Athol Fugard: His Dramatic Work

I Athol Fugard: His Dramatic Work with Special Reference to His Later Plays by Anne Sarzin B. A. University of Cape Town, 1961 B. A. Hons. (cum laude), University of Natal, 1962 M.A. University of Cape Town, 1965 A thesis submitted to the University of Cape Town in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of DoctorUniversity of Philosophy of in Cape English Town Literature 1987 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town ii 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 iii 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. iv 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. V 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. 2 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 3 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. 4 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.

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