Athol Fugard

386 Pages·2016·4.26 MB·English

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Athol Fugard: His Dramatic Work
with Special Reference to His Later Plays
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Anne Sarzin T

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B. A. University of Cape Toawn, 1961
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B. A. Hons. (cum laude), University of Natal, 1962
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M.A. University of Coape Town, 1965

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A thesnis submitted to the University of Cape Town
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in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature
1987
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The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No
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quotation from it or information derived from it is to be

published without full acknowledgeement of the source.
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The thesis is to be used for private study or non-
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commercial research purposes only.

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Published by the Universit y of Cape Town (UCT) in terms
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of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author.
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Abstract
Anne Sarzin, 11 Balgay Court, Main Road, Kenilworth 7700, Cape
Town, South Africa.
Thesis Title: Athol Fugard--his dramatic work with special
reference to his later plays.
1 March 1987.
In the introduction, the writer highlights Fugard's
regional artistry, his authentic reflection and recreation of a
nation's tormented soul. The first chapter deals with Fugard's
early plays, revealing the embryonic playwright and those
characteristics of imagery, construction, language and content
to be developed and refined in later plays. Briefly examined
within this context are No-Good Friday, Nongogo and Tsotsi, the
playwright's only novel. A chapter on the Port Elizabeth plays
written in Fugard's apprenticeship years, The Blood Knot, Hello
and Goodbye and Boesman and Lena, focuses on his growing skill
as a dramatist, his involvement in his milieu both geo
graphically and emotionally, as well as providing detailed
analysis of the plays in terms of major features such as
national politics, universal values, existentialism and Calvin
ism. The period of collaboration in which Fugard responded to
the suggestions, imaginative projections and creative stimulus
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of his actors, forms the content of a chapter devoted to
detailed study of the improvised plays: The Coat, Orestes,
Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and The Island. The later Port Elizabeth
plays, A Lesson from Aloes and "Master Harold '~ ... and the boys,
are explored from political and personal perspectives
respectively, with attention paid to the intensely human dramas
that dominate even the overtly ideological considerations. A
chapter on the television and film scripts--The Occupation,
Mille Miglia, The Guest, Marigolds in August--traces Fugard's
involvement in these media, his economy of verbal descriptions
and his taut control of his material generally. A chapter is
devoted to Fugard' s women, the characters who present
affirmative points of view, whose courage, compassion and
determination infuse a hostile world with a range of
possibilities beyond survival and existence. Milly in People
are Living There, Frieda in Statements After An Arrest Under
The Immorality Act and Miss Helen in The Road to Mecca form a
Fugardian sorority of survivors. The final chapter of the
thesis is devoted to Dimetos, regarded as an intensely personal
artistic statement, an examination of the dramatist's alter
ego, the playwright's persona.
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Acknowledgements
It is with a deep sense of appreciation that I record
my thanks to Professor Geoffrey Haresnape of the English
Department, University of Cape Town, who supervised my thesis
with meticulous attention to detail. It was not only his
literary methodology and scholarship that proved invaluable
but also his kindness and encouragement. My parents and
children were ever my support and inspiration.
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Table of Contents
Chapter
l. Introduction l
2. Fugard's Early Work 12
3. Early Port Elizabeth Plays 47
4. The Period of Improvisation 89
5. The Later Port Elizabeth Plays 118
6. Television and Film Scripts 175
7. Fugard's Women 235
8. Dimetos 324
9. Conclusion 355
Select Bibliography 366
1. Introduction
In South Africa, an authentic voice recounts in poetry
and prose the visions of a playwright. The sounds, shapes
and smells of a harsh terrain are reflected in the dramatic
works of Athol Fugard.
His territory is that of the South African heart and
mind the landscape of a people's psyche. The country's
soul with its schisms, factions, facts and fantasies
is the region he explores in plays that mirror contemporary
reality. Fugard, his insight honed by a lifetime of conflict
with South African authorities, including the withdrawal
of his passport and the censorship of his plays, has sharpened
his observations on a personal whetstone of hostilities and
antagonisms. He has taken up his pen not with the fervour
of a social critic or reformer but primarily with the passion
of a story-teller. This compulsion has characterised his
creative process and has ensured his work's universal appeal
and validity, notwithstanding regionally accented English,
the liberal use of indigenous language and a range of portraits
instantly recognizable to any South African.
The stories he has told, in words resonant with the
ambiguity of poetry, have been tales reflecting South Africa
in all its complexity: the absurdity of laws that wreck
hopes and dreams, loves and lives; the segmented apartheid
world dividing man from man as in The Blood Knot, and man
from woman as in Statements After An Arrest Under The
Immorality Act; and the gulf cleaving haves from havenots
subtly characterised in Hello and Goodbye.
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His hybridised family background has woven together
disparate threads of English royalist sentiments (his
grandmother) and Calvinist conservatism (his wife's family
background as well as his mother's) into the design of a
playwright's vision. For Fugard, biography has been destiny.
He is the resident of New Bethesda in the Karoo and the
sojourner of New Haven in Connecticut. To the inherent
understanding derived from background and the intuitive grasp
stemming from intimacy with a broad range of people and issues
encountered during a lifetime of relatively dissident activity,
one must add his ear for dialectal nuances and his eye for
authentic detail.
As an artist Fugard has evolved through successive stages
of technical expertise based upon a wide-ranging concern
with subjects at grassroots level. His plays have germinated
from flee ting impressions meticulously recorded in Notebooks
that impress with their honesty, precision and probing to
essentials. The standards he applies to the community he
applies as ruthlessly to himself. He acknowledges complicity
and expiates the guilt in a series of plays that proclaim
"mea culpa" loudly and clearly. He addresses issues that
confront him and threaten to engulf us all, focusing on the
victims of society, and its many guises of prejudice,
resentment, hatred, fear, deprivation and suffering. Fugard's
is the palette of an artist enshrouded by gloom. His personal
darkness has been delineated in The Guest, a portrait of
Eugene Marais, Afrikaner advocate, scientist, drug addict
and naturalist, who expounded a theory of Hesperian depression,
the sadness that overwhelms men at sunset. The setting sun
and the advent of darkness, suffusing the world with the
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omnipresence of mortality, symbolise the dark side of Fugard's
spirit. His doom syndrome was reinforced· by an addiction
to alcohol, 2 which catalysed so many of his plays. It is
significant that with abstinence, adhered to for several
years, motifs of light and hope have emerged with greater
clarity and emphasis, culminating in the effulgence of light
imagery central to The Road to Mecca, "the celestial geometry
of light and colour" 2 that illuminates Miss Helen's house
and heart.
If "Master Harold" and the boys is his most openly
autobiographical and confessional play, then Mecca comes
closest to laying bare the secret fear of the artist that
sterility of religion and social norms can threaten creativity.
Fugard's career may from one point of view be seen as a
description of milestones along his personal route to Mecca,
where finally there are self-knowledge, trust, acceptance,
belief and light to be found.
For theatregoers exposed to his material as active
contributors to his final draft (for his modus operandi
stresses dependence on audience response, often resulting
in far-reaching additions and subtractions) the meaning of
Fugard's personal Mecca is of lesser importance. For us,
his literary beneficiaries, the ideas he has nurtured, the
plays he has written and the feelings these have engendered
world-wide are testimony to an artist and craftsman. It
has been a long road from the early faltering efforts, No
Good Friday and Nongogo, to the professionalism of Master
Harold and Mecca.
It has been stated that there is a relevance to his
works that transcends the topicality of the here and now.
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The Blood Knot, first performed in 1961, played to packed
houses on Broadway in 1985. The bond forged between brothers,
the inter-dependence, needs, desires and dreams, and the
external violence that insidiously threatens to disrupt the
harmony of their relationship are as riveting 25 years later
as they were at first performance. The story of a black
man and his light-skinned brother is a microcosmic portrayal
in-depth of the South African situation, with its strengths
and weaknesses. The brothers' wrong steps are a natural
metaphor for the larger collisions of mankind. As a reviewer
once noted:
It is this pained acuity about the buffeting nature
of daily life, even more than his passionate
denunciation of the social system in his native
South Africa, that makes Fugard the greatest active
playwright in the English-speaking world.3
Five years after Blood Knot, Fugard focused on a brother/sister
relationship, an intense two-hander entitled Hello and Goodbye,
depicting the poor white fringes of Port Elizabeth society,
probing Calvinist hypocrisy and positing, if only tentatively,
the redemptive power of love. The final play in this early
Port Elizabeth trilogy, Boesman en Lena, is the work closest
to Fugard and, on his own admission, frankly autobiographical.
As close as the Crossroads of the 1980s, it portrays the
"coloured II person dispossessed of this land, the squatters,
their shacks and lives demolished by the whiteman's bulldozers
and laws. It is an indictment of a society in which there
are people regarded as II surplus 11 living on discarded waste,
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whiteman's rubbish. 11Vrot! This piece of world is rotten114
Lena exclaims, understanding that by association she and
Boesman are dehumanized into society's waste products.
With his involvement in the Serpent Players, a Port