Athol Fugard, the South African playwright whose portrayals of intimate relationships burdened by oppressive racial separatism exposed the cruel psychological torment of apartheid to an international audience, died on Saturday night at his home in Stellenbosch, a town near Cape Town. He was 92.
His wife, Paula Fourie, confirmed his death after a cardiac event.
Over a long and productive career, Mr. Fugard (pronounced FEW-guard) was both repelled and fueled by the bond he felt with his homeland.
For decades he was considered subversive by the government; at times productions of his work, with their integrated casts, were considered illegal, and his co-workers in the theater were jailed. In 1967, after his early play “The Blood Knot” appeared on British television, his passport was revoked, so that for several years he could not leave the country.
He eventually spent many years abroad, including in the United States — he worked on many productions of his plays at Yale and taught at the University of California, San Diego — yet he could never let himself leave South Africa for good. Even before apartheid was officially revoked in 1994, he maintained a home near Port Elizabeth, the city on the country’s southeastern coast, where he grew up.
“I think I actually need the sustaining provocation of being in South Africa when I’m telling a South Africa story,” he said in an interview with The New Yorker in 1982.
Viscerally powerful for audiences, their roles written with the muscle and idiosyncrasy that are candy to actors, Mr. Fugard’s more than 30 plays were presented widely in the United States and around the world. Six have appeared on Broadway, and in 2011, Mr. Fugard received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
He was often thought of as a political playwright, but politics only occasionally figured overtly in his work, and if his plays sometimes functioned as agitprop, it was true as well that the intense personal dramas he created resonated into the wider world.
“The situation in South Africa is so highly politicized that the notion of South African stories without political consequence or resonance is a contradiction in terms,” he said in a 1990 interview with American Theatre magazine.
In his first important play, “The Blood Knot” (1961), now known simply as “Blood Knot” — in which two Black brothers, one of whom can pass for white, reflect the disparate possibilities of life irrevocably determined by skin color — Mr. Fugard established his penchant for creating a dramatic crucible onstage: characters circling one another, fencing, generating tension and pressure in circumstances of privation, often in an enclosed space.
Mr. Fugard followed “Blood Knot” with, among other works, “Boesman and Lena” (1968) in which a mixed race couple, homeless and adrift, are reduced to expressions of primal need. Then came two plays created with the Black South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona: “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” (1972), about a worker who takes on the identity of a dead man to qualify for a work permit, and “The Island” (1973), about cellmates rehearsing to perform “Antigone” in front of other prisoners on Robben Island, the notorious penal institution that held Nelson Mandela.
Mr. Kani and Mr. Ntshona won Tonys for their performances when the two plays were performed in repertory on Broadway in 1974. They reprised their roles for New York audiences at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2003 (“The Island”) and 2008 (“Sizwe”).
In “A Lesson From Aloes” (1978), Mr. Fugard wrote about three former dissidents, two white and one Black, and the costs of their activism. And in the painfully autobiographical “Master Harold … and the Boys,” he examined the relationship between a teenage white boy and the two Black men who work for his mother in a tea shop.
In none of these plays, however, is apartheid the addressed subject. Rather, it is the saturating reality of the plays, the societally sanctioned philosophy — like American capitalism in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” — that informs the lives of the characters.
For them, Mr. Fugard created an insular, circumscribed world, just as William Faulkner did for his characters with the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi.
Mr. Fugard considered Faulkner an influence.
“I was absolutely fascinated by the fact that here was an American writer who was unashamedly regional,” he said. “It was reading and responding to Faulkner that gave me my first push toward the regional identity that I’ve stayed with ever since.”
Broadway-Bound
In 1982, “Master Harold” opened at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, the first of Mr. Fugard’s plays to have its premiere outside South Africa. With Mr. Fugard directing Danny Glover, Zakes Mokae and Lonny Price, the play went on to run for nearly a year on Broadway.
The play included one of theater history’s most memorable shocks. At the play’s climax, in a fit of angry confusion, Hally, the young white stand-in for the playwright, spits in the face of Sam (played by Mr. Mokae, who won a Tony in the role), who has been Hally’s fond friend and at times even a surrogate father. Gasp-inducing on the stage, it was an episode drawn from real life, Mr. Fugard confessed.
In the play, Sam’s rebuke to young Hally is quiet and agonizingly restrained, and his forgiveness is shortly forthcoming. Like some other Black roles written by Mr. Fugard, those of the tea shop workers brought him criticism from those who claimed that, as a white man, he did not have sufficient standing to imagine the world from the point of view of oppressed Black characters, and that his work was thus inauthentic and a mere salve for the guilt of liberal whites.
But the play had a powerful effect on audiences wherever it played, including in South Africa, and mainstream critics were largely in Mr. Fugard’s corner.
“There may be two or three living playwrights in the world who can write as well as Athol Fugard,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, “but I’m not sure any of them has written a recent play that can match ‘Master Harold … and the Boys.’”
Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard was born on June 11, 1932, in Middleburg, in a semiarid region of South Africa known as the Karoo. His family moved to Port Elizabeth when he was 3. His father, Harold, who had lost a leg in a childhood accident, was a pianist who played in jazz bands and who eventually descended into alcoholism but who also influenced Athol intellectually.
“From early on there were two things that filled my life — music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father,” Mr. Fugard said in a 1985 interview.
Young Athol was closer, however, to his mother, Elizabeth, who ran a boardinghouse and later a tearoom and became the family’s primary breadwinner. The more liberal of his parents, it was she who influenced him morally. He was 16 when apartheid was declared the law of the land in 1948.
“Growing up in South Africa was a complicated experience for me, for one very simple reason,” Mr. Fugard told Interview magazine in 1990. “I think at a fairly early age I became suspicious of what the system was trying to do to me. I knew the way it was trying to pull me. I became conscious of what attitudes it was trying to implant in me and what prejudices it was trying to pass on to me.”
Athol and his sister Glenda won ballroom dancing prizes together. (In “Master Harold,” it is the Black characters who are the dancers.) He studied automobile mechanics in high school and then philosophy at the University of Cape Town, where he preferred boxing to theater as an extracurricular activity. He dropped out during his final year to hitchhike through Africa.
Out of money in Port Sudan on the Red Sea, Mr. Fugard took a job on a merchant ship and found himself, as the only white crewman, living closely with men of a different race for the first time. He wrote an ultimately failed novel on board the ship. But he returned to Port Elizabeth determined to be a writer and found work in newspapers and radio.
He eventually moved to Cape Town, and at a party one night in 1956 he met Sheila Meiring, an aspiring actress who would become his wife and spur his interest in writing for the theater. They divorced in 2015.
Survivors include his second wife, Ms. Fourie, his daughter from his first marriage, Lisa Fugard, two children from his second marriage, Halle and Lanigan, and a grandson.
An ‘Ugly’ Experience
The Fugards moved to Johannesburg in the late 1950s, and for three months Mr. Fugard took a job as a clerk in a court that tried Black people for violations involving their required identity cards, known as passbooks. The experience, which he recalled as “just so awful and ugly,” found its way onto the stage in “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead.”
Two of his earliest plays, “No-Good Friday” and “Nongogo,” were inspired by Mr. Mokae and others he met in Sophiatown, a Black township outside Johannesburg, but they attracted little attention, and the family decided to move to London. There, Mr. Fugard had several plays rejected and ended up cleaning houses to make money. Then, in 1960, when white police in the South African city of Sharpeville opened fire on Black protesters engaged in a peaceful demonstration against the passbook laws, killing some 70 people, the Fugards were moved to return home.
Mr. Fugard wrote a novel, “Tsotsi,” about the moral reclamation of a delinquent, that would be published almost 20 years later and made into a 2005 movie that won an Oscar for best foreign language film. And he wrote “The Blood Knot,” a seven-scene series of conversations between brothers — the dark-skinned Zachariah, a laborer who has lived in a severely circumscribed universe, and the light-skinned Morris, who has traveled about South Africa and elocutes with a far more elevated perspective.
The crisis in the play arises when Zach, encouraged by Morris, begins a correspondence with a female pen pal who turns out to be white, precipitating a bitter — and finally a physical — confrontation in which the brothers are forced to accept the reality that their bond dooms them to misery.
The play, in its original four-hour version, was performed just once, in an abandoned factory in Johannesburg for an interracial, nonpaying audience of about 120, including friends, journalists and critics. Directed by Mr. Fugard, he also acted in it (as Morris) alongside Mr. Mokae, and it changed Mr. Fugard’s life. (Mr. Mokae’s, too.)
Critics who wrote about “The Blood Knot” recognized in its indigenous story the birth of a new kind of South African theater. The play was soon substantially cut, and the two actors presented it in towns across South Africa, sharing time onstage but often unable to travel in the same train cars. When the tour was over, the government passed legislation making it illegal for integrated casts to perform in front of integrated audiences.
A British producer brought “The Blood Knot” to London (where Mr. Fugard was replaced as both actor and director) and the powerful critic Kenneth Tynan dismissed it. It was first presented in the United States Off Broadway in 1964, with J.D. Cannon as Morris and James Earl Jones as Zach. Mr. Fugard and Mr. Mokae played their original roles in the Broadway premiere in 1986. Today, it has a confirmed place in the contemporary dramatic canon.
“It’s a great work,” The New Yorker critic Hilton Als wrote in 2012, “so powerful that it’s almost clumsy at times, reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Double’ in its intellectually crowded, poetic examination of the doppelgänger.”
The notoriety of “The Blood Knot” in South Africa inspired a group of Black men from the township within Port Elizabeth to approach Mr. Fugard about helping them to create theater.
Together they formed the Serpent Players, a productive and politically defiant company that performed classics by Machiavelli, Brecht and others. During a production of “Antigone,” two of the company’s actors were arrested and sent to Robben Island, where one of the actors put on his own version of the play; it was a series of circumstances that Mr. Fugard used in creating “The Island” with Mr. Kani and Mr. Ntshona.
Going Underground
In 1967, with international performances of “The Blood Knot” enhancing Mr. Fugard’s profile, and the growing reputation within South Africa of the subversive productions of the Serpent Players, the government seized Mr. Fugard’s passport, essentially giving him a choice: stay in the country or leave and never come back. He stayed, entering into a period of collaborative work that included “Sizwe Banzi,” a play, first produced in 1972, that, as Mr. Fugard recalled in a 1989 interview, “was far too dangerous for us to go public with it.”
“So we launched the play by underground performances to which people had to have a specific invitation — a legal loophole in the censorship structure in South Africa, and one we continued to exploit for many years,” he said. “During our underground period, we had a lot of police interference. They rolled up once or twice and threatened to close us down, arrest us — the usual bully tactics of security police anywhere in the world. We just persisted, carried on, and survived it.”
Mr. Fugard’s later plays included “The Road to Mecca” (1984), about an artist ostracized in her South African town because of her iconoclastic sculptures — “a metaphorical kind of apartheid, one that treats creativity and individualism as something eccentric, if not abhorrent,” the critic Mel Gussow wrote in The Times.
In “Playland” (1993), a drama about the nature of repentance, he wrote in almost allegorical terms about apartheid as it was being dismantled. The play depicts a confrontation between a Black night watchman at an amusement park who is burdened by a tragic memory, and a white park patron who draws the past into the open. And in “The Train Driver” (2010), Mr. Fugard represented apartheid’s lingering torment in the story of a white train engineer driven to sleepless misery by the memory of the Black woman and child he had accidentally run down and killed.
Guilt, both his own and other people’s, provided a powerful and painful strain in Mr. Fugard’s work. In 1984, he published “Notebooks 1960-1977,” a collection of journal entries, none more revealing than the recollection of a childhood encounter with the Black man who was his friend and mentor that became the most famous scene in his best known play:
“Can’t remember what precipitated it, but one day there was a rare quarrel between Sam and myself,” he wrote. “In a truculent silence we closed the cafe, Sam set off home to New Brighton on foot and I followed a few minutes later on my bike. I saw him walking ahead of me and, coming out of a spasm of acute loneliness, as I rode up behind him I called his name, he turned in mid-stride to look back and, as I cycled past, I spat in his face.
“Don’t suppose I will ever deal with the shame that overwhelmed me the second after I had done that.”
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