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Athol Fugard

Playwright, director and actor

South Africa · 1932–2025

South African dramatist whose plays, most of them set in and around Port Elizabeth, examined life under apartheid. His first major work, The Bloodknot, opened in Johannesburg in 1961 with a racially integrated cast; legislation prohibiting such casts was passed shortly after it closed. His passport was confiscated by the South African government from 1967 to 1971.

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Question What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it?

I don’t think I could. Of course I’m saying this on American soil. I’m facing a few more months of work in this city, but at the end of it, I will be returning to South Africa. I would like to believe that if for some reason the situation deteriorated to the point where I was told, “If you leave South Africa, you can never come back,” I’d stay there. There were periods in my life when I could have been seduced away. I am incredibly fortunate that the government took away my passport at the point when I was most open to seduction. With my passport gone, I could have left on a one-way ticket. But the issue was so starkly highlighted that I had no problem in saying, “No.”

Recorded Lloyd Richards, Interview conducted in front of an audience at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YMHA, New York, The Paris Review, Issue 111, Summer 1989, 13 October 1985 source ↗

Question What is the thing you are best at that nobody watching can see?

That is true. That one little corner of South Africa, Port Elizabeth and its immediate surroundings, is a region that I know like the back of the hand that holds my pen as I write about it. I can stand on a street corner in Port Elizabeth, look at anybody and put together some sort of biography. I know where they come from, where they’re going. I have a feel of the textures of their life. If I stand on a street corner in New Haven, which is a place I’ve gotten to know as well as any place outside of South Africa, I am still at a total loss to identify the people passing me on that street.

Recorded Lloyd Richards, Interview conducted in front of an audience at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YMHA, New York, The Paris Review, Issue 111, Summer 1989, 13 October 1985 source ↗

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