Athol Fugard
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".
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] 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.
[14] In September 1956, he married Sheila Meiring, a University of Cape Town Drama School student whom he had met the previous year.
[24][25] 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.
[29] 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".
[31] Fugard publicly supported the Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959–94) in the international boycott of South African theatres due to their segregated audiences.
[17] Lucille Lortel produced The Blood Knot at the Cricket Theatre, Off Broadway, in New York City in 1964, "launch[ing]" Fugard's "American career.
"[32] In the 1960s, Fugard formed the Serpent Players, whose name derives from its first venue, the former snake pit (hence the name) at the Port Elizabeth Museum,[17] "a group of black actors worker-players who earned their living as teachers, clerks, and industrial workers, and cannot thus be considered amateurs in the manner of leisured whites", developing and performing plays "under surveillance by the Security Police", according to Loren Kruger's The Dis-illusion of Apartheid, published in 2004.
[33] The group largely consisted of black men, including Winston Ntshona, John Kani, Welcome Duru, Fats Bookholane and Mike Ngxolo as well as Nomhle Nkonyeni and Mabel Magada.
According to Loren Kruger, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, the Serpent Players used Brecht's elucidation of gestic acting, dis-illusion, and social critique, as well as their own experience of the satiric comic routines of urban African vaudeville, to explore the theatrical force of Brecht's techniques, as well as the immediate political relevance of a play about land distribution.
Their work on the Caucasian Chalk Circle and, a year later, on Antigone[17] led directly to the creation, in 1966, of what is still [2004] South Africa's most distinctive Lehrstück [learning play]:The Coat.
[33]Clive Barnes of The New York Times panned People Are Living There (1969) in 1971, arguing: "There are splinters of realities here, and pregnancies of feeling, hut [sic] nothing of significance emerges.
Here—if real people are living there—they remain oddly quiet about it...The first act rambles disconsolately, like a lonely type writer looking for a subject and the second act produces with pride a birthday party of Chaplinesque bathos but less than Chaplinesque invention and spirit..[The characters] harangue one another in an awkward dislocation between a formal speech and an interior monologue.
Blankenship also stated, however, that the performance he attended featuring "only haphazard sketches of plot and character" was perhaps the result of Fugard allowing director Suzanne Shepard to revise the play without showing him the changes.
Fugard's play A Lesson from Aloes (1978) was described as one of his major works by Alvin Klein of The New York Times,[39] though others have written more lukewarm reviews.
Its world premiere was performed by Danny Glover, Željko Ivanek and Zakes Mokae, at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, in March 1982.
Inspired by the true story of World War II Soviet deserter, Fugard plays a paranoid who spent four decades hiding with his pigs.
Veronika, the granddaughter of Buk, the coloured farmer in Valley Song, leaves the Karoo to pursue a singing career in Cape Town but then returns, after his death, to create a new life on the land for her young son.
[51] His film debut as a director occurred in 1992, when he co-directed the adaptation of his play The Road to Mecca with Peter Goldsmid, who also wrote the screenplay.
[citation needed] Outside of his own work, Fugard has a number of cameo film roles, most notably as General Smuts in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), and as Doctor Sundesval in Sydney Schanberg's The Killing Fields (1984).
