Title: Athol Fugard and the Serpent Players
Author: Rory Riordan
Publisher: Mandela University Press
ISBN: 9781067181949
Nadine Gordimer has written that “significant South African drama in English has been created singlehanded by Athol Fugard. This is the man who William A Henry, the Pulitzer Prize winning cultural critic for Time magazine, described in 1988 as “the foremost active playwright in the English-speaking world.”
Not bad for a poor white from the cheap side of Port Elizabeth, a culture-free industrial town on the southeastern tip of Africa.
Fugard is the first to admit that he did not do this alone. When Rory Riordan met him to set out his vision for this book, he mentioned that, about Fugard there was plenty of “litcrit”. Instead Rory wanted to contextualise Fugard’s work in terms of the apartheid tyranny of the time, and in terms of those who had played important roles in making Fugard's work world-famous: Yvonne Bryceland, John Kani, Winston Ntshona, the other Serpent Players, Zakes Mokae, Barney Simon and Ross Devenish. Fugard thought for a few seconds and replied: “Rory, take those beautiful people and put them on the centre of the stage”.
That is what this book sets out to do.