Athol Fugard

On 30 June 2006 at the annual National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, two giants of South African protest theatre, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, performed as the original cast of the landmark struggle drama Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972). The revival marked the first production of the play in over twenty-five years. After its brief stint at the National Arts Festival (30 June–5 July 2006), the play transferred to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town (11 July–5 August) and then entertained a monthlong run at the State Theatre in Pretoria (17 August–17 September). After its turn at the State, the production stopped shortly at the Hilton College Theatre in KwaZulu Natal (19–23 September) before settling into an extended engagement at Johannesburg's Market Theatre (28 September to 22 October). In March 2007, the original cast revival of Sizwe traveled to the British National Theatre before finally ending its tour at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in April 2008. The two black artists may have endeavored, through the 2006–8 revival of Sizwe,
to separate their identities from the figure of Athol Fugard as author that had hung over much of the play’s production history. In order to further this aim, revival director Aubrey Sekhabi, a playwright in his own right, relied on a late 1970s BBC live recording of Sizwe and not the 1974 Oxford-published script identified as authored by Fugard. In this way, Kani and Ntshona restored to a whole new generation their improvisational coauthorship of the play.

The Island is a play that brings the pain and oppression brought on by the apartheid in South Africa to the forefront. Facing harsh prison conditions, Winston and John question their purpose in life while the play displays their suffering under the racist regime. Their search for a purpose and the effects of the apartheid are shown through two main devices: the main characters' distress when reminded of the reality of being in prison and the passage of time being abnormal and repetitive. These are also elements seen in absurd theatre-a movement that deals with a world without meaning and has historical roots in World War II, which is an event that affected populations in similar ways to the apartheid. Through existential distress and a distorted perception of time, the authors utilize the historical context of absurd theatre to amplify the depiction of the suffering caused by apartheid and familiarize the play for global audiences.

While he was imprisoned at Pollsmore, Nelson Mandela was interviewed by two American editors of the conservative American newspaper Washington Times. Mandela told them that he was neither a Communist, nor a terrorist. The journalist said that Mandela was not a Christian like Martin Luther King, Jr. who adhered to nonviolent resistance. “I told them that the conditions in which Martin Luther King struggled were totally different from my own: the United States was a democracy with constitutional guarantees of equal rights that protected nonviolent protest (though there was still prejudice against black); South Africa was a police state with a constitution that enshrined inequality and an army that responded to nonviolence with force. I told them that I was a Christian and had always been a Christian. Even Christ, I said, when he was left with no alternative, used force to expel the moneylender from the temple. He was not a man of violence, but had no choice but to use force against evil.” 

There is more to the comparison than that. In South Africa the apartheid system of segregation applied not only to black Africans, but to Asians (i.e., Asian Indians and Malays) as well. Mahatma Gandhi had led a non-violent protest movement in South Africa as travel restrictions of Asians from Natal to the Transvaal in the first two decades of the twentieth century, before he did the same in India during the 1940s. And Gandhi’s policy of Satyagraha that he developed in South Africa was a major influence on Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mandela was originally in favor of non-violent protest until the Afrikaner dominated white government began to crack down violently on the movement. Similarly, in the United States, the non-violent protest movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was displaced in the late 1960s Malcolm X and the Black Muslim, the Black Panthers, and the Black Power movements. Also, both the African National Congress and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) accepted help from Jewish radicals, some of whom were members of the Communist Party. This lead some right-wing elements in the United States to oppose the anti-apartheid and anti-segregation movements as being Communist dominated.

And yet the alliance between Liberal Jews and the civil rights movement in the United States was broken in the 1968 with the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers’ strike in New York City and the rise of the Black Power Movement. After the annexation by Israel of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem in 1973, a number of American Jews joined the neo-Conservative movement, while the State of Israel began supplying the apartheid government in South Africa with military and economic aid.

Mandela refused an alliance with the Asian Indians and wanted a South African nationalist movement, as opposed to a pan-African movement of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana or W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey in the United States. Unlike the United States, where West Indian blacks (including Marcus Garvey and later Stokely Carmichael) and native-born African Americans (including those of mixed racial backgrounds) joined in the anti-segregation movement, in South Africa the mixed-race Cape Coloreds and the Zulus refused to join the Xhosa-dominated African National Congress (ANC) until the very end.

In both the United States and South Africa, the end of segregation and apartheid did not result in a reconciliation between the races and the ethnic groups. In March 2012, Athol Fugard visited the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to deliver a lecture and comment on stage readings of his latest The Train Driver (2010). The play was based on a newspaper story from 2000 about a black woman and her three children who walked in front of a speeding train in South Africa’s Flats. In it two men, Roef and Simon, meet in a cemetery. Roelf is a white former railroad engineer who has come to the cemetery in search of the grave of a woman and her baby who died when she walked in front of his train. He knows her only by the name “Red Doek” for the head wrap she wore. Simon is an elderly black caretaker who buries the bodies of anonymous corpses. Roef is haunted by the woman he killed, and he moves into Simon’s shack. As he blows out the candle to try go to sleep, he thinks: “Was it like this for her? Was it dark like this for Red Doek? Darker, I say, because her darkness was somehow insider her, and how the hell do you light candles there.”

In the last analysis, one might ask how did descendants of the  Founding Fathers of the United States and the Netherlands—both countries that pride themselves on being liberal democracies—become the advocates of segregation and apartheid? The same question might be asked about Israel today, which seeks to annex the West Bank settlements thereby putting the Palestinian in disconnected homelands similar to those in South Africa. The answer is not in Bob Dylan’s famous words “blowing in the wind.” It is the fact that there are not only the “better angels of our nature,” but also the opposite.

The African theatre has heavily relied on European dramatic conventions after the colonization of Africa. For decades, it has indeed drawn on a variety of western dramatic techniques and adopted traditions found functional to treat contemporary issues. The aftermath of WWII witnessed radical changes in the African political and social structures that required new approaches to portray them. These transformations have naturally been displayed in the literature, including drama, of the period. Consequently, the Avant garde and the Epic traditions smoothly found their way into the heritage of African theater.
African playwrights also relied on European myth for their subject matter. They adapted various myths to the African stage. The Antigone myth is one of the enduring myths that was used, though in differing ways, by both classical and modern playwrights. Jean Anouilh adapted the play to comment on the Nazi occupation of France and those who opposed or agreed to it. Several African playwrights found Sophocles’ play aptly vital to vent out their opposition to modern colonization of their countries. They also adapted this play for more other purposes.
This paper is devoted to the African playwrights’ employment of the myth. Five African playwrights, namely Femi Osofisan, Athol Fugard, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Felix Morisseau-Leroy, and Sabata Sesiu, have indeed drawn upon the myth to expose the evils resulting from the ill managements of the systems. The five playwrights have also used a variety of approaches resting on those of the Epic as well as other theatrical traditions. The plays chosen for discussion are Tegonni: An African Antigone, The Island, Odale’s Choice, Antigone in Haiti, and Giants.

This paper examines Athol Fugard’s creative exploitation of the means of drama in garnished protest against South Africa’s apartheid.  The focus is on his three plays: “Sizwe Banzi is Dead," "The Island," and "Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act,” in the collection entitled Statements: Three Plays. The paper explores Fugard’s unique introspection into human emotions, his themes on the depersonalising system, and his furtive techniques arising from his social context of creative censor.

In his lectures in 1975-1976, Michel Foucault conceptualised the inclination to commit murders in political circumstances, and delineated it as ‘political death’ (2003).1 Such killings encompass both corporeal and psychological execution exercised through diverse means, for instance, murder, manslaughter, genocide, social ostracism and exposure to deadly environments. Apparently, today political death is implemented either through implicit biopolitical stratagems or overt violence by those who are already in power or those who attempt to gain power, and is prompted through phenomena such as racism, patriotism and xenophobia. This paper aims to examine ‘political death’ prompted by racism, and interrogates the ways and means by which these murders are actualised and rationalised, but ultimately rendered invisible in society, as represented in Athol Fugard’s Anglophone play-text, Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972): Set against the backdrop of the apartheid epoch, Fugard’s play focuses on the ...

"In Africa, tutto è invisibile" è il sibillino aforisma che Peter Brook ripete spesso. Ed è forse la formula che sintetizza meglio le motivazioni che stanno all'origine del suo interesse per il continente. Nella lunghissima carriera di Brook, l'Africa emerge come una presenza costante che si articola in varie forme: il regista instaura con il continente un rapporto privilegiato fatto di viaggi, di collaborazioni con attori africani, e soprattutto di una serie di spettacoli che disegnano un percorso coerente all'interno del suo variegato repertorio. Le prime timide tracce di questa predilezione si possono scorgere già agli inizi della sua carriera di quando, nel 1947, mette in scena a Londra The Respectable Prostitute con Orlando Martins. La pièce è il presagio di un'affinità elettiva che si concretizzerà più tardi in una forma particolarissima di collaborazione con artisti africani.

L’articolo analizza il rapporto di reciproca influenza tra il lavoro di Peter Brook e il teatro sudafricano clandestino dell’epoca dell’apartheid, in particolare i registi Athol Fugard e Barney Simon. Brook instaura con la drammaturgia sudafricana un rapporto stretto e singolare. Negli anni 1970 il suo testo Lo Spazio Vuoto diventa un modello teorico per la creazione di un teatro innovativo e rivoluzionario in Sudafrica. Brook, dopo aver scoperto la produzione sudafricana, non smette di interessarsene, organizzando durante gli anni dell'apartheid, un Festival Musique et Théâtre d’Afrique du Sud a Parigi. Dagli anni 1980 in poi, Brook porta in scena numerosi testi della nuova drammaturgia sudafricana tra cui Woza Albert!, Sizwe Banzi is dead, Le Costume, The Suit. La linea circolare che Brook e i drammaturghi sudafricani disegnano, ruota intorno alla nozione di Spazio Vuoto, riaffermandola.

To date, no text exists that focuses exclusively on the concept of postcolonial film as a framework for identifying films produced within and outside of various formerly colonized nations, nor is there a scholarly text that addresses pedagogical issues about and frameworks for teaching such films. This book borrows from and respects various forms of categorization - intercultural, global, third, and accented - while simultaneously seeking to make manifest an alternate space of signification. What feels like a mainstream approach is pedagogically necessary in terms of access, both financial and physical, to the films discussed herein, given that this text proposes models for teaching these works at the university and secondary levels. The focus of this work is therefore twofold: to provide the methodology to read and teach postcolonial film, and also to provide analyses in which scholars and teachers can explore the ways that the films examined herein work to further and complicate our understanding of «postcolonial» as a fraught and evolving theoretical stance.

In the 1980s, Field Day brought together some of the most important names in Irish artistic life—Brian Friel, Stephen Rea, Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, David Hammond and Thomas Kilroy—to articulate a cultural intervention into the deadly stalemate of the Northern Irish 'Troubles'. At the heart of the enterprise was an annual theatre tour around the island of Ireland that visited cities and small villages, playing in theatres and community venues. These plays did not tackle the 'Troubles' directly, but brought their audiences to places such as pre-Famine Ireland, the world of Greek tragedy, pre-Revolutionary Russian provinces and apartheid South Africa. Informed by poststructuralist thinking and archival materials, this book argues that the political and postcolonial salience of these dramas lies in the ways in which they foregrounded acts of cultural translation in order to disrupt disabling constructions of Irish identity that had contributed to engendering the 'Troubles'.

To be given at: History, Postcolonialism and Tradition, The Postcolonial Studies Association Conference, 12 - 13 September 2013


South African audiences are not strangers to Ancient Greek drama. This paper asks whether, in the same sense as Gilroy's ever-pertinent 'Black Atlantic', there exists a 'Wine Dark Atlantic' which links South African culture back to Ancient Greek theatre and culture. The latter's promotion through the apartheid era, and its use by dissident groups points to the manner in which history is an engagement fundamentally in the present. Considered permissible under the apartheid government's cultural policy, imported theatre from Europe from Shakespeare (although Othello was first performed with a black lead, John Kani, in 1987 at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg) to Sophocles avoided ideological challenges to South African society. Radicalised performances of Antigone by the Serpent Players foregrounded Fugard, Kani and Ntshona's classic dissident play The Island, not only enacting the original's power reversal, but also showing the (arguably) futile nature of such protest. Nevertheless, when looking at anti-apartheid cultural struggle, the agency we attach to such theatre is politically important from a Cultural Materialist perspective, as it challenged official cultural policy and censorship. There is here the implicit relationship between politics and aesthetics.
More recently the work of Yael Farber has contested with the theatrical canon, taking care to relocate these plots to the South African context. Molora (2008), based off Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, and the recent and internationally and locally acclaimed Mies Julie (2012), the appropriation of Strindberg's play, display definite engagement with theatrical traditions. In their performances there is an aesthetic engagement with local and Classical oral traditions. The relationship between text and performance here as a contestation and manifestation of tradition is important here, but also anxieties of the survival and re-performance of canonical, sometimes ancient, texts over South African ones. Molora, in engaging with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's testimonies, deals with the gendered issues and cast of the original, and the crimes against women during apartheid, produced through its cast and writer.  Farber's Theatre as Witness project is manifested here in an engagement with Classical theatre, a fertile ground with a long tradition in itself (Fugard's The Island, and Orestes for example). This shows the complex, contingent, material factors shaping Farber's oeuvre. With Farber's contemporary Reza De Wet also exploring her relationship to Chekhov, making sense of dramatic tradition is clearly paramount in challenging the ideological structures and assumptions of South African society and history in the post-apartheid, post-TRC period.