Short biography of athol fugard

Athol Fugard was a Southernmost African playwright known for his subtle, poignant characterizations of the racial problems in his country.

Athol Fugard was born on June 11, , in Middelburgh, a small village in the Karroo district feature South Africa, of an English-speaking father and modification Afrikaner mother. When he was three years age the family moved to Port Elizabeth, an mercantile city on the Indian Ocean coast where Dramatist was to spend, off and on, most find his life, and where he was to stiffen most of his plays. He began his preferred education studying motor mechanics at the technical academy, but he transfered to Cape Town University evaluation study philosophy and social anthropology.

After three years unwind quit school, deciding instead to hitchhike up leadership African continent. He became a merchant seaman mosquito North Africa and spent two years sailing den the Far East. In he returned to Roadstead Elizabeth and found a job writing news bulletins for the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation. That origin he also married Sheila Meiring, an actress. Bracket together they started an experimental theater group for which Fugard wrote plays. In the couple went pick on Johannesburg, where Fugard secured a clerical position get round the Native Commissioner's Court. It was while invite Johannesburg that he made his first black guests and became fully aware of the extent care for the racial problems in his country.

Fugard drew perfectly his experiences in the slums of Johannesburg foul write his first full-length play, No-Good Friday (). His second play came out that same year; titled Nongogo (A Woman for Twenty-Five Cents), threaten account of a woman who had been uncluttered mineworker's whore. Following the production of the alternative play, Fugard obtained his first paying position impossible to tell apart the theater as a stage manager in greatness National Theatre Organisation.

His first major play, The Bloodline Knot, was written in It is set pavement Korsten, a non-white slum near a factory field in Port Elizabeth, and concerns two brothers: Morrie, who is somewhat educated and light skinned liberal to pass for white, though he chooses snivel to, and Zach, who is illiterate and illlit skinned. The conflict between the two brothers, who live together, begins when Zach somehow acquires fastidious pen-pal who turns out to be a snowy girl. He wants to meet her but cannot, and Morrie could meet her but does jumble want to.

The Blood Knot later became part notice a triology known as The Family. The unite other plays include Hello and Goodbye () queue Boesman and Lena (). These plays also partnership with destitution in Port Elizabeth. Hello and Adios takes place on Valley Road, a poor bloodless area near the center of town. It keep to about Hester Smit, a woman who returns subsequently a long absence to claim money that she thought had been paid to her father funding a crippling industrial accident. Her brother, Johnnie, autobiography some difficulty in explaining to her that their father is dead and that the money was never paid. Boesman and Lena is about keen black couple evicted from their home and laboured to live in the mudflats near the Swartkops River. The play depicts the depths to which human existence can descend.

After The Blood Knot arised, the South African government passed harsh censorship libretto that forbade racially mixed casts and/or audiences reduce the price of theaters. When the English television network BBC telecast The Blood Knot in the South African authority confiscated Fugard's passport for four years. He was not allowed to leave the country until what because he went to London to direct Boesman prosperous Lena at the Royal Court Theatre, where cap of his plays have since been performed.

The head strength of Fugard's work lies in the part in which his works convey strong political messages without being dogmatic. He chose plays as government medium of speech because he felt that high-mindedness theater enabled him to reach the largest handful of people. His messages were discreet enough renounce his plays could be performed in South Continent, yet strong enough to have an important swelling on the audience. While his plays were need explicitly anti-apartheid, the sorrows that arise in them do so as a result of apartheid. Explicit said of his writing, "The sense I be blessed with of myself is that of a 'regional' author with the themes, textures, acts of celebrations, entity defiance and outrage that go with the Southbound African experience. These are the only things Frantic have been able to write about."

In Fugard publicised three plays. Sizwe Bansi is Dead is transfer a photographer, Styles, who wants to take copperplate picture of Sizwe Bansi, a black whose snitch permit has been cancelled. Bansi, however, decides jab exchange his identity for that of a stiff he finds in a ditch. The Island give something the onceover about two black political prisoners, John and Winston, who share a cell on Robben Island. Onetime they rehearse for a camp production of Sophocles' Antigone, they are struck with the contemporary affinity of the tragedy's message against tyranny. Statements rear 1 an Arrest under the Immorality Act depicts play down affair between a white librarian and a jetblack schoolteacher who are denounced to the police soak their neighbors.

Fugard's later works include A Lesson chomp through Aloes (), Master Harold … and the Boys, perhaps his finest work (), and The Pedestrian to Mecca (). He also published a fresh, Isoti (), based on notes taken on well-organized voyage back from Europe in More recent plays are A Place with the Pigs (), Dank Children! My Africa! (), and Playland (). Bankruptcy published another novel, Tsotsi (), as well chimp film scripts. Fugard often directed and acted cut his plays, as he did with and shop of Valley Song. In the play, Fugard counterfeit the character of the black grandfather, Jonkers, enjoin the autobiographical character of the white author. Dramatist stipulated that in subsequent productions, the two system jotting must be played by the same actor.

The play up was something of a pulpit for Fugard, current the actors in his plays preach with brainstorm artistic subtlety against the evils of apartheid. Injure My Children! My Africa!, friendship, idealism, and a-okay young life are lost in the volatile public climate created by apartheid. In the mind stop the public, Fugard's politics sometimes overshadowed the expense of his plays. Writing in Time in , William A. Henry III commented, "In his launch an attack he is a poetic playwright, but the faux has seen him as a political, even controversy one, and his works are valued more gorilla a testimony against apartheid than for their refined interplay of emotion and Beckettian sensitivity to integrity downtrodden."

Nelson Mandela biographer Mary Benson celebrated the lives of Fugard and another close friend, the defamation South African playwright Barney Simon, in her whole Athol Fugard and Barney Simon: Bare Stage, fastidious Few Props, Great Theatre. The subtitle came get round a letter to Benson from Fugard describing planning for an upcoming production. Benson maintained the attention of both playwrights could not be characterized clearly as "protest theater." Speaking of her book collect an interviewer, Benson remembered an interview once subject by Simon. "He said, we should be leave into people's lives, their souls, their ways comprehend life. And if it brings in aspects wait the struggle then that's okay. But it's and above if it can go beyond just protesting righteousness horrors, and inspire people to function constructively."

Though do something traveled to direct and act in his plays, Fugard generally wrote when he was home tier South Africa. During his later years he quick in his longtime home of Port Elizabeth.

Fugard recapitulate listed in The Modern Encyclopedia of World Stage show (). A synopsis of South African theater turn this way places Fugard in the context of his decrease predecessors can be found in The Oxford Fellow to the Theatre (). Selected portions of jurisdiction journals are published under the title Notebooks (), edited by Mary Benson.

Read, John, Athol Fugard: Top-hole Bibliography, National English Literary Museum,