ATHOL FUGARD

1. ATHOL FUGARD Poet, Actor, ConsciencefromSOUTH AFRICA (Sources: Craig McLuckie, Okanagan College, The Literary Encyclopedia Iain Fischer, Statements: An Athol Fugard Website)

2. Athol Fugard is a dramatist of enormous power, particularly adept at full length plays with a small cast. A one time student of philosophy, Fugard’s works are marked by an experientially driven search for truth and an attendant celebration of humanity, no matter how circumscribed the individual’s material conditions. Fugard, in the 1992 Academy Award winning film GHANDI as South African General Smuts.

3. While Fugard has written works set in other locales than South Africa, his evocation of the Karroo region of the Eastern Cape is inimitably his landscape. In a language that reaches the poetic, Fugard has charted the lives of the region’s dispossessed. His work has a universal application to audiences that arises from its precise grounding in the South Africa of the latter part of the twentieth century

4. His post-apartheid works have less power and evenness in their dramatic impact than those with a historic touchstone. In addition to some 20 dramatic works (including the stellar collaborations with John Kani and Winston Ntshona), Fugard has written a novel, Tsotsi, memoirs, and several film scripts (with Ross Devenish). Fugard directs and acts in his work, though the general reader is perhaps more aware of Fugard’s brief roles in the films Gandhi and The Killing Fields.

5. Athol Harold LanniganFugard was born in Middelburg, South Africa on June 11, 1932. He is white with English and Afrikaner parents. His mother, Elizabeth Magdalena (néePotgieter), a general store, then a lodging house operator, was an Afrikaner; his father, Harold, a former jazz pianist, was of Irish, English and Huguenot ancestry. Afrikaners (including the Boer subgroup) are a Germanic ethnic group in Southern Africa descended from Dutch (including Flemish), French and German settlers ...

6. Fugard has described himself as an Afrikaner writing in English. He was brought up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, the setting for many of his plays. He entered the Marist Brothers College in 1938 for elementary schooling with a Catholic flavour. Fugard’s secondary education, funded in part by a scholarship, was at the technical college. He attended Cape Town University, where his deep-rooted interest in the writings of Albert Camus began.

8. Fugard left university a few months shy of his final examinations in 1953. Travel with a fellow student through Africa was followed by Fugard signing on the SS Graigaur as a seaman for two years, spent in the Far East. On returning to South Africa, Fugard worked as a freelance reporter for the Evening Post (Port Elizabeth).

9. In September 1956 he married Sheila Meiring(now, a novelist and poet). In the late 1950s Athol and Sheila Fugard began the Circle Players in Port Elizabeth. In 1958 they moved to Johannesburg where Fugard worked in a “Native Commissioners’ Court” as a clerk, an experience that made him keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid. In that same year, he organized a multiracial theatre for which he wrote, directed, and acted. Sheila Fugard LisaFugard

11. As Dennis Walder notes: It is his great strength to move us deeply by showing the plight of ordinary people caught up in the meshes of social, political, racial and even religious forces which they are unable to understand or control. It is his weakness that he cannot reflect upon or analyse these forces himself. [. . .] As actor, director and playwright, he is obsessed with the idea that what he has to say can only be said indirectly, as an image, embodied in the ‘living moment’ on stage. (Walder, Athol Fugard, New York: Grove, 1985: 3)

12. Athol Fugard

13. Athol Fugard people Go to a website which profiles most of Fugard’s most important collaborators.

14. Athol Fugard at Signature Theatre SIGNATURE CENTER INAUGURAL SEASON PRODUCTIONS Blood Knot My Children! My Africa! The Train Driver

15. MASTER HAROLD and the boys Original NYC production with Lonny Price, ZakesMokaeand Danny Glover NYC, Roundabout Theatre, 2003 with Danny Glover Matthew Broderick and ZakesMokae in 1986

16. 2010 film http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234546/

17. Who is this play about? Protagonist is __________________ Antagonist is __________________ Central action is _________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

18. Plays of Athol Fugard A Lesson from Aloes Bosemanand Lena The Captain’s Tiger The Cell The Coat Coming Home Dimetos The Drummer Exits and Entrances Friday’s Bread on Monday Have You Seen Us? Hello and Goodbye The Island Klaasand the Devil The Last Bus Master Harold and the boys Mille Miglia My Children! My Africa! No-Good Friday Nongogo The Occupation Orestes People are Living There A Place With The Pigs Playland RamzyAbulMajd The Road to Mecca SizweBanzi is Dead Sorrows and Rejoicings Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act The Train Driver Valley Song Victory http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsF/fugard-athol.html