Athol Fugard in South Africa
Athol Fugard will celebrate his 80th birthday in 2012, and his is certainly a life worthy of the festivities to come. There are good playwrights, there are great playwrights, and then there are playwrights who change the world. Fugard falls into this last category, and more than 40 years into his writing career, he shows no inclination of holding back or slowing down.
What separates Fugard from his peers begins with his South African upbringing. The son of Harold Fugard, a European jazz pianist, and Elizabeth Magdalena Potgieter, an Afrikaner, Fugard grew up mainly in Port Elizabeth, later attending the University of Cape Town. He left the school only a few months before he would have graduated, deciding to hitchhike to North Africa and then spending two years working on a steamer ship in east Asia, which is when he fi rst began writing. In 1956, he married Shelia Meiring , a drama student who became a novelist and poet. The two had a daughter, Lisa, who has also become a novelist.
Moving to Johannesburg with his family in 1958, Fugard started working in a Native Commissioner’s Court, a job that brought him face to face with the injustices of the Apartheid system. His whole life was lived against the backdrop of Apartheid, but perhaps it took this up-close view to spur Fugard to action. He was ashamed of what he saw as “Kafka-esque” policies. “I’m telling you, it was a nightmare,” he said. He began not only to write plays, but to direct and perform, to produce, and to provoke. His work had an undeniable political bent, often feeling like a call to action. And most importantly, Fugard’s plays have never been merely didactic, using the stage as pulpit; they are truly stunning works of theater that are also fearless in what they have to say, which is exactly what Fugard felt his countrymen needed to see. He explained that before his work, “If you didn’t look like George Bernard Shaw or didn’t make you laugh like Oscar Wilde, it wasn’t set for the South African stage. And other playwrights of that time were writing plays like that, that had nothing, nothing to do with the urgent and terrifying reality of the millions of black people alive in that country at the same time. But they weren’t interested.”
Fugard himself persisted at forcing politics onto the stage. His productions were the fi rst in the country to feature actors of different races together on stage. Tackling racial bias, the AIDS epidemic, and other controversial subjects, Fugard soon found that the government was keeping an eye on him. In 1967, after Fugard spoke out in support of a boycott against segregated theater audiences, the government of South Africa revoked his passport. Knowing that leaving the country meant that he may never be allowed to return, Fugard made the diffi cult decision to stay there, in his home. He stayed for four years, until his passport was fi nally reinstated. It was certainly the more complicated choice, but he saw no other as a possibility – being kept out of his homeland was simply unacceptable, even to a man who fought against so much of what was being done there. “You can’t explain it, you can only say it,” he said. “It’s where you fi nally belong and where you have to go back to. It’s where you are owed. Home is a very deep transaction.”
The Road to Mecca is by no means Fugard’s most political play. Compared to works like Master Harold…and the boys (produced in revival by Roundabout in 2003), his recent Coming Home, and the acclaimed Blood Knot, the world of Apartheid takes a backseat in this piece. But it is, of course, always present, affecting the world from which these characters and their different points of view emerge. Yet this play takes on a different theme, one that happens to come out of South Africa here but is about as universal as it gets. As Fugard put it, “At the core of the play is the word ‘freedom.’ And that is the most political word of all.”
Rosemary Harris and Carla Gugino. Photo by Joan Marcus.
UPSTAGE THE ROAD TO MECCA
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