Photographs by Anthony Akerman
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Put all that together, and Athol Fugard was the Person of the Theatre of the Twentieth Century. And he is ours.
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The most frequently used description of Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard is that by William A Henry III, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic from Time magazine. In that magazine in 1988, Henry wrote, “Athol Fugard is the foremost active playwright in the English-speaking world.” No small praise, but only a part description of the Fugard genius, whom I hope to show you in this note of love, admiration and appreciation.
We all know when and where he was born, when he came to Port Elizabeth, the lousy schooling and dud matric he obtained there (matric took him two years), his two and a half years at UCT before he abandoned his studies and, degreeless, hitchhiked up Africa and worked as a labourer on a tramp steamer from the Sudan to Scotland; of his endlessly faithful mother paying to get him home, and his first months back in Port Elizabeth, then Cape Town; and of his marriage to Sheila and his introduction, at her hand, to theatre.
Then the two of them went to Johannesburg, to witness the horror of the final razing of Sophiatown in 1958/1959. In 1960, it was a year in London for them, trying to become writers – he a playwright, of all things, a profession which in South Africa was without hope or pennies then and still is now. No work, no money, no job and Sheila pregnant – it was on to the Carnarvon Castle and back to South Africa, to live in the one spare bedroom in his parents’ tiny flat in Bird Street in Port Elizabeth.
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A wife pregnant, no money and a father-in-law, Dr Meiring of Kirkwood, calling him a wastrel. Which he later admitted was accurate.
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The 29-year-old Athol Fugard who stood on the deck of the Carnarvon Castle in December 1960 on his way home to Port Elizabeth was an extreme case of a no-hoper. He had chosen to become a writer, and had written and discarded two novels – one thrown into the sea on a gin-soaked night in Fiji. Then he had narrowed his ambitions – he would be a playwright. In Cape Town, he had written two plays, in Johannesburg another two and in London a further pair. Nobody would read them, let alone bring them to a stage. Six plays written, all hopeless. A wife pregnant, no money and a father-in-law, Dr Meiring of Kirkwood, calling him a wastrel. Which he later admitted was accurate.
But something had happened. On, or slightly before, that sea trip, he began three projects, all of which were astonishing, and two of which would make him an international figure in literature.
Firstly, he began to keep notebooks, jotting down impressions and thoughts. Later edited by his great friend Mary Benson and published by the long-suffering AD Donker, who so loyally published so much of his early writing (which, believe me, didn’t sell like Harry Potter), these notebooks are a treasure trove of his thought through the years 1960 to 1977.
Secondly, he took a shot at another novel, drawing on his experience of the destruction of Sophiatown and the resultant degradation of its brutalised population. While he made considerable progress, he abandoned this also and thought it had been destroyed. Fortunately, Sheila had stowed it away, and nearly 20 years later this first draft of Tsotsi emerged – to become a world-famous and most significant novel.
The third thing he turned his energy to was a play.
When he and Sheila returned from London to Mrs Fugard’s Bird Street flat, Athol sat down at the dining room table and wrote and wrote and wrote. For five months.
At the end of May, three things happened: Lisa Maria Fugard was born, South Africa became a republic and Athol put his pen down. The blood knot was finished.
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Well, hardly a stage. A raised platform in the Rehearsal Room at Dorkay House at the southern end of Eloff Street in Johannesburg. A hundred people attended, and it was chaotic.
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It took five months for it to make a stage. Well, hardly a stage. A raised platform in the Rehearsal Room at Dorkay House at the southern end of Eloff Street in Johannesburg. A hundred people attended, and it was chaotic. Unedited, the play went on for four and a half hours without an interval, with the audience on hard stack chairs in an unventilated room. More spoken words than in Hamlet. Shakespeare gave us 26 speaking actors, dozens of mute ones and 19 scenes, including 15 changes of set, etc. Fugard gave us the same two hobos in the same woebegone shanty for all of these four and a half hours. Phew.
The reviews were mixed. But, more importantly, Fugard had invited the two partners in United Artists to attend: Taubie Kushlick and Leon Gluckman. Kushlick wanted nothing to do with this play, but Gluckman saw potential. He convinced Fugard to edit it down to about two and a half hours of theatre, and – well, it then blew South African theatre apart. After a six-month tour of South Africa, Fugard was famous – but not rich. This play went to London, where it was destroyed by Kenneth Tynan’s review, and New York, where it was warmly received. The career of playwright Athol Fugard in the international world of theatre had begun.
We then witnessed behaviour in Fugard that he was often to repeat – if he was on a winning streak, he immediately abandoned this for another, totally different, style of theatre. The blood knot was about two brothers who tragically appeared to be in different “racial groups”, as South Africa was then delineated – one black and one possibly white. It was a stinging portrayal of the horrors of South Africa’s racial classification. Fugard immediately abandoned both the racial component of his writing, and the critical. His next two plays were about poor whites, one set in a bombed-out Johannesburg boarding house, and the other about the “second-hand Smits” of Valley Road in Central, Port Elizabeth. Good stuff, for sure, but what about apartheid?
When Fugard returned to Bird Street from the second London season of The blood knot, which was very successful, he was both famous and exhausted. The fame brought him his next journey into theatre, for Norman Ntshinga of the black township of New Brighton came to request Fugard’s help in establishing a New Brighton theatre group. Ntshinga had read of this young playwright’s success, and persisted in knocking on Fugard’s door until he consented to do a play with this group.
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Thus the troupe later known as the Serpent Players was born, initially operating from the abandoned snake pit in the vacated museum across the road from Mrs Fugard’s flat.
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Thus the troupe later known as the Serpent Players was born, initially operating from the abandoned snake pit in the vacated museum across the road from Mrs Fugard’s flat. They were to become for Fugard “the second significant provocation and stimulus to myself as writer and director that I have encountered in South Africa”. Together, they were to put on a variety of traditional plays, and together they developed the cooperative style of playmaking that led to Sizwe Banzi is dead and The island.
Regretfully, they also attracted the attentions of the Special Branch of the police force; four of the Serpents, including Norman Ntshinga, were at one stage or another lugged off to Robben Island, and Fugard was to lose his passport for four years. During the years of the Serpent Players, racial separation was legislated both for acting casts and for audiences, and censorship of creative writing was greatly strengthened. I doubt that any of the other famous playwrights of the twentieth century world of theatre operated under such conditions.
At this stage, Guy Butler requested a play from Fugard to be shown at a congress of teachers of English at Rhodes University.
Fugard had had three experiences that now guided his writing. He had given a black lady a lift while returning from Norman Ntshinga’s trial in Cradock. She was carrying her whole world in a bundle on her head, and had been thrown off the farm she had lived on for years because her husband, a labourer on that farm, had died. Then he had seen a couple of vagabond “coloureds” at a traffic light on Russell Road in Port Elizabeth. They, too, carried their world on their exhausted heads. And thirdly, he had again seen apartheid’s bulldozers at work, for the mixed area of South End, Port Elizabeth’s District Six, had been destroyed in 1965. From these images, the play Boesman and Lena was created by Fugard. It was premiered at the Rhodes Theatre in 1969 at Butler’s conference.
Russell Vandenbroucke, an American academic who wrote the most detailed and researched biography of Fugard, regards Boesman and Lena as the best play written since Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. With that we will not argue. It is a devastating depiction of forced removals and the debasing of the unfortunate wretches thereby mauled by apartheid’s bulldozers.
This stunning play created the character of “Lena”. This role was taken on by Yvonne Bryceland. She and Fugard had worked together before, but the earlier roles do not compare with Lena, a part Ms Bryceland played over 400 times. Fugard once told me that Ms Bryceland was the most important and powerful influence he had had in his career in theatre. For those who are not fortunate enough to have seen her in full flight, Ross Devenish filmed Boesman and Lena. The performances of Fugard (Boesman) and Bryceland (Lena) are magical. It is, to me, a mystery that this film didn’t garner truckfuls of awards.
Having returned to a political theme in Boesman and Lena and having brought the house down on both South African and world stages, Fugard again abandoned the formula that guided his success and disappeared into a rehearsal room with Ms Bryceland and two other actors for three months. The end result, Orestes, was never scripted, and was quickly shown the back door by its sponsor, the government body CAPAB. Never mind, it led to the three plays that cemented Fugard’s reputation and established those of the two most talented of the Serpent Players, Winston Ntshona and John Kani.
The first of these plays, Statements after an arrest under the Immorality Act, was put together by Fugard and Bryceland in three months, for the two of them – with Bryceland’s husband, Brian Astbury – had conspired to create an independent theatre dedicated to the performance of plays nobody else would touch. Astbury and Bryceland were the driving forces of this project, to be called The Space, and Fugard promised a play to open the theatre in March 1972.
Fugard lived in Cape Town for three months, but this was not enough time to get it all together. Eventually, the play happened, but Fugard later rewrote it considerably.
When they proposed Statements after an arrest under the Immorality Act as a name to Astbury, his reply was: “Great name if you want to open on day one and be closed on day two.” This was not so much because it was a mouthful; Astbury felt that the name would get them closed down.
But they went ahead.
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It was chaos, Fugard-inspired.
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Fugard became more and more frantic. Barney Simon, a friend from Fugard’s first Sophiatown plays, came down to help. Fugard repaid this generosity by throwing Simon out of the rehearsals. He later admitted that their friendship never fully recovered from this tantrum. He insisted that the stage and the lighting all be removed. It was chaos, Fugard-inspired.
Then John Kani and Winston Ntshona approached Fugard and asked his help to make them both men of the theatre. They were sick of the menial jobs they endured. Fugard, barely able to support himself, offered his help and booked space for them at The Space. Again, little happened until the last minute; the three of them – Fugard, Kani and Ntshona – disappeared into an abandoned school and Fugard’s neighbour’s garage, and in 18 days they had Sizwe Banzi on the stage in Cape Town. Later, they used the same method to create The island, only this time it took 11 days. Neither had written scripts until months later.
These two plays, collaboratively created by these three, are undoubtedly the high point of South African theatre. The critics from the UK’s Independent newspaper rank Sizwe as the 40th best play of all time, and it won Best Actor Tony Awards on Broadway in 1975 for both Kani and Ntshona, a world-first. They beat out Anthony Hopkins in the British National Theatre’s Equus. Not bad for two guys with Bantu Education matrics, who had never been to a drama school or a university, acting in their second language and in a play they had co-created in 18 days!
Such has been the magic of Athol Fugard.
Yes, there was much more to come – the Ross Devenish movies, scripted and acted by Fugard himself; the four autobiographical plays (“Master Harold” … and the boys, The captain’s tiger, Exits and entrances and The bird watchers), which is a medium Fugard alone has used; the novel Tsotsi; and the play he wrote for Yvonne Bryceland, The road to Mecca. For her role as Helen Martins, she won the Laurence Olivier Award for the best acting performance on a stage in London, and the Tony for Broadway – I doubt that this double has ever been equalled.
Oh, he was not perfect – in fact, as we have mentioned in conjunction with Barney Simon, he was at times a bloody handful. And there was the booze issue – in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, he was way over the top, and was the first to acknowledge it. On 1 January 1983, he went teetotal and he stuck to it.
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And absolutely no state funding or state institutions to use. And no university post to pay the bills. And raids on his home by the security police, raids so invasive that they terribly disturbed his wife.
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But his record is unique, and is much greater than being just the best playwright in the English-speaking world. He was also a brilliant director, and won a Tony for that. And a brilliant actor. See him as Eugène Marais in The guest. And he wrote film scripts. Only Pinter, winner of the Nobel Prize, can match this all-round skill set – but Pinter operated in London, with possibly 50 theatres in walking distance from his home. Fugard operated from Port Elizabeth, on a godforsaken toe of Africa, a place described by Fugard’s biographer Dennis Walden thus: “A less propitious place for the production of works of art or literature than Port Elizabeth, it would be hard to imagine.” And Fugard had ferocious censorship to contend with – something Pinter could only read of. And segregated audiences. And segregated casts. And absolutely no state funding or state institutions to use. And no university post to pay the bills. And raids on his home by the security police, raids so invasive that they terribly disturbed his wife. And the confiscation of his passport at a critical time.
Put all that together, and Athol Fugard was the Person of the Theatre of the Twentieth Century.
And he is ours.
He lived a few houses from where I now live, in this culturally difficult industrial town.
And he gave a million interviews, always cheerful and willing.
My second last visit to Athol in his Stellenbosch home was something I will never forget. I started by pushing forward factual questions, to help fill out the book I am writing. He tried so hard to answer, but the answers would not come. He looked despairingly at Paula for help. But she had not been in Port Elizabeth in 1963. I realised the anguish I was causing, and quickly changed tack. I spoke of the absurdity of writing a four-and-a-half-hour play for South African audiences, and then noted that, as inconceivable as it was, it had worked. He started to warm. I mentioned that I had long thought that I was the patron of the Ancient Fathers’ Society (I was 57 when my Amy was born), but then along came our mutual friend Albie Sachs, who was 67 when his Oliver was born – now the 90-year-old Fugard had swept us both out with the dust. He started to laugh. It was vintage Fugard – that twinkle in the eye, that love of laughter, that ability to turn anything into a party. Paula found a half bottle of wine in the fridge, and this Port Elizabethan had the time of his life with one of his greatest heroes.
That night in bed, I shed a tear – not from sadness, but out of joy. And the joy was caused by Paula, who so kindly and tenderly looked after this giant in his last years. Thank you, Paula.
Now, he is gone, never to be replaced. I’m sure many who are reading this knew him.
Celebrate. Our lives have been enriched by one of our world’s greatest creatives.
See also:
Athol Fugard and the Serpent Players: The Port Elizabeth years