FUGARD, ATHOL

born June 11, 1932, Middleburg, S.Af. in full Athol Harold Lannigan Fugard South African dramatist, actor, and director who, despite South African drama's particular vulnerability to censorship, sustained a theatre group in Port Elizabeth that produced plays defiantly indicting the apartheid policy. Fugard's earliest plays were No-Good Friday and Nongogo (both published in Dimetos and Two Early Plays, 1977), but it was The Blood Knot (1963), produced for stage (1961) and television (1967) in both London and New York City, that established his international reputation. The Blood Knot, dealing with brothers who fall on opposite sides of the racial colour line, was the first in a sequence Fugard called The Family Trilogy. The series continued with Hello and Goodbye (1965) and Boesman and Lena (1969) and was later published under the title Three Port Elizabeth Plays (1974). Boesman and Lena, filmed in 1973 with Fugard as Boesman, played to a wider audience than any previous South African play. These penetrating analyses of the South African situation are powerful and essentially pessimistic. Fugard's willingness to sacrifice character to symbolism caused some critics to question his commitment. Provoked by such criticism, Fugard began to question the nature of his art and his emulation of European dramatists. He began a more imagist approach to drama, not using any prior script but merely giving actors what he called a mandate to work around a cluster of images. From this technique derived the imaginative if shapeless drama of Orestes (published in Theatre One: New South African Drama, 1978), and the documentary expressiveness of Siswe Bansi Is Dead, The Island, and Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (all published in Statements: Three Plays, 1974). A much more traditionally structured play, Dimetos (1977), was performed at the 1975 Edinburgh Festival. A Lesson from Aloes (published 1981) and Master Harold . . . and the Boys (1982) were performed to much acclaim in London and New York City, as was The Road to Mecca (1985), the story of an eccentric older woman about to be confined against her will in a nursing home. Films in which Fugard acted include Marigolds in August (1980; written with Ross Devenish) and The Killing Fields (1984). Tsotsi (1980) is Fugard's only novel, and his only nonfiction work is Notebooks, 19601977 (1983).