ATHOL FUGARD

Athol Fugard: Pioneer Dramatist

by

Bernard Sachs

Athol Fugard is South Africa’s white hope---the reference is to the theatre. The cognoscenti here were deeply impressed by his play No-Good Friday, which he wrote and produced in Johannesburg last year. The other day when I spoke to Leontine Sagan about the recent spurt in our indigenous theatre, she said without hesitation that Fugard’s effort was the most impressive. Nadine Gordimer, in a letter to the Star, likewise spoke most enthusiastically of this newcomer to the scene.

Athol Fugard has got all that it takes, and it is my bet that before the passage of many years a play by him will receive acclaim well beyond the borders of South Africa. That seems like extravagance. So in defence I have to say---I crave indulgence for introducing the personal note---that I edited a literary h journal which printed a large number of short stories by Herman Bosman, Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing long before they gained anything like recognition even here in South Africa. And I saw them coming along the way. The Kimberley Train and Try For White were better staged and more polished, and all that. But these qualities which are mainly derived from Europe. But No-Good Friday was essentially of the South African soil, and no other---a soil with aridity and bitterness, but not without the promise of fertility. You could tell it by the way the washing hung on the line of the Sophiatown backyard. And the despair and cynicism which this Township breeds is also African---a little more dark and more brooding. Elsewhere, these two manifestations of the spirit are rooted in simple decadence, as portrayed by Damon Runyon and Ferdinand Celine---here, in sunny South Africa, it is ground out of the counterpoint of savagery and aspiration. Nadine Gordimer has her sights fixed at the middle, and rather pale, level of society. Twenty-seven-year old Athol Fugard sees as well as she does---and that is saying something---at the level of the earth, at that point where the tread of feet send out reverberating echoes. That is where the richest South African aesthetic potential lies. Beware, Nadine!

When I left the theatre after seeing No-Good Friday, I felt that here was a new direction in South African artistic creativity. The rural African has been portrayed in all his subtlety by Mrs. A. A. Murray, in her neglected masterpiece, The Blanket, and in Cry, The Beloved Country. But here we had the urban African, with all his myths, folksiness, tones and overtones, done by a total African cast. Fugard must have come across Dostoevsky’s pronouncement, that to know a people you must walk with them, weep with them, and sing hymns with them. Political dissertations on the African you can get in plenty---the papers and books are full of them. But Fugard is the essential artist, and he knows that if you are to get at the core of the African spirit, and transmute it into artistic coin, you have to do more than read dissertations about them, or invite a few Africans to tea in your Houghton home. When he was writing No-Good Friday, he took a job with the Native Affairs Department so as to capture a few living moments. But the Native Affairs Department---not dedicated to art---was unhappy about the artistic moments Athol was capturing and they politely told him to go after two months. Poverty is not the only affliction of the artist in this country. Athol’s feel for the throbbing, living African scene manifests itself in many other ways. He told me that he had travelled through the Transkei, and I wanted to know if he was collecting material for another play. “The traditional African is od no interest,” he said. “All that is on the way out.”

It is not that the African is the only material he is interested in---his questing spirit is on the look out for anything that has abiding quality on which he can get to work. Admittedly, the African is in a state ferment, and it provides him an endless reservoir, but he is finding much else. You only have to listen to Athol telling a story for one minute, to know that he has theatre in his blood---mime, subtlety, keen observation, the lot. There is the one about the postman in the double storeyed tenement where he lived, and where everybody just about knew everybody else’s business even if you were not on the look out for dramatic material. The postman was a boxer---the fighting type, who lets go with all he has. Athol does not just tell you this in words, but he is up on his feet, weaving away in every direction so that the fighting postman is right before your eyes. But the combination did not apparently make for high or even normal intelligence, for he used to lose parcels and registered letters, which he had to make good with deductions from his pay. Athol once observed the postman coming home and telling his wife that they had deducted eight pounds from his monthly pay envelope. She was at the time busy penciling her eye-brows. As the remiss husband stood there before her crestfallen, she wrote on his brow with her eye brow pencil, “Bad Boy.” This couple has given him an idea for a new play.

Athol has more than artistic ability and integrity---he also possesses courage and daring in abundance, so indispensable in this country. Think of the heart difficulties one encounters in promoting a play by an African cast. Proper theatres are not available, and there are all kinds of restrictions on their movements, and staggering transportation problems. But you just never get a despondent look from Athol. He is bantam size, but so vibrant in his every gesture, so full of spiritual fire, that he just takes it all in his stride. Why bother about difficulties, when there are so many rewards forthcoming in the way of fulfillment at the highest level of human striving? His enthusiasm is infectious. After Athol has spent an evening at my flat, I feel the way Bernard Shaw felt after listening to the Berlioz Benvenuto Cellini Overture---I want to run into the street and shout and jump.

I do not wish to dwell on the real poverty and hardship that has been the lot of Athol and his wife since they landed in town, totally unknown, and set about putting on their play at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre. Not one critic turned up, although they were invited. There were forty Africans present, and a handful of whites, including Beni Bonaccorsi, who rescued the play from oblivion. But there was no word of complaint from Athol. And here is angry young man Jimmy Porter (alias John Osborne) setting up a hell of a howl because he has to make a living from a sweet stall. Why, he is not fit to tie Athol’s shoelaces!

Athol is perennially struggling against financial insecurity. But there is nothing of the loose Bohemian about him. If there is anything Bohemian about him, it is that the concepts of material wealth and bourgeois comfort are entirely foreign to him. He is a pioneer in a new field of artistic creativity, and he realizes that the lot of the pioneer is a very difficult one. He accepts it because he is dedicated to his task. In his work, he is punctual and thorough. And while he has plenty of temperament---there is Gallic blood in the Fugard family---it is all the time disciplined and controlled, and not of the flighty, prima donna variety. I do not think there is anyone in South Africa who has more theatre in him than Athol. But he is very modest about it, and always willing to listen and learn.

In a word, he has the necessary character to hold in check his many drives and demons, and that is how it should be. He is fully aware of his own limitations, and he hopes to spend time in Britain to acquire a better knowledge of his craft. But his character has shown itself in many other ways. Both Athol and Sheila come from half-Afrikaner stock, and they openly admit that they had all the Colour prejudices of the Afrikaner, even in violent form. But a trip he made through Africa, to which I shall make later reference, and his life as a sailor, where he worked for long stretches side by side with Malays, has knocked it out of him. His theatre work among the Africans has reinforced his newly shaped attitudes on the racial problem. He finds them humane and warm, and he has more friends among them than amongst whites.

“I’m not political,” says Athol emphatically. “It means nothing to me, and I haven’t a single solution for the political problems besetting our land---apart from one thing I have discovered for myself: I take people for what they are, regardless of race, colour or creed. That rule, limited and restricted by the racial pattern of South Africa, has made it possible for me to go on living and working here.”

I asked Athol if he minded my making reference to the way the Native Affairs Department had handled him. “Give it all the publicity you want,” he replied. It is not the personal discomfort he suffered that annoyed him, for in any event he was intending to leave after another month. What did worry him, was that such a spirit of injustice could stalk this land. But Athol will take a lot of holding down.

I discussed South African theatre with him. He frankly does not think that we have a playwright of the requisite standard as yet. But he has a very high opinion of an African, Lewis Nkosi, a 22 year old journalist on the Golden City Post.

I could write a book about Athol’s travels through the Continent of Africa, and how at one of the ports on the Mediterranean he joined a boat as a sailor and found himself in Japan---all this at about the age of 22. He was a student at the University of Capetown, and had excelled in his studies. But two months before taking the finals for his degree, he felt that the philosophy he was studying was stultifying, and suppressing all that was alive and ardent in him. He left without writing his examinations. Together with a friend, and thirty pounds between them, they got past every obstacle, and reached the Mediterranean littoral. The first night on the way they spent at the Worcester station, with different characters coming in and out, and Athol experiencing all the anguish of leaving home and country for good, as he thought. It will be the subject of a play one day, he tells me---and it should be a good play. He spoke much of that night, and particularly of a Thomas Mann character he met---a tuberculotic, looking ancient and bewildered, going off to a sanatorium, where he knew he would die. Anyway, after two years before the mast, he made his way back to South Africa.

“Did you ever come across Moby Dick in the Japanese waters:” I asked Athol.

“I’m not interested in fighting evil,” he replied---“only in doing a little good.”

He was a free-lance journalist for a time, and then a broadcaster. His marriage to Sheila, who had a theatrical background from the University of Cape Town, helped to develop his interest in drama. But being a sailor for two years had bred the adventurous spirit in him. He turned up his job, and with his savings he bought a station wagon, and travelled through the Bundu. He came to Johannesburg, where he intended staying for one week. But a friend too k him to Sophiatown, and it proved a turning point in his life---“It hit me like a sledgehammer. Here was life as I loved it---raw, basic, violent, charged with humour and laughter. I could not resist it. Out of it was born No-Good Friday. I had £50 left. With it we set about producing the play. We starved, but we were determined. When we drove the African actors home after the rehearsals, and we ran short of petrol, we passed the fat around and collected enough tickeys [nickels] from the cast to keep going. The faith they had in us sustained us.”

This, then, is the tale of Athol Fugard in brief---up to the age of 27. With people like the Fugards around, there is hope for South Africa. Athol was born in the Middelburg district in the karroo. Is the karroo going to give us another big talent?

From: Bernard Sachs, South African Personalities and Places, Kayor Publishers, Johannesburg, 1959.