Playwright Athol Fugard lambasts modern South Africa
Veteran South African playwright Athol Fugard has issued a stark warning about the direction his country is going in - and has urged younger playwrights to tackle the widespread injustices he sees as undermining the post-Apartheid settlement.
By Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph.UK
Published: 10:52AM GMT 05 Nov 2010
Veteran South African playwright Athol Fugard has issued a stark warning about the direction his country is going in - and has urged younger playwrights to tackle the widespread injustices he sees as undermining the post-Apartheid settlement.
Currently rehearsing his latest play The Train Driver, at Hampstead Theatre, Fugard, 78, has spoken out about his growing sense of disillusion. Having written, and co-authored, a number of seminal anti-Apartheid plays in his time - including The Island (1972) and Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) - he revealed this week that the need to address South Africa’s ongoing ills is so urgent that he has no plans to retire.
“The truth is that the new South Africa needs committed playwrights who are prepared to bear witness to what is going on every bit as urgently as the old ones did,” he declares in an in-depth interview with the theatre podcast website www.theatrevoice.com. “The essential responsibility lies with young playwrights and I’m not sure I can see them rising to that challenge - that’s what disturbs me.”
He delivers a furious attack on the government of President Jacob Zuma. “I have to live with an appalling sense of betrayal in terms of the present government in South Africa. When I think of the moment when Nelson Mandela came out of jail, and when I think of that day I stood in a queue a mile long under a blazing sun to cast my vote in our first free general election… when I think of that day and the euphoria that swept through the country that we were going to really get it right and turn our back on the appalling past and be a truly open democratic society with compassion and a sense of justice - that’s not the case.”
“In a sense we have got to start again,” he continues. “It’s a very fluid - and a very volatile situation in South Africa. On my side there’s a sense of betrayal. I hate to name names but men who I thought would stand up and speak out against the degree of corruption and everything that’s going wrong in our country simply concern themselves with getting richer. Look at the degree of corruption in high places in South Africa. Desmond Tutu has gone on record time and time again and said to us fellow south Africans that we have lost our way. He is absolutely right.”
The Train Driver is based on the true story of Pumla Lolwana, who in 2000, stepped in front of an oncoming train with her three young children on the Cape Flats. Fugard has described it as “perhaps the most important play I’ve written... It’s the emotional journey I’ve travelled in dealing with my inherited legacy of South African prejudice and what you do with that blinkered vision of reality”.
» » » » [Telegraph.UK]
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Fugard feels betrayed by his country
November 7 2010 at 11:32am
By Melanie Peters, Weekend Argus
Veteran playwright Athol Fugard, 78, has lashed out at President Jacob Zuma’s government for the high level of corruption and has said he feels “betrayed” and disillusioned by the direction his native country is heading.
He expressed his strong views in a frank interview – which has made headlines in British newspapers – with a podcast website www.theatrevoice.com.
He was talking before the UK premiere of his latest play, The Train Driver, at Hampstead Theatre.
Fugard, born in Middelburg in the Eastern Cape, was a key figure in the cultural struggle against apartheid and has often been referred to “the conscience of his country”.
In the interview he said: “In a sense we have got to start again. It’s a very fluid – and a very volatile situation in South Africa. On my side there’s a sense of betrayal. Men who I thought would stand up and speak out against the degree of corruption and everything that’s going wrong… simply concern themselves with getting richer.”
Fugard said: “When I think of the moment when Nelson Mandela came out of jail, and when I think of that day I stood in a queue a mile long under a blazing sun to cast my vote in our first free general election… when I think of that day and the euphoria that swept through the country that we were going to really get it right and turn our back on the appalling past and be a truly open democratic society with compassion and a sense of justice – that’s not the case.”
Veteran playwright and theatre director Nicholas Ellenbogen described Fugard’s comments as “naive”.
He said Fugard, who is now based in California although he still has a house in the Eastern Cape, had been out of the country was not fully aware of what was going on.
Author Zakes Mda said there was nothing new or even specific in Fugard’s “lambast”. He was not pointing out any specific problem.
“Playwrights, young and old, cannot be prescribed to by Mr Fugard about what to write or not to write.” - Weekend Argus
» » » » [IOL: Weekend Argus]
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Fugard feels 'betrayed'
Saterdag, 01 September 2007 10:29 BBC
PRAAG
Victory, which premiered in the UK city of Bath, paints a bleak picture of modern South Africa. It centres on a violent burglary of an elderly white widower committed by two black teenagers, Freddie and Victoria.
Fugard told BBC World Service's The Ticket programme that he took the theme after his own home was burgled on four occasions in the last two years - the last of which involved someone he trusted.
"It gave a focus to a sense of betrayal I've had growing in me with time, as I looked at what South Africa was becoming and the direction it was heading in," he said.
"I compared it with what I had felt 12 years ago when, together with millions of South Africans of all races and creeds, we stood in long queues to cast our votes in the first ever democratic election.
"That was a moment of incredible euphoria, of hope, that South Africa would in fact - as it did - turn its back on the violence of its past and try to forge a new identity."
Fugard, who initially became famous through his works about South Africa under apartheid, has set a number of his recent plays in the same village as he reflects on how the country has changed since those first democratic elections in 1994.
He said that it showed how burglary, violent crime, drug abuse "and all the attendant horrors of what the world is made up of now" have reached even this remote place in the Karoo desert.
He added, however, there is a "slender note of affirmation" in the fate of the young woman, Victoria, at the centre of the play.
Fugard established his reputation when he worked extensively with two of South Africa's greatest actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona.
Together they wrote three groundbreaking plays, including The Island and Sizwe Banzi is Dead - performed and workshopped in black townships.
He said that taking these plays into the townships, and talking loudly on stage "about things that were only whispered about" was, for him, "an absolutely defining experience of the potency of theatre."
And he said that, though he is now 75 years old, he still writes "with the same joy and the same sense of celebration.
"Underlying even the bleak in my opus is celebration - the celebration of theatre," he added.
"I was talking to the director of the Bath production of Victory this morning - and I just felt so proud to be a member of the theatre community.
"This community stretches all the way back to Shakespeare, and even earlier. Ours is a very noble profession, even though in many cases we've been the outcasts of society."
» » » » [PRAAG, via BBC]
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