Athol Fugard, the South African playwright of works including ” ‘Master Harold’…and the Boys,” ”The Road to Mecca,” “Boesman and Lena,” ”A Lesson From Aloes,” died on Saturday. He was 92.
While a cause of death was not disclosed, the South African government confirmed Fugard’s death and said South Africa “has lost one of its greatest literary and theatrical icons, whose work shaped the cultural and social landscape of our nation,” according to AP.
Fugard brought critical, wrenching portrayals of South African society under apartheid to international stages, including Broadway, helping to generate the wave of worldwide criticism that eventually led to the end of that policy in the country, in the process gaining wider access for South African dramaturgy outside that nation. He was also an actor and director, and a number of his works were adapted into films.
In a 2014 profile of Fugard, NPR dubbed the playwright South Africa’s Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill.
When Fugard’s early work was criticized, it was often for putting symbolism ahead of fully fleshed out characters; in response he became more experimental for a time, though he later began turning out more traditionally structured plays. Like all South African writers of his generation, he was faced with something of a creative crisis when apartheid was eliminated, and beginning in the early ’90s, his plays became more personal.
Fugard was nominated for multiple Tonys, both for writing and directing his plays, but never won a competitive Tony, though he received a Tony Special Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.
“Boesman and Lena,” about a mixed-race couple who are thrown off their land by whites and have to scrape by as they wander the mudflats of the River Swartkops in South Africa, was staged Off Broadway in a 1970 production that earned Fugard an Obie for best foreign play and also drew awards for director John Berry and actress Ruby Dee, who starred in the production with James Earl Jones.
The play was adapted for the bigscreen in South Africa in 1973, with Fugard as Boesman and Yvonne Bryceland as Lena, but that film was not released in the U.S. until 1976; decades later, in 2000, “Boesman and Lena” was remade as a film directed by original Off Broadway director Berry and starring Danny Glover and Angela Bassett.
Despite the film adaptations, however, “Boesman and Lena” is considered a relatively minor Fugard work compared to ”A Lesson From Aloes,” ” ‘Master Harold’…and the Boys” and ”The Road to Mecca,” though a 1989 production of the play at Montclair, N.J.’s Whole Theater drew accolades from the New York Times, because the passage of time had rendered the issues of homelessness and sexual abuse of women resonant in an American context.
Fugard first appeared on Broadway in 1974 with “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” and “The Island” in productions that he also directed; both works drew Tony nominations for best play, and Fugard was nominated as best director for each.
“A Lesson From Aloes,” which followed a 1960s Afrikaans couple who had unsuccessfully battled apartheid, began its Broadway run in 1980 and earned Fugard his third Tony nomination for best play. The New York Times said, “Fugard once again reveals his remarkable talent for tracking down the pulsebeat of life in a world that even God seems to have abandoned. In the literal sense, that world is the misbegotten land of South Africa, but such are the power and truth of Mr. Fugard’s writing that his best plays transcend even the political tragedy of his native country. ‘Aloes’ is one of his best plays, maybe his very best. Exile, madness, utter loneliness — these are the only alternatives Mr. Fugard’s characters have. What makes ‘Aloes’ so moving is the playwright’s insistence on the heroism and integrity of these harsh choices. Short of Beckett, it’s hard to think of a contemporary playwright who so relentlessly and unsentimentally tracks down humanity in the midst of apocalypse. And, like Beckett, Mr. Fugard sets forth his drama in spare, direct, at times even witty dialogue.”
“‘Master Harold’ and the Boys” followed on Broadway in 1982 in a production directed by Fugard, after what Variety described as an “incendiary reception” for its premiere at New Haven’s Yale Rep, yielding the writer a fourth nomination for best play and another nomination for directing the play. Another brilliantly effective argument against apartheid, it was revived on the Rialto 21 years later. Variety‘s review in 2003 posed the question of whether this work — and implicitly all of the playwright’s work up to the point when apartheid ended — was still relevant: “Does this tightly constructed play, rooted in the specifics of the country and indeed the experience of its author, still retain all its extraordinary force? The answer is a qualified yes.” The play concerns an intelligent, sensitive but deeply troubled Afrikaner boy whose bigotry threatens to destroy his relationship with the black man who is his surrogate father and best friend. Variety said in 2003 that it is “as much about the way human beings are warped by shame and isolation and neglect — and instinctively seek to release their pain by inflicting suffering on others — as it is about the culture of a particular time and place.”
“The Blood Knot,” first produced in Johannesburg in 1962 and regarded as Fugard’s first major play, received a Broadway production in 1985 directed by Fugard and starring Fugard and Zakes Mokae. The play, about two brothers, one dark-skinned, and the other with a complexion light enough to enable him to pass for white, drew Fugard his fifth Tony nomination for best play. Passing has emotionally warped the light-skinned brother, and the tensions between the two that began in childhood because of their different skin colors explode as the two compete for a woman who turns out to be white. Variety called it a “sobering theatrical experience.” Reviewing the play in New Haven before it hit Broadway, the New York Times applauded Fugard the actor — He is “an articulate stage performer, not only capturing the tragic element of his character but revealing a latent talent for comedy” — and declared, “The anniversary production of ‘The Blood Knot’ is a celebratory occasion.”
“The Road to Mecca” played Off Broadway in 1988 in a production starring Fugard himself, Yvonne Bryceland and Amy Irving; a 2012 Broadway production starred Carla Gugino, Jim Dale and Rosemary Harris. The title refers not to Islam’s holy place but to an eccentric old widow’s sculpture garden in the South African desert. While this setting would seem to be surprisingly devoid of political content, the New York Times said in 1988 that Fugard “finds in Miss Helen’s homely artistic credo a cathartic statement of what it means to be a true artist in any place, at any time. As the soul of a Government-defying South African playwright is reflected in Miss Helen, so too is the spirit of anyone who persists in the often lonely struggle for what is right.” The sculptures are not seen, because their specifics are irrelevant.
“The Road to Mecca” was adapted for the bigscreen in 1991, directed by Fugard and Peter Goldsmid and starring Fugard, Bryceland and Kathy Bates.
Fugard wrote the 1980 novel “Tsotsi,” the basis for the 2005 Gavin Hood film that won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, as well as an array of other awards. The story, set in the South African township of Soweto, centers on a young criminal (the title means “thug”) who grows more human, and more humane, when he is forced to take care of a baby. Roger Ebert wrote that the film “does not sentimentalize poverty or make Tsotsi more colorful or sympathetic than he should be; if he deserves praise, it is not for becoming a good man but for allowing himself to be distracted from the job of being a bad man.”
Athol Harold Lannigan Fugard was born in Middelburg, a small desert town in Eastern Cape, South Africa to an Afrikaner mother and an Anglophone South African. When he was small, the family moved to Port Elizabeth, which became the setting of most of his plays.
Fugard studied philosophy and social anthropology at the University of Cape Town but dropped out before receiving his degree; he hitchhiked through Africa for six months and did two years as a seaman in the Far East. He always knew he would be a writer, but he did not become involved with theater until after his return from the Far East and his subsequent involvement with actress Sheila Meiring. After they married in 1956, they started an experimental theater group, penning most of the material.
In 1958 the couple moved to Johannesburg, where Fugard took a job as a government clerk. He was employed in a Native Commissioner’s Court, which effectively determined, through rulings on passport violations, where South Africans of all races could live, work and travel. These experiences proved grist for his plays. “During my six months in that courtroom,” the Paris Review quoted Fugard as saying, “I saw more suffering than I could cope with. I began to understand how my country functions.”
Fugard’s first plays were “No-Good Friday” and “Nongogo,” but “The Blood Knot,” which was staged Off Broadway in a production starring J.D. Cannon and James Earl Jones and in London in the 1960s as well as on television in the the U.S. and U.K., first brought him to international prominence. “The Blood Knot” was the first work in Fugard’s “Family Trilogy,” which also included “Hello and Goodbye,” staged Off Broadway in 1969 with Martin Sheen and Collen Dewhurst, and 1969’s “Boesman and Lena.”
The plays he wrote in the 1990s and early 2000s, after the demise of apartheid, never attained the international renown of his apartheid-fueled works. These included “Playland,” (1992), “Valley Song” (1996), and “The Captain’s Tiger” (1997) — all of which contain strong autobiographical elements. His 2002 play “Sorrows and Rejoicings” concerned a poet who returns to South Africa after a long exile.
He eventually came to reappraise his native country in his work: “Victory” (2009), starkly explored post-apartheid South Africa, while 2010’s allegorical meditation “The Train Driver” centered on white South Africans’ collective guilt over apartheid.
Fugard continued producing into his 80s, writing the play “The Shadow of the Hummingbird” and starring in it in 2014, at the age of 81. In this personal play he read from his diaries. The two-character work featured an old man who has spent too much on intellectual pursuits and his young grandson.
In 2015 his thoughtful and poignant new play “The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek,” inspired by the story of a little-known South African outsider artist, played Off Broadway. As in “The Road to Mecca,” the artist’s work is in as a powerful symbol of human dignity.
In addition to acting in his own work, Fugard occasionally appeared in the work of others, appearing in Peter Brook’s 1979 film “Meetings With Remarkable Men”; Richard Attenborough’s best picture winner “Gandhi” (1982) as General Jan Smuts; and Roland Joffe’s 1984 film “The Killing Fields.”
Survivors include his wife, Sheila.
