Issue 111, Summer 1989
Athol Fugard was born in the small village of Middleburg in South Africa’s semi-desert region of Karroo in 1932. His mother was an Afrikaner and his father an English-speaking South African. When Fugard was three years old the family moved to Port Elizabeth, the setting of most of his plays and his primary home ever since.
Fugard spent three years studying philosophy and social anthropology at the University of Cape Town. He dropped out before getting his degree, hitchhiked through Africa for six months and spent two years as a seaman in the Far East. Although he says he always knew he would be a writer, it was not until his return from the Far East, when he met the actress Sheila Meiring, that he became involved in the theater.
The two were married in 1956, and together they started an experimental theater group for which they wrote most of the material. In 1958 they moved to Johannesburg, where Fugard took a job as a clerk in a Native Commissioner’s Court—the court that adjudicates violations of the passbook endorsements that determine where South Africans, both black and white, may live, work and travel. “During my six months in that courtroom,” Fugard wrote, “I saw more suffering than I could cope with. I began to understand how my country functions.”
Several years later, Fugard wrote The Bloodknot, his first major play, which opened at the Rehearsal Room in Johannesburg on October 23, 1961. Its characters, Morris and Zachariah, are “colored” brothers born of mixed-race parents. Morris, who was played by Fugard, is light-skinned; Zach, played by Zakes Mokae, is dark-skinned. At the time of the opening, and for the duration of the play’s six-month South African tour in 1962, it was permissible under South African law to produce a play with a racially integrated cast before non-segregated audiences. Shortly after the show closed, legislation was passed into law to prohibit this.
Fugard’s work has never been censored in South Africa, despite his volatile treatment of apartheid. His passport was, however, taken away for several years, from June 1967 until 1971, when the government returned it on a restricted basis, enabling him to direct a production of Boesman and Lena in London. Since then he has acted and directed widely on Broadway, at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, and in London as well as in Europe. A Lesson from Aloes won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play in 1981; “Master Harold” . . . and the boys won the Drama Desk Award in 1982 and the Standard Award for Best Play in 1983. Most recently, The Road to Mecca won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1988. His other plays include Hello and Goodbye (1965) and Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972), the latter written in collaboration with John Kani and Winston Ntshona. He has published one novel, Tsotsi (1980), and his Notebooks 1960–1977 was published in 1983. Fugard has been awarded honorary degrees from many universities, including Yale and the University of Cape Town.
This interview was conducted in front of an audience, under the auspices of The Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YMHA on October 13, 1985. At the time, the twenty-five-year anniversary revival of Fugard’s play The Bloodknot was playing on Broadway. The interviewer was Fugard’s longtime friend and collaborator Lloyd Richards, Artistic Director of the Yale Repertory Theatre. Richards described their working relationship: “Athol will call me and say, ‘Let’s have a cup of coffee.’ We usually pick the cheapest restaurant we can find, one that still has paper napkins. We get together and order a cup of coffee. ‘Okay, what is it?’ I ask him. Athol tells me the title of the play, and the story of the play, and I know that there is not a word on paper yet. Then I say, ‘Let’s do it in such-and-such a month. Is that okay?’ ‘Fine,’ he says, and we write the title and the date of the play on a napkin and that is our contract.”
INTERVIEWER
When did you realize that you wanted to become a writer? Was there some precipitating event, or did it grow naturally out of a commitment to literature?
ATHOL FUGARD
There was no one moment, but you could see it growing. You can see it in “Master Harold” . . . and the boys—that gauche young schoolboy playing around with words. Young Hallie talking about what would be a good title for a novel, thinking about writing a short story. From early on there were two things that filled my life—music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me. Thoughts about being a concert pianist or a composer started to fall away from about the age of fifteen. By eighteen, by the time I went to university, I knew that somehow my life was going to be about putting words on paper. Originally I thought I was going to write the great South African novel, then poetry, and only when I was twenty-four or five did the thought of theater come into my head. That obviously relates to my meeting my wife Sheila, who, when I met her, was an out-of-work actress.
INTERVIEWER
What is your reason for writing?
FUGARD
Well, it’s a convergence of two things. I can’t think of a single one of my plays that does not represent a coincidence between an external and an internal event. Something outside of me, outside even my own life, something I read in a newspaper or witness on the street, something I see or hear, fascinates me. I see it for its dramatic potential. That external event affords me the opportunity to deal with what has been building up inside me. For example, the writing of The Bloodknot. I remember the genesis of that, even though it happened twenty-five years ago. I am singularly prone to that most human of all diseases—guilt. I’ve had my fair measure of it. But the image that generated The Bloodknot had absolutely nothing to do with the racial situation in South Africa. The seminal moment was my returning home late one night and going into the room where my brother was sleeping. My brother is a white man like myself. I looked down at him, and saw in that sleeping body and face, all his pain. Life had been very hard on him, and it was just written on his flesh. It was a scalding moment for me. I was absolutely overcome by my sense of what time had done to what I remembered as a proud and powerful body. I saw the pain: that is the seminal image in The Bloodknot.
INTERVIEWER
And that translated into the injection of race and whiteness?
FUGARD
I was trying to examine a guilt more profound than racial guilt—the existential guilt that I feel when another person suffers, is victimized, and I can do nothing about it. South Africa afforded me the most perfect device for examining this guilt without going into the area of the absurd as Ionesco did by giving a man a rhinoceros’s horn.
INTERVIEWER
Can you describe the conjunction of external and internal events in A Lesson from Aloes?
FUGARD
The external provocation is very simple: I got to know an Afrikaner in Port Elizabeth who had been committed to the struggle for decency and dignity and human rights, but who was suddenly suspected of being a police informer. His name was Piet. Piet’s story gave me a chance to deal with the fact that you cannot simply dispose of the Afrikaner as the villain in the South African situation. If that’s the only sense you have of the Afrikaner in South Africa at this moment, your thinking is too naive, and you are never really going to understand what is happening in that country. You’ll never understand how we landed in the present situation or what’s going to come out of it. The terrible and challenging thing about the Afrikaner is his complexity: he is not just bad; there’s good as well. The case of Piet Bezuidenhout occurred at a time when I was ready to put an Afrikaner—not a hero, but a survivor—up on the stage. That was my internal provocation.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you use the symbol of aloes? I have an image of the aloe as tangled in the roots of South Africa. It can either be strangled, or survive to produce a flower . . .
FUGARD
Yes, I think the aloe is one of South Africa’s most powerful, beautiful and celebratory symbols. It survives out there in the wild when everything else is dried. At the end of one of our terrible recurrent droughts, the aloe is still there.
INTERVIEWER
You once told a story about being in England for a while and saying you had to go back to South Africa because you could not look at the people on the street and identify where they had come from . . .
FUGARD
That is true. That one little corner of South Africa, Port Elizabeth and its immediate surroundings, is a region that I know like the back of the hand that holds my pen as I write about it. I can stand on a street corner in Port Elizabeth, look at anybody and put together some sort of biography. I know where they come from, where they’re going. I have a feel of the textures of their life. If I stand on a street corner in New Haven, which is a place I’ve gotten to know as well as any place outside of South Africa, I am still at a total loss to identify the people passing me on that street.
INTERVIEWER
Do you identify with Piet’s inability to leave South Africa?
FUGARD
I don’t think I could. Of course I’m saying this on American soil. I’m facing a few more months of work in this city, but at the end of it, I will be returning to South Africa. I would like to believe that if for some reason the situation deteriorated to the point where I was told, “If you leave South Africa, you can never come back,” I’d stay there. There were periods in my life when I could have been seduced away. I am incredibly fortunate that the government took away my passport at the point when I was most open to seduction. With my passport gone, I could have left on a one-way ticket. But the issue was so starkly highlighted that I had no problem in saying, “No.”