he recites the final speech by Antigone facing death. Life thus imitates art.
Fugard began his career working on plays by Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, as well as reworking many later dramatisations by Albert Camus, a major influence in his life (interview, Walder 2012).
Fugard was also one of the first to recognise and respond to the creativity pent up for so long under the apartheid system. Mixed casts were forbidden, as were mixed audiences, but Fugard’s workshopping collaborative theatre practices challenged all this, since the different races could mix in a common creative writing space.
Fugard first started working with the New Brighton group (Port Elizabeth) in 1963 (they were later named the Serpent Group), and this eventually led to the development of The island. Kani and Ntshona later insisted that the initiative and creativity for The island had come from them, rather than Fugard. But, as Walder (interview, Walder 2012) points out, both sides needed the different kinds of creativity each could bring, providing a mutual engagement that challenged the laws of their divided society. A “perfect storm” of balancing talents – the infusion of Fugard’s Western classicist approach meeting the Africanist raw anger of the black actors – provided just what South African theatre was looking for. One must not underestimate this “raw anger”.
In fact, Kani was deeply ambivalent about working with Fugard in the first place, saying that in the beginning they (he and his fellow black actors) felt they could not get too close to and befriend whites like Fugard, because one day they might be called upon by the ANC to “kill them” (John Kani, quoted in a retrospective film on Fugard’s life, Fugard, 2012, produced by Eric Abrahams).
The “perfect storm” was early on discernible, when Fugard produced Albert Camus’s The just with a cast of local black actors. The approach was trademark Fugard style, workshopping and improvisation; what the Serpent Group in fact came up with was a new kind of “hybrid witnessing”, a mixture of Brecht’s didacticism and Grotowski’s physicality on the one hand, and black urban narrative performance traditions on the other (Walder 2003, 57). Fugard’s chosen way of working – writing draft scenes with not much dialogue but extensive stage direction, and then having his chosen performers improvise those scenes – thus infuses his work with a more than social documentary tone (Walder 2003, 47).
Grotowski had a particular influence on Fugard – the result was a “most extreme excursion into radical communication by means and gesture rather than pre-established text” (Walder 2003, 47). Fugard was attempting an apparently total reliance upon the creative as opposed to the merely illustrative abilities of his cast.
Fugard was an apolitical playwright according to those who knew him (interview, Walder 2012). Camus’s The just asks a central question: when, if ever, is violence justified? Fugard’s approach to this problem in the context of South Africa – where anti-apartheid activists were beginning to question the viability of a non-violent approach as epitomised by the ANC’s Nobel Prize winner, Chief Albert Luthuli – was to condemn violence, while at the same time implying its inevitability in the context of the anti-apartheid struggle.
This semi-pacifist position brought Fugard into conflict with many people on the left (see below). As already mentioned, he opposed the artistic boycott of South Africa on the grounds that “all significant opposition has been silenced and so ... anything that will get people to stop and think for themselves is important to our survival – theatre can do this” (Walder 2003, 19).
Fugard’s collaborative work with the Serpent Players was groundbreaking, leading to “the making of plays without an identifiable author, improvisation and new experiments with the creative potential of the actors” (Walder 2003, 21).
The island was one of the first of the original Fugard plays to be developed on the new hybrid improvisational lines. According to Walder (interview, Walder 2012), Fugard had long had it in mind to draw on Antigone and reports that Nelson Mandela had performed it on Robben Island. The difficulty, though, was that it was almost impossible in those 1973 days of censorship, to write or perform anything that referred even indirectly to prison life in South Africa.
A celebrated (and successful) test case against the Rand Daily Mail, which had reported on jail conditions on the basis of notes smuggled out by an inmate, had recently demonstrated how dangerous it was to flout the law in this regard, (interview, Walder 2012). Fugard, Kani and Ntshona were therefore obliged to work up the play on an improvised basis, without any notes at all.
In an interview with Ron Jenkins (New York Times Theatre Review, 30 March 2003), John Kani recalled:
[We were workshopping] Antigone with a black actor named Shark, who could never remember his lines. I was the prompter, and Athol arranged for me to be a soldier onstage so I could whisper his lines to him during the show, but Shark was arrested before it opened. Then we heard he was doing a one-man version of Antigone in prison during lunch hour, and we wondered how he did it, because we knew he could never get the lines right.
The lesson learned was that, provided the stage directions were broad enough, improvisation meant that lines could be made up roughly. This was especially true of the first three scenes pivoting around prison life. Fidelity to the lines would only be required in the final scene.
According to Fugard (Jenkins interview, New York Times, 30 March 2003), performing Antigone in South Africa was just as dangerous as performing The island. Said Fugard:
Antigone is ... the first play that raised the issue of standing up and being counted in a situation that involved oppression and injustice. The entire time we were working on it, the government was harassing us, barging into rehearsals and confiscating manuscripts. Several members of the group were arrested.
Kani recalls (Athol Fugard website, University of San Diego, 2011) that in order to imagine what it was like to be in prison when they began improvising The island, he and Winston took a blanket and folded it in two and then four and so on, until it occupied a tiny space on the floor. Then the two men stood on it facing one another. This effectively recreated (for them) a claustrophobic environment, and from there they began to invent the play, with Fugard directing. Fugard had a clear idea of the overall Antigone theme, but the actors had to work it out as they went along.
The working title had to be camouflaged for security reasons. It was not initially called The island, but rather Hodoshe’s span (team). The roles and lines were all retained in the actors’ heads. They first performed it at The Space, Cape Town. When the time came for them to fly to England, they arrived without a script, but with an idea that crossed frontiers in a manner analogous with the way Russian dissidents communicated with one another creatively (interview, Walder 2012).
The first English performance of Hodoshe’s team (soon to be renamed The island) took place on the Sussex university campus, staged in a climate of secrecy. Subsequent performances at the Royal Court, also without notes and with a good deal of improvisation, took place in late 1973. At this stage, Fugard, according to Walder (interview, Walder 2012), sat down and recorded the words rather like a secretary. He was, therefore, not the sole author of The island, even if this was his name and often appears in subsequent published texts as such. In fact, the Oxford 1993 paperback edition specifically identifies the authors as Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona.
Crucially, the original scripts (secretarial notes) represented, in a more than usual sense, “versions” of the performance. The text that emerged eventually was not intended to be binding, but was “open – signalling ... the potential for alternative rendition, in action as well as word” (Dennis Walder, Township plays, Oxford, 2000, xxxi).
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In adapting Antigone to an African setting, the Fugard workshop immediately opened up important questions: in re-investing Antigone with greater local relevance, had the traditional Socratic approach of Sophocles (see Note I) been replaced with an oppositional approach, where individual morality comes into conflict with public morality?
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In the case of The island, this flexibility is important when we consider the evolution of the work, with the first UK performances being criticised for being too “passive”. Even Fugard’s close friends had their reservations about his commitment to the “struggle”. According to South African playwright and friend of Fugard, Zakes Mda (Four plays, Florida Hills Pub, 1996), “Fugard ... lacked a spirit of defiance.”
Walder (interview, Walder 2012) concurs with this observation. He sees Fugard as taking a distinctly “Hegelian line” of dialectical reconciliation – “bearing witness” to the injustices of apartheid, rather than immersing himself in the struggle: “Fugard’s concern was with what happens to the victims of the system, rather than tackling the system head-on. He did not see himself as a political activist.”
Cultural context
Antigone is at the heart of the three plays making up Sophocles’s Theban Cycle. She is the innocent product of the chaos caused by Oedipus arrogantly disregarding the prediction of the Oracle of Apollo. Oedipus does, indeed, go on to kill his father and marry his mother, Jocasta, and Antigone and her sister Ismene and brothers Eteocles and Polynices are the result of this ill-starred union.
The brothers are meant to alternate annually as rulers of Thebes, but it is not a happy arrangement, and eventually Polynices, having grown used to the trappings of court, refuses to hand over to Eteocles when his turn to govern comes round. They kill one another in single combat, and King Creon, Jocasta’s brother, reluctantly steps in to stop the civil war and restore order. Even though he acts out of responsible motives as a disinterested outsider, he soon discovers he can’t please everyone.
The law, which the king must uphold, even if it is a law not of his own making, states that traitors must be left to rot unburied outside the city walls. Creon instructs guards to ensure the corpse is undisturbed. Antigone ignores the law and buries her brother, doing the right thing by her own lights and individual conscience.
She justifies her actions to the king:
Ancient moralities – Of common human decency – They speak the language of eternity – Are not written down, and never change – They are for today, yesterday and all time – No one understands where they came from – But everyone recognises their force – And no man’s arrogance or power – Can make me disobey them. (Antigone in Sophocles’ plays, Don Taylor, London, 151)
Antigone then pays the ultimate price for her courageous duty and is walled up in a cave, where she commits suicide.
King Creon cannot escape the damage to his reputation. Although he is needed in Thebes to restore order and uphold the law and the “social contract” such as it was, he is deemed by everyone to be wrong, a tyrant even, in denying funeral rites to a dead man, however traitorous (Jean Anouilh, Antigone, Barbara Bray; Methuen, 2009, xxxv).
In adapting Antigone to an African setting, the Fugard workshop immediately opened up important questions: in re-investing Antigone with greater local relevance, had the traditional Socratic approach of Sophocles (see Note I) been replaced with an oppositional approach, where individual morality comes into conflict with public morality?
According to Kevin Wetmore (quoted in A van Weyenberg, Antigone as revolutionary muse, 2004, 1), Antigone can be adapted into:
Any situation in which a group is oppressed or in which in the aftermath of struggle the forces of community and social order come into conflict which the forces of personal liberty.
Such a redefinition and reduction of Sophoclean complexity of a Greek tragedy, seen by many in Africa as epitomising imperial Europe because it was part of an imposed colonial education curriculum, has enabled Antigone to be recast anew as revolutionary muse in a continent unshackling itself from foreign oppression. Several African writers in recent years have rewritten Antigone to highlight injustices. Femi Osofisan in West Africa and Edward Brathwaite and Sylvain Bemba in East Africa are good examples (A van Weyenberg, 2).
Fugard is part of this circle, though there is no doubting where Fugard’s core sympathies lie – it is with the broad Western classical (non-oppositional in the Antigonean case) tradition, and this was the approach he was to take in The island, even though it cost him his reputation in some circles. (See Political Context below.)
Jean Anouilh, the French playwright, also suffered in like fashion when his Antigone was first performed in 1944. The Gaullist resistance embraced it as a rallying cry, reading into it a disguised affront to the occupying power. The communist left instead saw it as exonerating Marshal Pétain and Vichy because of Anouilh’s refusal to condemn King Creon, upholder of Theban law. (See, for example, Ted Freeman, Antigone; Methuen, 2009, Commentary.) The very fact the German censors allowed it to be staged, implied approval.
Fugard was inspired by the example of Anouilh and the comparison with Mandela’s performance in front of prison warders in the 1960s. In his interview with Jenkins (New York Times, 30 March 2003), he noted:
Jean Anouilh produced a version of Antigone in Paris. In an exact parallel to the situation on Robben Island, the first five rows of German jackbooted officers admired what they thought was a straightforward piece of classical culture, but the French audience behind them knew what it was about .... [On Robben Island] the Boers were in the first row and enjoyed it, but the prisoners were the ones who got the real message.
Did these “populist” renditions of The island in its various performance guises distract from, or dilute, the “ethical balance” to be found in the original version by Sophocles? Especially note Albert Camus’s much quoted observation: “While Antigone was right to insist on her fundamental call to individual conscience, King Creon wasn’t necessarily wrong, either, in upholding the law” (Albert Camus, quoted in Bray, xlv – also see note 2 below).
It seems obvious with hindsight that this was, indeed, the case, as later productions of The island and its reception resonated with the unfolding drama of the revolution in South Africa. In that sense, Kani and Ntshona might almost be said to have hijacked Fugard’s interpretative role. They Africanised the Antigone myth, and imposed an oppositional (see Wetmore above) rather than a dialectical grip on the play, with Antigone herself elevated to a simplistic eminence that the scholar in Fugard must have felt uncomfortable with – swept up in the fervour of revolution, scrambling over the barricades, flag of resistance in hand, rather like the famous painting by Delacroix.
We can now clearly follow the golden thread of the Western classical tradition in which Fugard was steeped, and it is interesting to consider to what extent Fugard may have been at odds with his fellow workshop collaborators, Kani and Ntshona, because of it. Was Fugard torn by his scholarly loyalty to explore the ethical dilemmas in the play as Sophocles meant us to do? Or had he thrown in his lot with the Africanist lobby, embracing Antigone uncritically as metaphor for opposition – the oppositional approach?
On the face of it, and given his reluctance to do much more politically than “bear witness” (interview, Walder 2012), as already mentioned, it is more than probable that he would have inclined to the view of Ian Steadman (in Marcia Blumberg and Dennis Walder, Cross/cultures – South African theatre as/and intervention, Open University Conference, 1996, London, 18), that to insist on a rejection of Western aesthetics and influences in the name of an imagined African or black aesthetic is to forget the fundamental point of the intertextuality of theatre in any society, for example, we understand The island differently by knowing the original Antigone, just as we understand Antigone differently by knowing the unique political and cultural setting of The island.
A very good example of this can be seen in the fact that Sophocles intended Creon, not Antigone, to be the centrepiece of his play. Indeed, it is Creon alone who occupies the last quarter of the performance, undergoing a brutal journey of realisation of the consequences of his pride and obduracy.
Fugard and Anouilh, on the other hand – although following in the tradition of dramatists from the Renaissance onwards who, inspired by Antigone’s role as heroine, were intent on casting her, rather than Creon, as central to the story – are cooler, more aloof, reverting to Sophocles’s original vision of the importance of Creon’s role. Anouilh’s Creon comes off very lightly, in fact, as the upholder of stability. Likewise, Fugard’s Creon, as representative of the state, retains his authority throughout – this is precisely what led his critics to say he was passively accepting of the reality of the apartheid regime (interview, Walder 2012).
The guises of Antigone are many and varied through history (Barbara Bray, 2009, xxxvi), viz, from Garnier’s Antigone’s ou la piété (1580) to Brecht’s Antigone, 1947, she has been cast variously as a Christian martyr, a Joan of Arc figure, an egalitarian in the French Revolution (daughter of Louis XVI), a republican resisting the Prussians in 1870, a German waking up too late to the menace of the Nazis and, in The island, a prisoner on Robben Island.
There is even a recent book (and play in the making) set in Afghanistan (The watch, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, Hogarth, 2012) – Antigone, in this case, represented by a young Afghan woman who has lost her legs, and wheels herself painfully on a carriage to claim the body of her brother, killed next to an American base. The American commander refuses to hand it over, suspecting a trick, and a stand-off develops with the soldiers, who realise that their obdurate officer (King Creon) is wrong.
This version pricks the conscience of the Americans, appealing to them rather like the appeal of the blind prophet Tiresias to Creon, in Sophocles’s original, to change before it is too late. In Joydeep’s version of the myth, Antigone has not so much been recruited to stiffen the sinews of those fighting many causes, as to shame the conqueror.
Bray (xliv) says such “avatars” of Antigone are part of an Antigonean myth that is constantly evolving, from a decrease in a family and religious focus, to an increased political stature – the enemy of all tyranny: “[F]or the French in particular, Antigone will always be the daughter of the Revolution.”
But is this true? Anouilh, while keeping the focus (as mentioned above, like Fugard) on Antigone, takes us away from such a simplistic interpretation, presenting Antigone as much more complex and ambiguous, a young girl in denial refusing to grow up and leave childhood, even contriving, through her insistence on burying her brother, to end her life. Anouilh embarks on a dramatic construction of considerable audacity as he leads us to the realisation that “far from being a brutal tyrant, Creon has a plausible case for acting as he did and (conversely) ... Antigone’s ostensible noble cause is insincere” (Bray 2000, xliv; also see note 2 below).
Such fidelity to the classical original carried a price. Anouilh was probably lucky not to have been arrested, in company with a Pétainist literary collaborator like Robert Brasillach (see note 2), who was, in fact, shot. The Communists and the Gaullists (who had supported the play earlier as a coded message to the Resistance) now condemned it – and Anouilh with it – once they realised his position on Creon. He must have had friends in high places, though, because he survived the post-war purge of collaborators. After the war, he left France to live in Switzerland. Likewise, Fugard now lives in America and no longer in South Africa, which is an interesting parallel, since the sharpest criticism reserved for Fugard was that the ending of The island also, as in Anouilh’s and Camus’s support for King Creon’s position, suggested an acceptance of the status quo. This was not what revolutionaries wanted to hear.
Fugard (interview, Walder 2012) saw himself as “bearing witness” to unjust events in South Africa. Although his Antigone is established as “the enemy of all tyranny”, there is a less complicated investigation into her psychology, as with Anouilh’s version. In the Fugard workshop version, she is what she is, a challenge to unjust authority. On the other hand, Creon’s values and what he stands for, apparently live on – upholder of the law, unjust or not. “Antigone is right but Creon is not altogether wrong” – Fugard doesn’t write him out. His ethical claims, in the classical sense, bear valid investigation. In the final scene, Fugard gives Creon every opportunity to justify his position in terms of being an upholder of the law: “There was a law. The law was broken. My hands are tied.”
Earlier, Creon is adamant that Antigone cannot break the law with impunity (The island, scene 4, 227). The ultimate sanction of the law would apply even to his own child – there is nothing he can do about it. The law is sacrosanct. Competing ethical claims ring out across the set.
What is interesting about Fugard, as has already been mentioned, is that he was steeped not only in Sophocles but also in Aeschylus, the proper predecessor of Sophocles and author of Prometheus bound. The ethical dilemma enjoined in Antigone and Creon is echoed in the earlier conflict between Prometheus and Zeus, between essentially two right causes: “the betterment of humanity and the necessity of order” (CM Bowra, Ancient Greek literature, Greek Oxford University Press, 1967, 37). Antigone is not a “one-off” for Fugard – like Aeschylus, he believed that even the gods could learn and improve their ways, and that an ultimate reconciliation was possible between the two opposed powers. This is what makes Fugard an optimist about the human condition, a believer in the triumph of the human spirit, ultimately, even though the characters in his township plays are so often portrayed as stunned and barely surviving witnesses.
Walder, Fugard’s biographer (Walder 2003, 8), amplifies this reading. He says The island is a play charged with moral meaning. This echoes what matters most to Fugard – the moral imperatives of life in the face of death, rather than any specifically socio-political concern.
Fugard’s work is universal in the sense that it reflects Western classical values. His plays, according to his biographer, negotiate the troubled and troubling terrain of the “other” – from within the codes and textures of South Africa, they reach out to whoever is open to the exploration of what the theatre in the modern world can do to define our anxieties about ourselves and our relation to others (interview, Walder 2012).
Political context
Given fast-moving events on the ground in South Africa, however, The island clearly needed to become more relevant in struggle circles if it was to retain credibility. That is, in fact, what happened, even though it took some time for the interpretive emphasis to change.
It was only during later performances in the 1980s, with Fugard’s fellow authors and actors, Kani and Ntshona, having matured into their roles, that the play became sharper-edged and the anger of the actors more personal. Winston’s own brother was a political prisoner. The island now, for the first time, began to project a distinct challenge to apartheid, becoming a rallying cry for active resistance, and this new approach, taken forward by the original black authors/actors, became contextually appropriate as political theatre relevant to the South African setting.
The freedom as actors not to have to stick rigidly to the printed text meant they could improvise their lines, and so the core “struggle” message now became a more overt theme.
People who saw the early 1970s and the later 1980s versions of The island came away feeling they had witnessed a mutation from passivity to real anger, and this impression was highlighted in the 1985 revival of The island in Cape Town, when Kani and Ntshona publicly (and bravely, since it was against the law so to do) declared that their every performance was an “endorsement of local and international calls for the immediate release of all political prisoners in South Africa” (interview, Walder 2003).
The altering character of the play became even further evolved, when post-apartheid performances (after 1994) were hailed as projecting inspirational brotherhood, celebrating solidarity and the metaphorical victory of the resistance (of Antigone) over the evils of apartheid (interview, Walder 2012).
The island thus rapidly became the focus for a theatre of resistance in South Africa. In its working life, it was re-interpreted from a passive mode (1973) to a cry of resistance mode (1980s) to a celebratory mode (1994), echoing the march of history (interview, Walder 2012).
The structure of the play lends itself to such – it is enacted in four scenes, with the first three scenes devoted entirely to the prisoners’ (as actors) own life experience in prison, their longings and their hatreds and hopes. Only the final, quite short scene, to which Fugard contributed the greater part of the text, enacts the Antigone legend. The first three scenes thus set the tone for the run-up to the performance of Antigone proper, and much depends on the actors’ emotional performance in this run-up to determine the thrust of the final scene, which is true in its essentials to Sophocles’s original.
The island’s two political prisoner actors are given permission to stage Antigone for their fellow inmates during a routine prison event. They are thereby enabled to send a covert signal of resistance to their companions. Inspiration for the play came from an actual event (1966) on Robben Island, when Mandela and his fellow inmates performed Antigone to an audience of warders and prisoners. Nelson Mandela played King Creon.
According to Sampson (Mandela: The authorised biography, Vintage, 1999), Mandela, at the time of his own prison performance, perceived Creon as a leader who was “originally wise and patriotic, but ... showed himself merciless and inflexible in refusing to let Antigone bury her dead brother”. Antigone, on the other hand, he saw as simply a “freedom fighter who defied the law on the grounds that it was unjust”, knowing that it would lead to her death.
Interestingly, there are prefiguring echoes here of Mandela’s earlier stand at the Rivonia Trial – he had pleaded guilty to the main charges, even though he knew it could lead to the rope. “[Liberty] is an ideal for which I am prepared to die,” he said in his famous speech at the dock (Joel Joffe, The state vs Nelson Mandela, Oneworld, 2007, 160).
Long years later, after five years in office as president, his views had clearly softened in the light of experience. In an interview with South African writer André Brink (Guardian Weekend Magazine, 22 May 1999), Mandela recognises the complexities inherent in Creon’s character:
Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgement – not until he’s shown his colour, ruling the people, making laws ... there’s the test.
The issues for Fugard in portraying the Antigone myth were evidently also more ambiguous (interview, Walder 2012). Fugard acknowledged Camus, who refused to condemn Creon (see below) and understood that the nature of the ethical conflict between Antigone and Creon, while clear-cut on the face of it, masked the intricate nature of the terrain it explored “between men and women, individuals and state, private and public and gods and mankind” (A van Weyenberg, 1).
It may be that this intellectual sensitivity blunted Fugard’s revolutionary sword, in a manner of speaking. For, in attempting even tangentially to elaborate the dilemmas of private versus public morality in The island, instead of going for the political jugular, as his actor collaborators wished him to do, Fugard couldn’t help but lay himself open to attack from those who saw in the play merely a reflection of “passive suffering”, rather than the “call to arms” which anti-apartheid activists were looking for (Walder 2003, 58). Supine passivity was not what they wanted to hear from a liberal playwright at a time when South Africa was undergoing its own “Arab Spring”, with discontent mounting in Soweto and other townships.
The mere fact of theatre as a means of bearing witness to injustice was enough, for Fugard. To the extent that it was able to sidestep censorship, it had become, in itself, a reflection of the struggle in the country against apartheid. After all, it was theatre, with its ability to articulate ideas of freedom even in the most unlikely settings, such as Robben Island, which had the most powerful impact on the public imagination. Mandela performing Antigone was to remind his fellow prisoners of the importance of Milan Kundera’s observation: “The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (Walder 2003, 55).
Performing plays like The island is part of that struggle. Fugard was determined to bear witness, no matter how difficult the circumstances, to the extent that his black actors never used their own names but only the names of their characters, in order to escape police surveillance. His aim was to shatter the complacency of his audience, and he achieved this by communicating as directly with them as possible.
Quoting George Steiner: “The island is the satyr play to all preceding Antigones,” Walder says its harshness breaks open the whole Western humanist tradition which silences resistance in order to maintain a balance of voices (Walder 2003, 56).
Although the conclusion of The island presents a passive position of accepting the power of the state, it can also be a way of anticipating the solidarity in suffering that eventually overcomes the captors, as it helped to overcome the apartheid tyranny, in fact:
At the end of the play Winston has articulated his claim upon a dimension of justice which subverts that argued for by Creon as the benevolent father of the state. It is a play within a play at the end, a situation the audience has been prepared for by a series of mini-narratives. (Walder 2003, 59)
In the “art reprises life” ending, Winston, the prisoner on Robben Island serving a sentence of life imprisonment, where life means just that, tears off his wig and confronts his audience: “I go now to my living death because I honoured those things to which honour belongs.” He is literally destined to return to his cell.
Conclusion
We have seen how the play mutated from being an act of witness in the first performances, with the actors (and writers with Fugard) Kani and Ntshona gradually “converting” it away from the Fugardian purpose into a play protesting against apartheid. In part, this was possible because of the open-ended way it was conceived, in part because the actors chafed against the perceived criticism of struggle activists of the early performances of The island. But today we are back where we started. As critic AC Grayling said of a recent performance in London (2000): “Today ... the play is an act of witness, of historical record, of keeping very green the memory of what racism and injustice can do” (Times Literary Supplement, 15 January 2002).
Fugard, as witness, appears vindicated after all, and it is now possible to revisit the intertextuality of the original in its Western sense of competing ethical claims. The oppositional interpretation can be bracketed within the confines of the apartheid period, and there is no reason why future performances cannot once again examine the ethical quandaries of King Creon – very much as Nelson Mandela suggested.
In the new South Africa, it is the king that matters. Fugard’s Creon says, “My good people ... I am your servant ... how many times must I ask you – to see in these symbols of office nothing more or less than ... the uniform of the humblest menial in your house. Creon’s crown is as simple and as clean as the apron Nanny wears” (Athol Fugard, Township plays, Oxford University Press, 2000, 223).
Fugard’s Antigone could not accept this statement at face value, given the times, but perhaps now that things are different, The island’s continued relevancy will lie in asking whether this is perhaps indeed the case today.
Notes
1) In other words, an investigation in a dialectical fashion of whose claim has greater ethical weight and is more just – Antigone’s private, or Creon’s public, morality.
2) The consequences were pretty devastating for Anouilh. Charles Méré (a collaborationist critic) hailed the production, dismissing Antigone as a degenerate madwoman whose revolt “produces only anarchy and disaster”, while Creon on the other hand was the real hero, ”the just ruler, a slave to his duty who sacrifices everything dear to him for the sake of his country” (Bray 2000, xivii). Creon, to Méré, was Pétain, who had come out of a well-earned retirement to save France from chaos. Collaboration with the Germans was a sad necessity. As Bray (2000, liii) says: “We must always entertain the suspicion that Anouilh ... means us to feel Creon is right.”
Bibliography
Anouilh, Jean (2009), Antigone, translated by B Bray, Methuen, London.
Blumberg, Marcia and Walder, Dennis (1996), Cross/cultures – South African theatre as/and intervention, Open University Conference, London.
Bowra, CM (1967), Ancient Greek literature, Oxford University Press, London.
Fugard, Athol (2000), Township plays, Oxford University Press, London.
Fugard’s life and work (2012), film produced by Eric Abrahams, South Africa.
Joffe, Joel (2007), The state vs Nelson Mandela, Oneworld Press, London.
Roy-Bhattacharya, Joydeep (2012), The watch, Hogarth Press, London.
Sampson, Anthony (1999), Mandela: The authorised biography, Vintage Press, London.
Walder, Dennis (2003), Athol Fugard, Northcote House Publishers, London.
Wertheim, Albert (2000), Fugard, Indiana University Press.
- Regent's College, London, and the Open University, UK, are acknowledged. This article draws on supervised work submitted for a Masters degree in dramatic arts.
The Island has even been performed in Arabic by Said Zarzar and Osama Jabri.
See also:
Athol Fugard is 90: A portrait of the artist as a man who jumped at opportunities