Academic literature on the topic 'Athol Fugard'

The author attempts in various ways to account for the similarities between Fugard and Beckett. He points out a certain biographical linkage, and goes on to discuss and evaluate the more direct influences of Beckett on Fugard. The existentialist link is noted and the influence of other writers on Fugard pointed out as a balancing force. Three Beckettian motifs in Fugard’s work emerge: the nexus motif, the motif of coming to terms with one’s past, and the play or game model. Despite parallels and similarities, however, considerable differences appear when conceptual and ideological values are analysed. There is a dialectic between universalism and regionalism. The conclusion is that Fugard displays a quality of courageous pessimism more akin to Camus than Beckett.

Continuing our coverage of South African theatre, which most recently featured a critical view of the policy of the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, by David Graver and Loren Kruger (in NTQ19), we now include a consideration by South African writer Stephen Gray of one of the Market's most recent productions, by assuredly its best-known playwright, Athol Fugard. My Children! My Africa! is, claims Fugard, ‘between me and my country’. Here, Stephen Gray acknowledges and analyzes the ways in which the play focuses with a new intensity upon the agony of Fugard's native land, as realized by a cast of three: two unknowns, plus the veteran John Kani – here cast, controversially, as a coward and traitor to his people. Stephen Gray has also edited the documentary volume on Athol Fugard in McGraw-Hill's ‘Southern African Literature’ series.

Bibliography: pages 366-380.<br>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 geographically and emotionally, as well as providing detailed analysis of the plays in terms of major features such as national politics, universal values, existentialism and Calvinism. The period of collaboration in which Fugard responded to the suggestions, imaginative projections and creative stimulus 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 alterego, the playwright's persona.

Different forms of racial segregation have been practiced in different countries the world over. However, the nature of South Africa‟s apartheid system, as it was practiced from 1948 until the dawn of the democratic dispensation in 1994, has been a subject of debate in South Africa and even beyond. Apartheid was a policy that was designed by the then ruling Nationalist Party for purposes of dividing and stratifying South Africa along racial lines - whites, blacks, coloureds and Asians. It thus promoted racial segregation and/or unequal stratification of society. In South Africa‟s hierarchy of apartheid, blacks, who constituted the majority of the population, were ironically the most destitute and segregated. Some historians believe that South Africa‟s racial policy was designed against the backdrop of Jim Crow, a similar system of racial discrimination which was instituted in the American South late in the 1890s through the 20th century. Jim Crow and apartheid are, in this study, considered as sides of the same coin; hence for the sake of convenience, the word apartheid is used to subsume Jim Crow. Although South Africa‟s apartheid system was influenced by different ideologies, for example German missiology as applied by the Dutch Reformed Church, historian Hermann Giliomee (2003: 373) insists that „the segregationist practice of the American South was particularly influential.‟ Given the ideological relationship between apartheid and Jim Crow, the present study investigates the interplay of compatibility between apartheid/Jim Crow and crime and violence as reflected in selected works of Richard Wright (African American novelist) and Athol Fugard (South African playwright). The aim of the study is firstly, to examine the works in order to analyse them as responses to apartheid and by extension colonial domination and secondly to investigate crime and violence. The three criminological theories selected for this study are strain theory (by Robert Merton), subculture theory (Edwin Sutherland) and labelling theory (Howard Becker). While criminological theory provides an empirical dimension to the study, postcolonial theory situates the study within a specified space, which is the postcolonial context. The postcolonial is, however understood, not as a demarcated historical space, but as a continuum, from the dawn of colonization to the unforeseeable future. Three postcolonial theorists have been identified for the purposes of this study. These are: Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha and Bill Ashcroft. Fanon‟s psychoanalysis of the colonized, Homi Bhabha‟s Third Space and hybridity as well as Ashcroft‟s postcolonial transformation are key concepts in understanding the different ways in which the colonized deal with the consequences of colonization. It has been suggested particularly in Edward Said‟s Orientalism (1978) that the discourse of orientalism creates the Oriental, as if Orientals were a passive object of the colonial adventure. This study uses Bhabha‟s and Ashcroft‟s theory of colonial discourse to argue that the colonized are not only objects of the colonial enterprise but also active participants in the process of opening survival spaces for self-realization. The various criminal activities that the colonized engage in (as represented in the selected works of Richard Wright and Athol Fugard) are in this study viewed as ways of inscribing their subjectivity within an exclusive colonial system.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at the University of Zululand, 2017<br>Athol Fugard and Maishe Maponya both used the postdramatic theatre, which was largely anti-elitist, anti-text, experimental and collaborative, at certain point in their literary careers. They rebelled against established conventions, and, in their own ways, produced a type of theatre that suited their context and literary and ideological leanings. The rebellion and transformation of the theatre was not peculiar to them, but was a universal phenomenon at the time this thesis examines. As such, it manifested in works of artists who appropriated the new dramatic techniques to represent their different contexts and emerging socio-political trends. The thesis examines the collaborative process of Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona in view of the critical debates about identity, politics, role play, and Fugard’s claim to primary authorship of Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island. Collaboration is not a fixed term or practice. It depends largely on the play, play-making situation, and intention. It also changes even with the same artists involved in the collaboration. The devising process that led to The Coat, for example, differed from that of Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island. Even the collaborative process of Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island differs despite that the plays were produced around the same time. Fugard’s collaboration with the Circle Players (late 1950s) also differs from his collaboration with the Serpent Players (1960s) and that with Kani and Ntshona (early 1970s). Collaboration meant different things at different times for Fugard. He seems to have ridden on the coattails of black actors, although he successfully toured the plays around the world. Maponya’s idea of collaboration differs from that of Fugard. Although Maponya did not officially collaborate with actors, he used them as conduits into their lived experiences (The Hungry Earth) and professions (Umongikazi). This play-making technique is in many ways collaborative and similar to Fugard’s collaborative pattern during his work with the Circle Players in the production of No-Good Friday and Nongogo. Maponya lifts up the black artist but suffers the consequences. Fugard and Maponya used the actors in different capacities and utilised fairly similar, but different, collaborative techniques. They both utilised experimental, improvisational, and workshop-based methods differently, and at different times. The white South African playwright Fugard prepared the ground for radical experimentation with form and content in South Africa. Fugard enjoys a place of honour in the South African (and more generally African) canon. His reputation as a great writer, creative collaborator and director, and as a person who was able to create a unique theatre that blended African and Western forms of performance, has been acknowledged globally. His work with black actors, notably John Kani and Winston Ntshona, enabled this feat. He adopted a multidimensional approach to art, retained his literary leaning and identity, collaborated, and assisted in training and directing of black actors, and so contributed in his own equally potent way to the struggle against apartheid through the theatre. He promoted a belief in “the personal is political” through plays to be examined herein. The Coat (1966), Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973) are selected because they are Fugard’s most political plays and because they were devised in collaboration with actors. The Hungry Earth (1979), Gangsters (1984) and Jika (1986) also pass the litmus test because they are Maponya’s most radical indictment of the apartheid regime and because they were also devised through experiments with actors who provided material and acting. In contrast to most writing on Fugard and Maponya, which are anchored to either a literary interpretation of the plays or performance discourse, this study offers a literary and performative analysis of the selected plays, demonstrating that this must be done together. This thesis also offers a comparative analysis of the selected plays. Maponya is a black artist and bitter playwright of the Struggle. His works are multifaceted, open to differing interpretations and are fairly universal and timeless because of their concern with general themes such as capitalism, subversion and containment; so also for their relation with more universal works, and their demonstration that the local and immediate experiences can have global legs. His concern with Black Consciousness and resistance however confined his status to a black ideologue. Maponya’s dramas nonetheless resist the accustomed standard of categorisation as plays by a black South African dramatist. The sharp cataloguing between white and black and major and minor playwright begins to fall apart when comparing Fugard and Maponya in terms of theatre practice and experiences. The reception of Maponya’s plays – both at home and abroad – reveals that he was an equally theatrically-aware and successful artist of the struggle, although he cannot be evenly matched with Fugard in terms of literary craft and outreach. This reductionism has also affected Fugard, who many regard as a liberal white writer. His colour was a handicap and a saving grace since it allowed him to work with black actors despite the laws banning interracial relations. The discourse of commitment in the plays to be examined – as well as in the dramatists’ practice of theatre – is centred on the relation between intention, context and text. The study examines the artists’ contribution(s) to the struggle; and how effective that contribution is, considering the complicated context and events they wrote about. To my knowledge, no other work, specifically, examines these two quite different playwrights, particularly in the context of their writing methods, their political reception in South Africa and abroad, and their ideas about play-making. New Historicism is chosen for the analysis of the selected plays because they are produced in history and for the theory’s concern with historical situation; because it is more of a practice than a set of doctrines or theory (Greenblatt 1990); and because it is concerned with intention and choice of genre (Bressler 2000). The theory, or rather practice, is also chosen because it promotes the study of both major and minor authors, thereby blurring the distinction between them (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000); and because it accords more place for collaborative works (Greenblatt 1989) – which is one of the main concerns of this study.

The south African playwright Athol Fugard of ten explores the problems which apartheid has created within his society -problems ranging from the racial and societal to the spiritual. He seems to communicate his thoughts about these issues through many direct references to space. This study investigates the meanings these spaces communicate. Four plays were chosen as representative of Fugard's subject matter (covering both white and non-white society) and career: Blood Knot (1963), People are Living There (1970), The Road to Mecca (1985), and My Children, My Africa (1990). Then three steps were carefully followed. First, each reference to space was identified and categorized using Keir Elam's and Susanne Langer's definition of "virtual space" as guide to the establishment of categories. Three categories were established: virtual space (that which is immediately visible to the audience), extended-virtual space (the off stage world which is real to the characters but unseen by the audience), and imaginary space (that which the characters project on or into the world around them). second, patterns and relationships among the spaces were identified (using Kenneth Burke's and Mary McCarthy's methodology of image clusters and dramatic alignments). Third and finally, the meaning of these patterns was explored, often using Edward Hall's science of proxemics to facilitate understanding. There is considerable similarity and continuity from play to play in the use of space. Fugard often employs references to extended-virtual space to communicate the many ills which have arisen in South African society. He also typically includes a virtual space or spaces which provide a safe haven from those ills. In addition, be almost always uses reference to imaginary space or spaces to communicate the hope for the future of freedom for all of South Africa's people. Ideally, the recognition of the spaces in Fugard's work should be actively, and knowingly, articulated in any production of his plays. This study provides a methodology for exploring these spaces and an indication of what many of the spaces mean.

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2000.<br>ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Most critics and academics have concentrated on the referential function of Fugard's dramatic dialogue. In this thesis I' argue that to notice just one way in which the language functions tends to limit the text. My aim, therefore, is to look at the other ways in which language functions in selected Fugard plays. I explore the way in which Fugard uses dialect and sociolect to establish a stage world that looks and sounds recognisably South African to South Africans. I investigate how .certain assumptions (on the part of the audience) accompany the acceptance of the stage world as 'real' and how Fugard uses subtextual inferences to force the audience to critically re-evaluate these assumptions. I argue that the way to consciously understand and evaluate the sub text is through a detailed investigation of the different ways in which language functions in dramatic dialogue. Therefore, by applying Pfister's theories on the multi functionality of dramatic dialogue to selected Fugard plays, I look at how characters reveal themselves to the audience through the choice of specific words, subject matter and language variant. I also investigate, by applying Quigley's observations regarding Pinter's plays to Fugard's characters, the way in which language reveals characters striving to negotiate their status within relationships. My argument is that as far as characterisation and relationships are concerned the actual referential function of the words reveals only the tip of the iceberg - the rest lies beneath this and is to be uncovered by looking at the other ways in which the language functions. Finally I look at the way in which language as the medium of communication per se is foregrounded in Fugard's plays and how this accentuates the role that language plays in communication, as well as the failure of communication, in the South African context. Related to this metalingual function of dramatic dialogue I investigate the idea, put forward by Ibitokun, that language can be used as a 'mask' behind which a person can hide his true identity. I agree with Ibitokun that this is not only a strategy for survival but that, when consciously adopted, it is also a means for challenging the status quo. The Fugard plays I have selected are Master Harold ... and the boys, Boesman and Lena, Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island.<br>AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die meerderheid kritici en academici het in die verlede gekonsentreer op die referensiële funksie van dramatiese dialoog in die werke van Fugard. In hierdie tesis argumenteer ek dat so 'n enkele gesigspunt op die rol wat taal speel neig om die teks te beperk. Derhalwe kyk ek in die studie na die ander wyses waarop taal in geselekteerde Fugard dramas funksioneer. . Ek begin met 'n ondersoek na Fugard se gebruik van dialek en sosiolek om 'n wêreld op die verhoog te skep wat herkenbaar Suid-Afrikaans klink vir Suid-Afrikaners. Hierna bekyk ek die wyse waarop sekere aannames (deur die gehoor) saamgaan met die aanvaarding van die "realiteit" van die verhoogwêreld en hoe Fugard subtekstuele verwysings benut om die gehoor te dwing tot kritiese herevaluering van daardie aannames. Die argument is voorts dat 'n gedetailleerde ontleding van die wyse waarop taal in dramatiese dialoog fuksioneer onontbeerlik is indien mens die subteks wil verstaan en ontleed. Deur Pfister se teorieë oor die multifunksionaliteit van dramatiese dialoog toe te pas op geselekteerde Fugard toneeltekste, kyk ek dus hoe die onderskeie karakters hulle aan gehore openbaar deur hul gebruik van spesifieke woorde, inhoude en taalvariante. Ek gebruik ook Quigley se observasies oor Pinter se stukke om te bepaal tot watter mate die taal van Fugard se karakters dui op mense wat poog om hulle status in verhoudings te vestig. My argument is dat die referensiële funksie van taal slegs die oppervlak van karakterisering en verhoudings verteenwoordig - die res lê dieper verberg en moet geopenbaar word deur te kyk na die ander wyses waarop taal funksioneer. Laastens bespreek ek die mate waartoe taal per se in Fugard se stukke na vore kom en hoe dit die rol van taal in kommunikasie benadruk, asook die tekort daaraan in die Suid- Afrikaanse konteks. Verwant aan hierdie metalinguistiese funksie van taal, toets ek Ibitokun se idee dat taal 'n masker kan wees waaragter die persoon sy ware identiteit versteek. Ek stem met Ibitokun saam dat hierdie nie slegs 'n strategie vir oorlewing is nie, maar dat dit, doelbewus aangewend, ook gebruik kan word om die status quo te bevraagteken. Die Fugard tekste wat bekyk word is Master Harold ...and the boys, Boesman and Lena, Sizwe Bansi is Dead en The Island.

This thesis examines three South African memoirs using M. M. Bakhtin’s theories of the dialogical relationship in language and literature. By offering an alternative to a postmodern or multicultural interpretation of autobiographies, Bakhtin’s precepts, that define a dialogic, help to reframe a way of discussing memoirs and avoiding dead-ends previously arrived at by essayists in James Olney’s 1980 collection. Bakhtin’s ideas discussed here, which include the “once-occurrent moment”, “architectonic contraposition”, ”emotional-volitional tone”, “alibi”, “non-alibi”, and “centripetal” and “centrifugal” force, help to rebuild a discussion based on temporary and evolving self truth rather than fiction, the postmodern interpretation, or confession, the new-age secular spiritualism based on multicultural and politically correct standards. For this, each author’s memoir had to be examined separately and a conclusion was arrived at through inductive analysis. Rather than try to find similar characteristics, I focused on what made each memoir different and unique. Janet Varner Gunn’s Autobiography: Toward A Poetics of Experience (1982) refocused the debate over autobiography on process. The question, what steps did each author take toward writing about himself, led the discussion to an examination of the priorities each author exemplified. Beginning with Fugard who emphasized spatial, concrete, and sensory detail to help him contain his emotional life, the thesis moves on to an examination of Coetzee’s sense of justice. From the physical and intellectual world follows Breytenbach’s spiritual space-making. In each memoir, control of space is evident on different levels of experience. Articulating space inevitably leads to a discussion of boundaries. Here, Charles Taylor’s emphasis on the modern self’s need to articulate a horizon or a framework is helpful in generalizing the effect of the autobiographical process. The conclusion reached is that autobiography is inherently centrifugal: it moves away from the center of cultural thinking because its “truth” bolsters itself on dialogical process which does not depend on a fixed authority but rather on communicative exchange. As an example of exchange, autobiography’s central truth is that it returns to a “unique point of origin”, namely the self, only to reconnect to the other in a potentially eternal exchange of responsiveness moving away from the center.