Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard ( ; 11 June 19328 March 2025) was a South African playwright, novelist, actor and director. Widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright and acclaimed as "the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world" by Time magazine in 1985, he published more than thirty plays. He is best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system of apartheid, some of which have been adapted to film. His novel Tsotsi was adapted as a film of the same name, which won an Academy Award in 2005. Three plays he wrote, and two plays he co-authored, were nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play.
Fugard also served as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.
Fugard received many awards, honours and honorary degrees, including the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver from the government of South Africa in 2005 "for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre". He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1986. Fugard was honoured in Cape Town with the 2010 opening of the Fugard Theatre in District Six. He received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.
Early life Fugard was born as Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, in Middelburg, Cape Province (now Eastern Cape), Union of South Africa, on 11 June 1932. His mother, Marrie (née Potgieter), an Afrikaner, operated a general store and then a lodging house; his father, Harold Fugard, of Irish, English and French Huguenot descent, was a former jazz pianist who had become disabled.Fisher gives Fugard's full birth name as "Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard", spelling Fugard's middle name as Lanigan, following Dennis Walder, Athol Fugard, Writers and Their Work (Tavistock: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 2003). It is spelled as Lannigan in Athol Fugard, Notebooks 1960–1977 (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004) and in Stephen Gray's Athol Fugard (Johannesburg and New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982) and many other publications. The former spelling (single n) seems more authoritative, however, as it is also used by Marianne McDonald, a close UCSD colleague and friend of Fugard, in "A Gift for His Seventieth Birthday: Athol Fugard's Sorrows and Rejoicings" , Department of Theatre and Dance, University of California, San Diego, rpt. from TheatreForum 21 (Summer/Fall 2002); in Fugard's National Orders Award (27 September 2005) from the government of South Africa, presented to "Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard (1932 –)"; and in his "Full Profile" in Who's Who of Southern Africa (2007).
In 1935, his family moved to Port Elizabeth. (Google Books limited preview.) In 1938, he began attending primary school at Marist Brothers College.
Fugard attended Port Elizabeth Technical College for his secondary education from 1946 to 1950, then studied philosophy and social anthropology at the University of Cape Town on a scholarship. However, he dropped out of the university in 1953, just a few months before final examinations.
Fugard left home, hitchhiked to north Africa with a friend and in Port Sudan, aged 18, enrolled in the crew of the steam ship . On board, and bound for Japan, he began writing a novel, but deciding it was terrible, threw the manuscript into the sea. He "celebrated" his two years as a merchant seaman in his 1999 autobiographical play The Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage. (Google Books limited preview.)
In September 1956, he married Sheila Meiring, a University of Cape Town Drama School student whom he had met the previous year. In 1958, the couple moved to Johannesburg, where Fugard worked as a clerk in a Native Commissioners' Court. He became "keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid", and befriended local anti-apartheid activists, an experience that was to colour his earliest work.
Career
Early period In 1958, Fugard organised "a multiracial theatre for which he wrote, directed, and acted", writing and producing several plays for it, including No-Good Friday (1958) and Nongogo (1959), in which he and his colleague, black South African actor Zakes Mokae, performed. In 1978, Richard Eder of The New York Times criticized Nongogo as "awkward and thin. It is unable to communicate very much about its characters, or make them much more than the servants of a noticeably ticking plot." Eder said, "Queenie is the most real of the characters. Her sense of herself and where she wants to go makes her believable and the crumbling of her dour defenses at a touch of hope makes her affecting. By contrast, Johnny is unreal. His warmth and hopefulness at the start crumble too suddenly and too completely."
After returning to Port Elizabeth in the early 1960s, Athol and Sheila Fugard started The Circle Players, which derives its name from the production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht. (Google Books.)
In 1961, in Johannesburg, Fugard and Mokae starred as the brothers Morris and Zachariah in the single-performance world première of Fugard's play The Blood Knot (revised and retitled Blood Knot in 1987), directed by Barney Simon. In 1989, Lloyd Richards of The Paris Review declared The Blood Knot to be Fugard's first "major play".
Refusal to stage for "Whites Only" audiences In 1962, Fugard found the question of whether he could "work in a theatre which excludes 'Non-Whites'—or includes them only on the basis of special segregated performance—increasingly pressing". It was made more so by the decision of British Equity to prevent any British entertainer visiting South Africa unless the audiences were allowed to be multi-racial. In a decision that caused him to reflect on the power of art to effect change, Fugard decided that the "answer must be No" to segregation.
That old argument used to be so comforting; so plausible: 'One person in that segregated, white audience, might be moved to think, and then to change, by what he saw'. I'm beginning to wonder whether it really works that way. The supposition seems to be that there is a didactic—a teaching through feeling element in art. What I do know is that art can give meaning, can render meaningful areas of experience, and most certainly also enhances. But teach? Contradict? State the opposite to what you believe and then lead you to accept it? In other words, can art change a man or woman? No. That is what life does. Art is no substitute for life. Of the few venues in the country where a play could be presented to mixed audiences, Fugard noted that some were little better than barns. But he concluded that under these circumstances, "every conceivable dignity—audience, producer, act, 'professional' etc.—" was "operative" in the white theatre except one, "human dignity".Fugard (1984), p. 60
Fugard publicly supported the call of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain for an international boycott of racially segregated South African theatres. The results were additional restrictions and surveillance. He began to have his plays published and produced outside South Africa. Lucille Lortel's production of The Blood Knot at the Off Broadway Cricket Theater in New York City in 1964 "launch[ed]" Fugard's "American career".
The Serpent Players In the 1960s, Fugard formed the Serpent Players, whose name derives from its first venue, the former snake pit (hence the name) at the Port Elizabeth Museum, "a group of black actors worker-players who earned their living as teachers, clerks, and industrial workers, and cannot thus be considered amateurs in the manner of leisured whites", developing and performing plays "under surveillance by the Security Police", according to Loren Kruger's The Dis-illusion of Apartheid, published in 2004. (Google Books limited preview.) The group largely consisted of black men, including Winston Ntshona, John Kani, Welcome Duru, Fats Bookholane and Mike Ngxolo as well as Nomhle Nkonyeni and Mabel Magada. They all got together, albeit at different intervals, and decided to do something about their lives using the stage. In 1961 they met Athol Fugard, a white man who grew up in Port Elizabeth and who recently returned from Johannesburg, and asked him if he could work with them "as he had the know-how theatrically—the tricks, how to use the stage, movements, everything"; they worked with Athol Fugard since then, "and that is how the Serpent Players got together."Art is Life and Life is Art'. An interview with John Kani and Winston Ntshona of the Serpent Players from South Africa", in Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies [Internet], 6(2), 1976, pp. 5–26. Available from: eScholarship, University of California. Retrieved 26 July 2017. At the time, the group performed anything they could lay their hands on in South Africa as they had no access to any libraries. These included Bertolt Brecht, August Strindberg, Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare and many other prominent playwrights of the time.
In an interview in California, Ntshona and Kani were asked why they were doing the play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, considered a highly political and telling story of the South African political landscape at the time. Ntshona answered: "We are just a group of artists who love theatre. And we have every right to open the doors to anyone who wants to take a look at our play and our work...We believe that art is life and conversely, life is art. And no sensible man can divorce one from the other. That's it. Other attributes are merely labels." They mainly performed at the St Stephen's Hall, adjacent to St Stephen's Church, and other spaces in and around New Brighton, the oldest Black township in Port Elizabeth.
According to Loren Kruger, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, the Serpent Players used Brecht's elucidation of gestic acting, dis-illusion, and social critique, as well as their own experience of the satiric comic routines of urban African vaudeville, to explore the theatrical force of Brecht's techniques, as well as the immediate political relevance of a play about land distribution. Their work on the Caucasian Chalk Circle and, a year later, on Antigone led directly to the creation, in 1966, of what is still South Africa's most distinctive Lehrstück [learning play]:The Coat. Based on an incident at one of the many political trials involving the Serpent Players, The Coat dramatized the choices facing a woman whose husband, convicted of anti-apartheid political activity, left her only a coat and instructions to use it.
Clive Barnes of The New York Times panned People Are Living There (1969) in 1971, arguing: "There are splinters of realities here, and pregnancies of feeling, hut [sic] nothing of significance emerges. In Mr. Fugard's earlier plays he seemed to be dealing with life at a proper level of humanity. Here—if real people are living there—they remain oddly quiet about it...The first act rambles disconsolately, like a lonely type writer looking for a subject and the second act produces with pride a birthday party of Chaplinesque bathos but less than Chaplinesque invention and spirit..[The characters] harangue one another in an awkward dislocation between a formal speech and an interior monologue." Mark Blankenship of Variety negatively reviewed a 2005 revival of the same work, writing that it "lacks the emotional intensity and theatrical imagination that mark such Fugard favorites" as "Master Harold"...and the Boys. Blankenship also stated, however, that the performance he attended featuring "only haphazard sketches of plot and character" was perhaps the result of Fugard allowing director Suzanne Shepard to revise the play without showing him the changes.