tHis works by South African playwright and director Athol Fugard include the drama Sizwe Banzi’s death and the novel Tsotsi died at the age of 92. “Athol Fugard is not only an outstanding figure in the theater world. He is a cashier of a profound story of hope and resilience for South Africa,” the mayor’s office said.
Fogard was a leading political playwright in the 20th century, and wrote more than 30 plays in The Immoral Act (1972), Master Harold and The Boy (1982). Both attracted time in the 1950s, when he could only find work in one of the courts, as one of the courts, a black South African man was accused (inevitably convicted) of violating the Pass Act, aimed at controlling the movement of apartheid people under the justice system. There, he witnessed the dehumanization of those who chose the “wrong” street or people every hour.
Fugad’s cultural and political influence was only confronted elsewhere in the plays of Václav Havel, a Czechoslovakia controlled by the Soviet Union. Javier was sentenced to jail and, after being released, gave up the theater and became the first president of the Czech Republic. Fugard – Despite having established two theater companies in the quarantined Black Township and bravely refused to participate in the state-mandated “white only” audience, prisons were avoided because they were white and therefore not the main goal of a racist government. The worst personal persecution Fugard suffered was the removal of his passport and the occasional ban on drama and burning books. But he always consciously benefits from the immoral hierarchy of his writings denouncements.
The writer’s race will also make him an impossible political leader in the New Republic of South Africa: his dissident turned president in the way Javier, Nelson Mandela, who has a strong background in Fogard’s drama, especially the Islands (1972), who spent 27 years at Mandela’s political prisoner Robben Island, which he spent 27 years.
Born in 1932, Fugard is the only child of Harold, an immigrant family of Irish descent and Elizabeth, the Potgieter Clan of Elizabeth, one of the early Afrikaans settlers of Dutch stocks. Harold, a turn-around shop owner of a jazz pianist, moved his family to Port Elizabeth in 1935, an urban industrial town that remained the main house and most conventional dramatic environment in Fugard for the next ninety years.
During his childhood, the family ran a hotel and cafe in Port Elizabeth, where Hally (like the young Athol) grew up. In the late 1940s, there, this event happened, which would be the core of his psychology and creativity. Fugard explains how Sam Semela, a black employee of the family business, became “the most important thing in my childhood – the only friend.” But after a “rare quarrel”, Harry raised his racial rank and spitted on Semera’s face.
When Fogard handed his diary to his, he could never “cope with the shame that overwhelmed me the second time”, literary compensation with “Master Harold”… and the boys acknowledge that the racist hierarchy between the white crowd and their servants, who were devastatingly defended that people were free to put forward an unstoppable attitude. One of the dedication to publishing the script is “Sam” with which Forgad reconciles.
The public story of this humiliation is typical of Fugard’s personal honesty, but can also be seen as an attempt to prevent any explanation of the “saint” or “savior” of his work. The contemporary derogatory term “white savior”, which suggests stolen and virtues, has not been widely used yet, but once Fogard faces retrospective charges.
The African Theatre Seminar and the Working Methods of Snake Players, the working methods of two multi-racial companies Fugard and his wife Shiela (also a 1960 writer) caused complications, first in Johannesburg and then Port Elizabeth. The early Fugard plays improvised scenes such as No-Good Fooring (1958), Nongogo (1959), and The Coat (1966), scenes that the actors simplify based on their own experience, and then creates fixed performance texts.
As a leading scholar at Fugard, Professor Dennis Walder noted that this is another horror of the system, and the author can only work with his coloured colleagues in his home through bureaucratic purposes.
Fugard’s desire to work with popular communities rather than writing anti-apartheid stories (criticism of some contemporaries) in studies of isolated white areas can be reasonably viewed as another compensatory response to Sam’s shame. But a majority black co-operative run by a white man repeatedly raised issues of “appropriation” to which Fugard was alert: editions of The Island and its companion play, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972), in which someone takes on the identity of a dead man in order to use his “pass book” (ID papers), have the credit “devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona”, with royalties split three ways.
Now makes the situation in Fugard’s early drama sound like something in a dystopian novel. South African police will raid rehearsals, check the script and name it after the actors; list the standards of performers on the show and posters in the capacity of fictional characters they previously played.
Beginning in 1994, segregation and the end of Mandela’s presidency were removed from office, which novelist Nadine Gordimer calls the “only theme” of the white liberal writer in South Africa. However, Fugard wrote, effectively reflecting the “truth and reconciliation” phase of attempted restoration of justice.
In Train Driver (2010), his most powerful late work, the white title character, seeking a family of black mothers and children, who die when they set foot on the train in front of the train. In “Sadness and Joy” (2001), a family of dead white anti-apartheid writers reflect on his lifelong escape.
Even though the push for his first game was achieved, Fugard was still a dramatist, due to the incompleteness of the victory. Although the historical interest of anti-Soviet dramas now only has historical interest – because former Russian groups continued to have relatively democratic – the revival of Faugaard’s rhetoric in 2021 remains unsettling after being arrested in the Immoral Act and the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.
Despite its dramatic specific evils – the ban on racial sexual acts in South Africa from 1927 to 1985 has disappeared, the show now serves a new purpose: the metaphor is the persistent inequality of opportunities and security that people of color suffer from around the world. The unexpected lifespan of the statement continues a paradox that runs through Fugard’s career: the situation he hated as a citizen was his dramatic fuel.
Parents can be heard explaining to shocking children in statements published in London that in the lives of anyone over 36, there are laws on immoral conduct in the Commonwealth nation. The obligation of education will make the play of Forgaard in the drama model, just like the broader statement lessons, “Master Harold Master”, and the racist and racist ro of the boys and islands, as well as the racist ways. His 1980 novel Tsotsi, which tells the story of crime in Johannesburg, was adapted into the 2005 Oscar directed by Gavin Hood.
Fogard was originally the first to acknowledge that others (such as Kaney and Entshona) are free South African drama Mandalas, but the one who calls himself a “classic example of powerless, white liberals” is the epitome of good people who must act in the formation of Hannah Arendt if evil doesn’t want to.
