From my correspondence with Sheila Fugard about her memoir, a correction to the historical record about the date of The Cell emerged. Although she chose not to write about her husband's other early unpublished play, Klaas and the Devil, both she and Athol are positive that The Cell was performed before Klaas. A play review (Anon. "Three") establishes the first production of Klaas as 3 October 1956: therefore the standard date of The Cell's first production, put at 26 May 1957 by Russell Vandenbroucke (13) and more generally as 1957 by Stephen Gray (File 11), must be incorrect.

She brings a novelist's eye for detail to her evocation of people and places during those financially desperate but exciting apprenticeship years: baking papier-mache masks in their kitchen oven for The Cell.

The origins of The Cell, like so many of Athol's later plays, were rooted in both the human and political injustices of South African society. At the time we met, Athol was emotionally involved in the problems of our country. Two years earlier, when he was a seaman on a tramp steamer, he had worked alongside Malay and black seamen, and so had learned to live with men of different skin color. One day he noticed an item in the local newspaper which both moved and outraged him. A black woman had been arrested for not carrying a passbook, the identity document which blacks were forced to have with them at all times. She was jailed and, when in prison, gave birth prematurely. She screamed over and over for assistance, but her cries were ignored. The brutal warders left her in the cell to wail over her dead infant. Finally, the next The origins of The Cell, like so many of Athol's later plays, were rooted in both the human and political injustices of South African society. At the time we met, Athol was emotionally involved in the problems of our country. Two years earlier, when he was a seaman on a tramp steamer, he had worked alongside Malay and black seamen, and so had learned to live with men of different skin color. One day he noticed an item in the local newspaper which both moved and outraged him. A black woman had been arrested for not carrying a passbook, the identity document which blacks were forced to have with them at all times. She was jailed and, when in prison, gave birth prematurely. She screamed over and over for assistance, but her cries were ignored. The brutal warders left her in the cell to wail over her dead infant. Finally, the next day, they removed the bleeding, stinking thing. Athol created The Cell around this incident.

Zakes Mokae, who had just turned twenty, and hardly ever spoke, was Athol's choice for the role of "first thug." Athol sensed the acting potential of this young man, who had been a protege of Father Trevor Huddleston, an English cleric who was a political activist in Sophiatown. Zakes had been a member of Father Huddleston's jazz group. He was withdrawn, yet behind his shy grin he was able to project an undertone of menace. No-Good Friday was the beginning of Zakes's career, which was to continue in Athol's later plays in the United States, as well as in movies.

By the time Athol was writing his next play, Nongogo, he needed other influences. He had found a new inspiration in Tone Brulin, a Belgian theatre director, brought out to South Africa by the National Theatre. Tone was both a director and playwright. Athol sat in on his rehearsals and got a feel for European theatre. This experience broadened his outlook and gave him more confidence in himself. Tone sensed Athol's unique talent. There were township visits with him, and later we went to Brussels, where Tone was helpful in getting Athol work in Dutch theatre.

This is a play about decay, after all, and the ugly mid-century décor is perfectly realized by Sean Doyle's set and Nina Mahi Zardonzny's costume design. The production flags somewhat during the longer monologues, especially those delivered by Carroll, whose awkward demeanor works better as a foil for Novack's brashness. Still, Fugard's morbid spectacle of a dying family unit is a rare and challenging one, and the undertaking is ultimately worth the effort.

C. Carroll and K. Novack, Photo: John Mulcahy

It was a year before the result became visible, in The Coat, "An Acting Exercise" which was presented to its first audience, a white Port Elizabeth "theatre appreciation" group who, having asked to see a sample of their work, were expecting a comedy, Wole Soyinka's Brother Jero. But since the Native Commissioner would permit performance in a "white area" only on condition the black performers did not use the toilets, and returned to the township after the show, the Players (after bitter debate) decided to do a reading of The Coat instead, using pseudonyms from their earlier roles to avoid trouble with the police, and a Brechtian actor-presenter who encouraged their white audience to think about, not merely sympathize with, what they were witnessing. Fugard's aim was to "shatter white complacency and its conspiracy of silence"; for the group, going ahead was an act of "solidarity," a testimony to their work together over the years. The collaborative procedure, with Fugard as "scribe" and provocateur, and the performers drawing on their knowledge of New Brighton, was fully vindicated by the result, which left their audience of one hundred and fifty frozen in "horror and fascination" (Notebooks 142-43) at being taken out of their safe white world into township oppression. As "Lavrenti" (Mulligan Mbikwane) announces in the opening address: 'We want to use the theatre. For what?... Some of us say to understand the world we live in, but we also boast a few idealists who think that Theatre might have something to do with changing it (Township Plays 123).

People Are Living There revolves around Milly, the landlady of a rundown bordering house, who has recently been cast aside by her long-term lover and is obsessed with revenge. She finds out that her ex-lover is going out on a date and decides to throw a birthday party for herself just to spite him. But this just doesn’t work out because her party guests/lodgers Don and Shorty are victims of their own ineptitude...

The one thing that binds these characters together is their fear of being alone....

There is a bleak, melancholy shadow over everything and Fugard gives us few things to laugh at. (Though not necessarily from lack of trying) I have to admit that I began to lose interest in the first half of the play because it is light on plot and heavy on banter. However, things really pick up and become interesting theatre when the party begins. There is about ten minutes of fantastic theatre when all talking ceases and we only hear (and see) the characters attacking the party food. This scene had the most impact on me. Fugard shows us throughout the play what happens to us when we sit around and wait for life to come to us instead of attacking it. So I saw this scene as a futile attempt at attacking life and the one moment when the characters break out of their shells. This is very refreshing, but then immediately afterward Fugard falls back on dramatic speeches to reveal his characters' innermost feelings.

photo © Richard Termine

The original stage version featured white actors in black roles. The first film version was shot in 1973 and starred Yvonne Bryceland and Fugard.

...Bassett, in particular, stinks up the joint by playing virtually every emotion to the kids in the cheap seats

Fugard, like Beckett and Camus, seeks an answer to Camus' question of why these people do not commit suicide when faced with the absurdity and squalor imposed on their lives. In Boesman and Lena the answer to the question is forestalled by the lack of a complete and truthful consciousness of the self. Lena is preoccupied with uncovering her identity, which she believes is held in her past and in an other's recognition of her. Boesman, contrarily, fears an encounter with his self because his false sense of identity might be brought into question.

What particular advice can you remember Mr. Fugard giving about your characters and how to act them?

MOKONE: For me the advice was "Write your own journey." The script from time to time says my character, the old man, murmurs something in Xhosa, but doesn't say what. Actors before me who had played the role, like Bloke Modisane, had written their own journey, so I followed their example and wrote my own story.

The most obvious device, already broached in the discussion of role-playing, involves the peopling of the theatrical space of the play with a wide variety of representatives from the society which surrounds the action and the actors. In Statements . . . the policeman represents not only the System, the forces of law and order, but- notably through the statement of Mrs. Buys- the outside world which invades the lovers' haven. In both the other plays the two central actors themselves represent the absent multitude- all the more persuasive because in their invisibility they come to inhabit, to possess, the actors... In Statements, of course, the woman is physically present as "the other person on the floor". Yet from the beginning, even before the intervention of the Immorality Act, the relationship between the play's protagonists is in the process of breaking down ("Is there nothing any more we can do except hurt each other?"). If she represents an attempt toward human wholeness ("And he . . . And I . . . And we . . ."), it is the failure of this wholeness, through a progressive exclusion and denial of the woman by the man toward the end, that results in the irremediable bleakness of the outcome, a near-total darkness quite uncharacteristic of Fugard.

The racial and power dynamics between the two, largely submerged at first, shift to the forefront once the two are arrested (the Immorality Act forbade interracial sex). What started as a fairly linear play splinters into a series of poetic monologues that vary in quality.

Sizwe Bansi is Dead

This reading of Fugard's dramaturgy in Sizwe Band returns us to what he himself, at a time when he was a particularly enthusiastic exponent of Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theatre, regarded as basic to the theatrical experience: an "immediate and direct relationship with our audience". It means that for a more comprehensive evaluation of the interaction between aesthetics and politics we should look at the text as performance, i.e., as part of an experience that has no "outside" to it. In such a reading the audience assumes a vital importance. The narrative in the play may indeed present images of closed circles in which Buntu's words reverberate ad infinitum: "There's no way out, Sizwe." But the act of confronting an audience with such images cannot but stimulate a response, and this in itself is already a breaking of the circle. In the narrowest sense of the word, the play can be read as the response by a group of artists to the challenge of a sociopolitical situation. In performance it is the play that acts as challenge to elicit a response from the audience. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows," said Orwell (81).

It has also been translated into more than 30 languages. Kani says he is sometimes surprised by royalty cheques made out in roubles.

"He was an enormously talented and very passionate actor," Fugard recalls. "He was almost as devastated not to have the chance to play the role as he was to go to prison. I later received a letter from him that someone smuggled out. He told me he had performed a 10-minute, two-man version of Antigone at a prison concert that he adapted from memory. It was just an extraordinary story. I recognized right away that it would make a great play."

With The Island there was an interesting situation. Everybody knew there was a Robben Island, Mandela was on Robben Island; everybody knew there were people in detention, people underground; everybody knew people in exile. But people were afraid to touch this subject. We had to find a way of talking about these things, of telling the story.

What we discovered after creating Sizwe Bansi was that we couldn’t have the text written down. This was because it would have been a document; it would have meant that the police would have evidence that could be presented to a District Attorney who might lay charges against us. So we kept continuing to improvise according to the interactions and response with the audience. That way we used our life experience, structured it around a story, to take the audience on a journey through to the end of the evening.

As they enact the Greek tragedy, they discover that the civil disobedience of the mythical heroine must be translated to their own situation. This is a play about the arts as a tool of empowerment and the simplicity of its narrative merely adds to its weight.

His method in Dimetos was even less characteristic. There he tried to embody the idea in a man, but one who lived in no recognizable place, no identifiable time. Still working with the play after its first production at Edinburgh, he indicated that he was thinking of the time of the play "without letting any specifics creep onto the page" but that he had "two specific settings in my imagination" (Notebooks 219). Working tools, presumably, for they never moved from his imagination to the stage. Certainly the New Bethesda that became the "remote province" of Act One of Dimetos has none of the substantiality of the New Bethesda outside Miss Helen's door in The Road to Mecca.

Athol Fugard plays the Afrikaner intellectual, naturalist, poet, author and rebel Eugene Marais, who publicly attacked Kruger's repressive Transvaal government and raised hackles by lecturing on 'The Joys of Opium'. Focused on when he was trying to overcome morphine addiction on a remote farm, Devenish's film is a dark, poetic examination of a life which, in Marais' words, was 'founded on pain and sorrow'.

The three characters in Aloes--distantly based on people mentioned in Notebooks as early as 1961--are veterans of the struggles in a cause that--for two of them at least--has come to seem false, a kind of ideological self-delusion that made their idealism and their sense of community appear to be politically important.

The Drummer, the five-minute mime piece he wrote for the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1980, grew out of an image he found in New York- a derelict playing with drumsticks.

"It was difficult to realize that I'd have to spit in my friend's face during every performance. During the show, which runs without intermission, I have to stay in the moment and stay in character in order to deal with this awkward situation. This is a very actor-driven show, and I feel a lot of responsibility playing the title role."

Structurally, the play has three main sections: a prelude when Sam and Willie are alone on stage; a long middle section when Hally is on stage, storming around and "bumping" into people and things; and a brief postlude when Sam and Willie are again alone together.

The topics covered include a synopsis, a biography of Fugard, directing the play, lighting, background on South Africa, classroom ideas.

"I love words and ´the space between words´ which is a phrase of Fugard´s´. There is a lot of dialogue in the play and each character has an individual style.... the almost aggressively active Elsa provokes a seemingly passive Helen to explain why she feels as she does..." .

This is highly recommended.

The play, originally written in1984, is a remarkably complex piece of work. There are only three characters, and the entire production takes place in one room. But in that space, Fugard creates a remarkable parable. The piece works on several levels; as a character study of the three participants, an allegory about the problems (past and present) of South Africa, and as an examination of human frailty and strength.

At the time it was first produced, The Road to Mecca must have been dynamite in South Africa. Despite no black character ever appearing on stage, the work challenges and confronts both the immediate issue of apartheid, and the deeper question of racism in all its forms.

it is unusual to find a man exploring the complexities of women's relationships, which is precisely what Athol Fugard does in The Road to Mecca (first performed in 1984 at the Yale Repertory Theater). He uses the dose friendship between Helen and Elsa to explore many issues, especially the isolation of the artist and other rebels and the ability of an artist to nurture younger friends. These universal themes enable the play to transcend mere character studies and to articulate the deepest needs of both men and women

"A play that never ended," is Athol Fugard's recollection, in a conversation with me in 1986, of the first performance of The Blood Knot: it went on for four hours "on a terrible little stage, only about six inches high at one end." The momentous event took place in Johannesburg in 1961 with Fugard and Zakes Mokae playing Morrie and Zach. The tiny rehearsal room of the African Music and Drama school in Dorkay House, a rundown factory in the automobile district, was packed on that suffocating summer's evening. Egg boxes were glued to one wall to shut out the noise of traffic, but through blacked-out windows on the opposite side came the beat of drums from a nearby mine compound

Sud-Africain blanc, Athol Fugard est un auteur joué dans le monde entier. Ses plus récentes pièces écrites en collaboration avec des écrivains noirs ont intéressé Peter Brook, et bien d'autres. Mais, en France, l'heure de la gloire n'a pas sonné pour lui... La création du Lien du sang pourrait aider à le mieux connaître, car elle nous montre que Fugard n'a pas cette raideur, cette netteté anglo-saxonne qu'on lui attribuait volontiers, mais un art très complexe de traduire la réalité.

If The Guest is the only Fugard work to make an obvious allusion to his alcoholism, A Place with the Pigs is the only one to celebrate his drying out. Pavel begins the play with the hope- even the expectation- that he will be able to leave the pigsty in which he has been hiding, but when this proves impossible and when the excitement of a momentary walk outside ends with his hurrying back into his sanctuary/cage, he declines from the relative fastidiousness of the first scene to complete the filthy identification with the pigs. It is only after his wife has beaten him back into his manhood that he is able to release the pigs, and he and Praskovya can leave the sty.

The play is both a cry for tolerance and a bitter acceptance of the violence that flares to destroy peace in South Africa. It is not possible to ignore the parallel between Mr. M., and his search for change through peaceful and intelligent intervention, and another Mr. M., now President Nelson Mandela.

Newspaper articles and reviews in Johannesburg and Gape Town published to coincide with the opening of the play in the two cities describe how Fugard found the initial germ of the play in a newspaper article describing the death of a teacher in the Eastern Gape town of Cookhouse in 1984 (actually, of course, 1985). Finding out more about the incident has not been easy. It is not mentioned in the Race Relations Survey, nor was it reported in major newspapers outside the Eastern Cape. Until recently it was, understandably, difficult to find anyone in either opposition or government circles prepared to speak freely about what took place. As far as it is currently possible to reconstruct the incident, what took place was this. On Tuesday, 30 April 1985, Anela Myalatya (Fugard oddly retains his actual name), a twenty-nine-year-old teacher of junior secondary school pupils (not, as in the play, an elderly teacher of senior pupils) at Msodomvu Intermediate School in Cookhouse became caught up in the political turmoil of the Eastern Cape. Early in the day he acted as an interpreter at a meeting at which the circuit inspector responsible for African schools in the area addressed teachers, parents, and pupils about the need, as he saw it, to "normalize" the school. Later in the day Myalatya requested permission to be absent from school the following day. He had learned that because of an incident that had taken place the previous week he might be in some danger.

This piece is a little slight and on occasions the sentiments can seem a little trite but even so the subject matter is very important and remains so as cultural differences are still apparent in South Africa and Zimbabwe today. With good performances from both Samson Khumalo and Mark Wakeling, this thought provoking play is one that anyone interested in politics and the issue of race should see.

The play's gestation began in December 1966 when Fugard took his small daughter Lisa to Playland, an amusement fair traveling the Karoo. He watched the attendant of the "happiness machines," an African in faded overalls, behaving oddly, "muttering darkly to himself," his eyes with an "abstracted intensity" (Notebooks 145). That man is now incarnated in the character of Martinus. The catalyst for Fugard in writing the play was a photograph of white South African soldiers dropping the corpses of black men into a crude hole. In the play a black woman stands, watching--a sorrowful mother?--an image inspired by Pergolesi's Stabat Mater.

Dialogue is iceberg territory where you see very little above the water of the real mass that is hidden beneath.

Perhaps the production would have been more effective and certainly more varied if the young Fugard was played by a young actor, thereby at least releasing the older, "narrative" Fugard from performing his own recollections.

This play is about the personal journey of everyone in it. There are five main personal relationships: Marta/Dawid, Allison/Dawid, Dawid/Rebecca, Allison/Marta, and Marta and Rebecca. Dawid is dead, so those relationships are over, even though they still influence the lives of all he touched. The last two relationships are ongoing, significant not only for the people involved, but symbolically for the future of South Africa. In these relationships there is hope. Allison and Marta made a journey from conflict to reconciliation, as Marta says, "Life is full of surprises, hey Allison".

"This is the first play written in its entirety outside of South Africa, and it shows the profound longing of a man for the land of his birth and his mother tongue. It is a play about someone who has left South Africa, and who misses his country every day"

As the confrontations in Sorrows and Rejoicing come one after another, the suffering that the end of apartheid and its  have inflicted on the various populations of South Africa is made increasingly plain. As Fugard depicts them, the accumulated feelings come to possess the burning intensity of a flame. But another revelation about Fugard’s compulsive vision comes into focus as well, and it takes the edge off his accomplishment: He’s too schematic. The Sorrows and Rejoicing symbols proliferate until they almost topple the play: The living room in which the afflicted country’s peoples are so carefully represented is too patently a metaphor for South Africa.

It is not often that a new work by an acclaimed playwright opens in a very small theater. Exits and Entrances not only debuted at the 78 seat Fountain Theater on the east side of Hollywood, it was expressly written for this venue. It is by Athol Fugard’s own description, “a small play,” and is satisfying only if viewed in this light. He sees himself as being “a miniaturist (who) writes on small canvases.” A one act, written for two characters, and lasting less than 90 minutes including extensive excerpts from classic theater, Exits and Entrances is a vignette or a showcase, rather than a fully developed play...

So what is missing? Exits and Entrances is tightly written and very quotable, skillfully acted and directed. Yet something is lacking. With all that finesse, audience emotion is not engaged. Huguenet’s acting competence is established repeatedly with Hurley reciting complete passages from classic works such as the entire soliloquy from Hamlet. But the pain and loneliness of a closeted homosexual in an intolerant society, or a confirmed Afrikaner in a world that is passing him by, is not explored. Might it not be better to devote less stage time to the established genius of Shakespeare and more to the inner life of the characters? Was the young playwright always so charming and gracious? Could he be as enveloped in the politics of his country as he is and yet always present such a pleasant face? This is autobiography without revelation--well done and pleasant to watch, but it could have been so much more.

In Huguenet, Fugard has written a true tour de force role, and Morlan Higgins makes the most of it. Whether he is putting on makeup, running through his lines, having a prima donna moment, or kindly sharing a word about his life in the theatre with the playwright who clearly idealizes him, Higgins is mesmerizing. (Indeed, perhaps the greatest feature of William Dennis Hurley's performance as the playwright is his ability to disappear even though he's still on stage.) In its short 80-minute running time, Exits and Entrances gives an actor the opportunity to play Sophocles and Shakespeare as well as Fugard, and Higgins doesn't waste it. While running lines in preparation to take the stage as Oedipus, Huguenet slides into character, giving a taste of a powerful, chill-inducing performance. But Higgins also plays the moments Fugard has written, making a speech about where an actor's "home" is truly poignant even though we all know the place he is going to name.