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Some problems of a playwright from South Africa - Athol Fugard Issue - Transcript
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993
Have your plays been performed in Afrikaans?
Certain of them have, but it's a very healthy situation in South Africa in that the degree of bilingualism (white South Africa has two cultures, two languages, Afrikaans and English) is near ninety percent. Most English-speaking South Africans know enough Afrikaans to go to Afrikaans theatre, and the same, even more so, with Afrikaans people, who are much more diligent in their bilingualism than English-speaking South Africans. So there's not really been any great need for that. But certain of my plays have been translated into Afrikaans. In fact, some of my Afrikaans friends claim, because I use a lot of Afrikaans characters in my plays, that my plays were translated before they were written. They claim I've translated from Afrikaans into English, and that the plays should go back into Afrikaans, if you know what I'm saying.
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I'm trying to understand the difference between Western and African audiences, using your plays as a way of evaluating. Which of your plays do you find have greater acceptance in the Western world in contrast to the South African world? Or is the reception generally the same? Do we respond to the same things?
There are different responses in exactly the same way that I find there are significant and interesting differences in the way audiences respond in New York and in London. Both in turn are different from the way white audiences respond in areas in South Africa, where my plays, by virtue of geographical location, play to predominantly white audiences. But having said that much, that there are differences coming out of cultural identities which are different, and backgrounds, let me go on to say that, with respect to the response to the story, the identification of what is important, what moves an audience, I've found that people are very much the same everywhere. In South Africa, black audiences bewilderingly (as white South Africans see it) laugh much more readily, even at some very tragic things. The reason being not that they are found funny as such, but simply that laughter is a survival mechanism in South Africa. But I can't say that there are radical differences in that. I have written a couple of plays which have just white characters in them. Most plays which do not resonate particularly, and which do not have an immediate relevance to black audiences, have not attracted large black audiences. But that has been the long and the short of it as far as I'm concerned. With respect to my play, My Children! My Africa!, which I did at the Market Theatre and then at other theatres in South Africa, and then took into the black townships, responses were very much the same. It was the same story, they recognized the same thing, responded to the same issues. That gives me great faith.
Is there another generation of white and black playwrights coming up in South Africa?
Yes. South African theatre is unbelievably exciting. We are not a society in which the media, like television and all the rest of it, have such an effect as in America. In fact, there are large areas of South Africa where there is no electricity, and therefore no television, and where television signals can't be picked up. We've found that theatre has become a major forum for looking at the past and talking about the future. I can't tell you how exciting it is to have that immediate relevance between what you do on stage and the events on the street outside the theatre. Coming out of this is an extraordinary amount of writing by young writers, Afrikaans-speaking, English-speaking, black writers writing in English, black writers writing in the vernacular. A lot of it in my opinion is still at an apprenticeship level, just as I wrote plays at an apprenticeship level up until I wrote The Blood Knot. A lot of the plays are still crude in their crafting and I don't think are going to travel outside of South Africa. But, because of the energy in theatre there, I don't doubt for one moment that South Africa is going to be making an extraordinary contribution to world theatre in the near future.
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