Athol Fugard
Athol Fugard OIS HonFRSL (born 11 June 1932) is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright.[1] He is best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system of apartheid. Some of these have also been adapted for film.
Athol Fugard
Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard
11 June 1932
Middleburg, Cape Province, South Africa
- Playwright
- novelist
- actor
- director
- teacher
University of Cape Town (dropped out)
1956–present
Drama, novel, memoir
- Sheila Meiring Fugard (m. 1956; div. 2015)
- Paula Fourie (m. 2016)
Lisa, Halle
His novel Tsotsi was adapted as a film of the same name and won an Academy Award in 2005. It was directed by Gavin Hood.[2]
Acclaimed in 1985 as "the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world" by Time,[3] Fugard continues to write. He has published more than thirty plays.
Fugard also served as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.[4]
He has received many awards, honours, and honorary degrees, including the 2005 Order of Ikhamanga in Silver from the government of South Africa "for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre".[5] He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[6]
Fugard was honoured in Cape Town with the opening in 2010 of the Fugard Theatre in District Six.[7] He received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.[8]
Early life and education[edit]
Fugard was born as Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, in Middelburg, Eastern Cape, South Africa, on 11 June 1932. His mother, Marrie (née Potgieter), an Afrikaner, operated a general store and then a lodging house; his father, Harold Fugard, of Irish, English and French Huguenot descent, was a former jazz pianist who had become disabled.[2][9][10]
In 1935, his family moved to Port Elizabeth.[11] In 1938, he began attending primary school at Marist Brothers College.[12] After being awarded a scholarship, Fugard enrolled at a local technical college for secondary education. He studied Philosophy and Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town,[13] but he dropped out of the university in 1953, a few months before final examinations.[2]
Early career, marriage and family[edit]
He left home, hitchhiked to North Africa with a friend, and spent the next two years working in east Asia on a steamer ship, the SS Graigaur.[2] During this time he began writing, and he "celebrated" these early times in his 1999 autobiographical play The Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage.[14]
In September 1956, he married Sheila Meiring, a University of Cape Town Drama School student whom he had met the previous year.[2][15] Now known as Sheila Fugard, she is a novelist and poet. Their daughter Lisa Fugard is a novelist.[16]
In 1958, the Fugards moved to Johannesburg, where he worked as a clerk in a Native Commissioners' Court. He became "keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid."[2] His good friendship with prominent local anti-apartheid figures had a profound influence on Fugard. His plays' political expression brought him into conflict with the national government; to avoid prosecution, he had his plays produced and published outside South Africa.[15][17] Fugard struggled with alcohol for a time but has been a teetotaler since the early 1980s.[18]
For several years in the late 20th century, Fugard lived in San Diego, California,[19] where he taught as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting, and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).[4][17] For the academic year 2000–2001, he taught at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana as the IU Class of 1963 Wells Scholar Professor.[20]
In 2012, Fugard returned again to South Africa, where he now lives permanently.[21][22]
In 2015, after almost 60 years of marriage, the Fugards divorced. In 2016, in New York City Hall, Fugard married Paula Fourie, a younger South African writer and academic.[23] Fugard and Fourie live in the Cape Winelands region of South Africa with their daughter, Halle Fugard Fourie.[24][25]
Career[edit]
Early period[edit]
In 1958, Fugard organised "a multiracial theatre for which he wrote, directed, and acted", writing and producing several plays for it, including No-Good Friday (1958) and Nongogo (1959), in which he and his colleague, black South African actor Zakes Mokae performed.[2] In 1978, Richard Eder of The New York Times criticized Nongogo as "awkward and thin. It is unable to communicate very much about its characters, or make them much more than the servants of a noticeably ticking plot." Eder said, "Queenie is the most real of the characters. Her sense of herself and where she wants to go makes her believable and the crumbling of her dour defenses at a touch of hope makes her affecting. By contrast, Johnny is unreal. His warmth and hopefulness at the start crumble too suddenly and too completely".[26]
After returning to Port Elizabeth in the early 1960s, Athol and Sheila Fugard started The Circle Players,[2] which derives its name from the production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht.[27]
In 1961, in Johannesburg, Fugard and Mokae starred as the brothers Morris and Zachariah in the single-performance world première of Fugard's play The Blood Knot (revised and retitled Blood Knot in 1987), directed by Barney Simon.[28] In 1989, Lloyd Richards of The Paris Review declared The Blood Knot to be Fugard's first "major play".[29]
Refusal to stage for "Whites Only" audiences[edit]
In 1962, Fugard found the question of whether he could "work in a theatre which excludes 'Non-Whites'--or includes them only on the basis of special segregated performance-- increasingly pressing". It was made more so by the decision of British Equity to prevent any British entertainer visiting South Africa unless the audiences were allowed to be multi-racial. In a decision that caused him to reflect on the power of art to effect change, Fugard decided that the "answer must be No" to segregation.