In early 2010, I used to be sitting at a communal desk in a espresso store in Cape City, once I noticed a grizzled, bearded fellow who seemed unusually acquainted. It was Athol Fugard, South Africa’s foremost playwright and the good chronicler of his nation’s apartheid previous. There he was, sipping a cup of espresso like several odd individual.
I plucked up braveness and approached him, murmuring one thing inarticulate about my admiration for his writing. “Corridor-O,” Fugard stated enthusiastically. “Be a part of us. Have a espresso. Or a glass of wine.”
One of many nice issues about Fugard, who died on Saturday, was that he was an odd individual in addition to a rare one. He was splendidly captivated with individuals and their potential, able to see the great in each scenario, but in addition unafraid to confront the unhealthy, each in others and himself. The well-known scene in “‘Grasp Harold’ … and the Boys,” through which the younger white protagonist spits within the face of his Black mentor, was, he freely confessed, drawn from his personal life.
Because the theater critic Frank Wealthy famous in a 1982 New York Instances evaluate of the play, Fugard’s approach was to uncover ethical imperatives “by burrowing deeply into the small, intimately noticed particulars” of the fallible lives of his characters.
My first encounter with Fugard’s work was within the early Eighties, once I noticed a manufacturing of his 1972 play “Sizwe Banzi Is Useless,” written with Winston Ntshona and John Kani. It’s a bleakly comedian story of a person who assumes one other id and assigns his personal to a corpse, as a way to acquire the coveted cross e-book that the South African authorities required as permission to work.
It was a visceral, painful jolt to the soul. I grew up in apartheid South Africa. I knew about passbooks, concerning the police hammering on the door at evening, concerning the dehumanizing, demeaning means Black individuals have been handled. However the humanity and heat of Fugard’s writing, the complicated actuality of his characters, made the cruelty of South Africa’s racist regime an excruciating reality.
In 2010, Fugard was dwelling in San Diego, however had returned to Cape City to rehearse a brand new play, “The Practice Driver,” earlier than its premiere on the newly constructed Fugard Theater, which the producer and philanthropist Eric Abraham had named after the playwright.
The Fugard, which was to turn into a vibrant beacon on the South African arts scene, was situated in District Six, a previously mixed-race space that was declared a “whites solely” neighborhood by the apartheid authorities in 1966. (The theater, the place quite a few works by Fugard have been seen over a decade, closed in 2020, a sufferer of the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns.)
“You’ll be sitting within the laps of the ghosts of the individuals who couldn’t be right here,” Fugard stated on opening evening.
Fugard’s performs are in nice half about these ghosts, an try to bear witness to forgotten and unknown lives and to the ethical blindness and blinkered imaginative and prescient of the fact engendered and perpetuated by apartheid. His best-known works — “Blood Knot,” “Boesman and Lena,” “The Island,” “The Street to Mecca,” “Sizwe Banzi,” “Grasp Harold” — are mercilessly unsparing concerning the insidious means that race determines relationships in apartheid South Africa. However they’re additionally deeply humane.
“Ethical readability — in such quick provide in South Africa and certainly the world — was what he delivered,” Abraham wrote after the playwright’s dying final weekend. “He pointed us to the packing containers containing our previous and urged us to rifle via them as a way to be taught extra about ourselves.” Fugard understood, Abraham continued, “that divisions can solely be overcome by a realization of a shared humanity, a palpable sense that we should take care of each other if we’re to make it via an typically merciless and unforgiving world.”
Fugard moved again to South Africa quickly after the Fugard Theater opened, first dwelling in New Bethesda, the place “The Street to Mecca,” concerning the outsider artist Helen Martins, was set; later he and his spouse, Paula Fourie, moved to the college city of Stellenbosch. I met and interviewed him a number of instances through the years; he was generally intense, however at all times jovial, unpretentious, humble.
As soon as he informed me that he thought-about himself an outsider artist, with out formal coaching or a level, beginning to write at a time when nobody thought it worthwhile to place a South African story onstage.
However by being determinedly native, Fugard transcended the specifics of 1 nation. As Abraham famous, his performs exhibit the worth of each human life. “Come over for a glass of wine,” Fugard would inevitably say on the finish of an interview. I want I had.
