Some problems of a playwright from South Africa - Athol Fugard Issue - Transcript

Thank you for this opportunity to be self-indulgent. I'm going to talk at a personal level about some of the problems I find myself dealing with as a playwright, and as a playwright from South Africa.

At the beginning of this year I returned to South Africa, more specifically my home in Port Elizabeth--a little windswept industrial town on the eastern seaboard of the country--after a six-month stay in the United States, during which I had directed two of my plays: The Road to Mecca at the Kennedy Center in Washington, and a tryout in New York at the Perry Street Theatre of my latest play, My Children! My Africa! I was desperate to be back on South African soil again, as I always am after an extended absence from it. Returning home has always been a complex and emotional experience for me. I identify passionately with my country, and the thought of any form of exile from it is to me a vision of living death. I know it would mean the end of Athol Fugard the playwright, that any creative energies I have would wither away and die. Everything that I am, good and bad, as man and artist, I owe to that country. In fact, I sometimes think of my writing as an attempt on my side, hopelessly inadequate, to acknowledge, to pay back, something of the colossal debt that I owe to South Africa. I said once I think the most important thing a human being does with his life is how he loves in the course of it. The little or the lot that I know about loving was taught to me by South Africa and South Africans, and you can't have a more profound tie to any place.

In recent years my return to native soil, while losing nothing of its emotional complexity, has begun to Change subtly in terms of the mood in which I step out of the aircraft and take my first steps across the tarmac. In the past, particularly during the seventies, my returns were made with a very heavy heart. There seemed to be no end in sight to the nightmare of apartheid, that appalling scenario of oppression and injustice that is associated with my country. The change that has taken place in my returns to South Africa is that I step off the airplane with a much lighter heart.

The last half of the eighties was one of the most bewildering periods I have known in my country. On one hand, the policy of apartheid continued to brutalize millions of South Africans simply because of their black skins (in fact, this period saw some of the worst atrocities). On the other hand, in response to external, and most important of all, internal pressures, the whole edifice of apartheid was slowly starting to fall apart. I think a lot of people erroneously see the recent dramatic changes in South Africa as a response just to the external pressures that have come by way of sanctions and boycotts and everything else that the concerned and caring communities outside the country have brought to bear. Those did have an enormous influence on events. What is not always appreciated is that within South Africa itself there were pressures, not just from blacks in the form of active resistance, but increasingly from brave white South Africans who had begun to read the writing on the wall. These white South Africans recognized the total monstrous injustice of the system, and had started to talk, and lobby, and attempt to defy it.

I'll mention some examples of things that happened during the last half of the eighties, prior to the tremendous drama of this year. The Mixed Marriages Act was abolished--that was the odious piece of legislation which made it a criminal offense for people of different racial categories to be lovers. Also, the dreadful Immorality Act, as it was known, was abolished--a piece of legislation that provided the background to my play, Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act. Another piece of legislation that disappeared in the latter half of the eighties was that governing the odious passbook. All black men and women over the age of eighteen were forced to carry that awful little document, which controlled their lives. The passbook law was the background to another play of mine, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead.

I think that toward the end of the eighties the government was still involved in cosmetic work, trying to convince the outside world that changes were taking place, whereas the really big issues hadn't been addressed yet. But as part of the cosmetic attempts at cleaning up the South African image, the situation regarding the arts began to be relaxed. In the last few years there was no segregation in theatre. All the theatres in our country, the stages as well as the auditoriums, were completely open. You could mix your cast, and anybody who had the price of a ticket could sit down in one of those theatres and see the production. So all these factors taken together left me with a sense that something was trying to happen in South Africa. And whereas in the past I had always found myself returning and sounding like a prophet of doom, I was now going home with a measure of desperate hope. There appeared to be some justification for believing that I had been wrong in thinking and saying that white South Africa had run out of time.

Desperate hope: I think that is a reasonably accurate description of what I felt when I arrived back in Port Elizabeth on Friday, the second of February, this year. I am very specific about the date because it is one which I, and the rest of South Africa, have every reason to remember. As my plane touched down at two p.m. at Port Elizabeth's small airport, President de Klerk was standing in Parliament in Cape Town, five hundred miles away, making the speech in which he announced the unbanning of the African National Congress and all the other exiled black political movements, the lifting of all restrictions on the press, the suspension of the death penalty for political offenses, and, most dramatic of all, the imminent release of Nelson Mandela and other black political leaders. If you had told me three months earlier that the government would do all of this in one fell swoop, I would have shaken my head and smiled at your naive and totally unrealistic optimism. I am not exaggerating when I say that I couldn't believe my eyes when I read the newspapers that evening and the following day, and then listened to the radio broadcasts and watched the news on television. For us South Africans the speech on that Friday, and the events of the next few weeks, gave us a small taste of what it must have been like to look through that extraordinary wave of liberation that had swept across Eastern Europe in the preceding months.

The press coined the phrase "freedom euphoria" to describe the atmosphere in the country in the first few weeks after that speech, and that is certainly what it felt like. It was an extraordinary time. In the course of the next three months I saw my country try to turn its back on the past and move, very uncertainly and very confusedly, toward a new identity. At first people had a justifiable measure of skepticism about the sincerity of the government. I certainly was skeptical, and I said so in no uncertain terms. I have to eat my words now. I think most people now will agree with Nelson Mandela that President de Klerk and his closest associates appear to be sincere. They appear to mean what they say when they say they are genuine in their desire and determination to build a truly democratic South Africa.

I have started my talk with this bit of political history because it helps me to focus on a perception of my work that I find very frustrating. It is a perception which has led to me being labeled in a very narrow sense a "political playwright." Because of the interest in South Africa and what has taken place there in the past few months, during which I have been here in America involved in the production of my plays, I've had more than my fair share of encounters with the press. Some variant of a certain type of question keeps coming up. I'll give you a few of the main variations: "Haven't de Klerk and Nelson Mandela put you out of business, Mr. Fugard?" That's one. "Aren't your plays now out of date?" "What are you going to do for subject matter when South Africa's apartheid system is in fact abolished?"

I'd like to respond first by saying that anybody who thinks South Africa's journey to a just and decent society is going to be a short and an easy one is naive and terribly uninformed. The continuing violence (in this case it's called black-on-black violence) that racks my country is a fair indication of the formidable hurdles that still lie ahead of us before we'll be that just and decent society. Let me put it in perspective this way: I am fifty-eight years old and am resigned to the possibility that, in my lifetime, I might not see the fully democratic society that I so passionately wish for my country and its people.

But even apart from the fact that those questions are embarrassing because of their ignorance and their naivete, the very frustrating thing about them is that they create an expectation of my work that I think interferes with what I'm trying to do. If anybody in an audience for one of my plays sits there expecting that I am going to make a political statement, or give a message, or lay out a blueprint for a better and juster South Africa, they are going to be disappointed. What is more, because of this expectation, and because they are looking in the wrong direction (this I think has happened to a lot of critics in their reactions to my work), they will most probably miss what I have got to offer, which is a story.

My essential sense of myself is that of a storyteller. I once said something about myself and my work, I think I said it about ten or fifteen years ago, which remains as true today as it was then. I said the only truly safe place I have ever known is when I am in the middle of a story as its teller. At this point I am hovering over commitment to a new play, because in a sense I've cut the umbilical cord of my last work, My Children! My Africa! That's got to look after itself now. It's always frightening--nothing I've done in the past ever makes the commitment to a new piece of writing easy. At the same time I know that, once I make the commitment, unlike the man who stands here at this moment talking to you, I will know who I am and why I am who I am. That is what writing and telling a story mean to me.

I don't want to be naive about the business of storytelling. I'm not fighting shy of the fact that politics is in a sense part of the substance of the stories I tell. The notion that there could be a South African story that doesn't have political resonance is laughable. When it comes down to it, any story, from any time in history, from any society, is political--if you take the word "political" in its broadest and most meaningful sense. Every act of storytelling is in a sense a political action. Certainly this is so in South Africa, which is unbelievably politicized. As I experience that country, living there day to day, there is no area of my life, even my most private moments, which does not have a political resonance. Politics is there in everything we do in South Africa. So the notion of telling a story in South Africa and not being political is naive. I know, particularly as I have an interest in the dispossessed of my country, with whom I identify very strongly, it is inevitable that there is going to be a political byproduct to what I make. But that is not my focus as I start out.

I start telling my stories for other reasons. Once I was asked: "How do your stories start?" "What is the genesis of your plays?" "Is there any pattern to them?" "Are they random?" "What is the essential nature of the experience that leads to this event?" And I answered: The genesis of a play is complex, and it varies enormously from play to play. I can't pin down any one element as the reason for writing a play. I've written about eighteen plays of various shapes and sizes, and I can't point to any one of those and say, "That one I wrote simply because I wanted to . . ." "Simply because"--no! Every one of them involves a lot of factors, including the basic one that I earn my living by writing plays, and if I don't write plays I can't pay the rent. Also, vanity and conceit inform the writing of a play. I've got plays which critics have praised greatly in the past, and I get frightened now: is my next play going to be as good? Because I want to keep up the image of somebody who knows his craft and is doing a good job at it. It's a vanity and a conceit, and I would be dishonest with you if I denied that as a factor as I sit down and confront what I call the inquisition of blank paper.

Believe me, it is an inquisition. A writer once asked me for a piece of advice. He asked, "How do you start, what's the best way to start?" I said, "When the paper isn't looking at you." That is what it feels like. I approach it like a crab: I sharpen pencils; I fill my fountain pens, because I write by hand in pen and ink; I make my little scratches on the side in pencil; and do everything I can to try and avoid meeting that paper eye to eye. When it's not looking at me I suddenly do that terrible thing, which is open the bracket for the first stage direction. I can't tell you how frightening a moment that is. So then, vanities and conceits.

Then I must add, in all fairness to myself, that I do passionately love my people, my country. Coming out of that love, I try to be as honest a witness as I can to what I see around me in South Africa.

Then also, an important agenda in my life as a writer is self-exploration. I don't just write because of an objective reality out there. I write because Athol Fugard puts me under pressure. I'll give examples from two plays I've done here in New York. The Road to Mecca is based on a story of an actual artist, a woman, in an isolated town in the arid heartland of South Africa, the Karoo, a semi-desert region. She lived in a small community cut off from the outside world. This woman at the age of fifty, meek, obedient, church-going little widow, shocked everybody in the community by doing two things: she stopped going to church and she started sculpting. For the next twenty-five years she transformed her little Gothic house with its Gothic darkness into a light-filled palace of the most unbelievable splendor. In the large yard around her house she created--self-taught--statues, all of them with an eastern theme. She called it the camel-yard. She was obsessed. Her inspiration came from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. She saw those last twenty-five years of her life as a journey to Mecca, Mecca not being the real Mecca of Saudi Arabia, but the Mecca of imagination, that golden city, that other place, that extraordinary world we all want to reach at some point in our lives. That sort of mythic goal was the Mecca she set out to reach by way of the sculptures and her transformation of her dark house into a light-filled palace. Then, when she was seventy-five years old, the visions stopped coming. After two years of being able to make nothing more, of seeing nothing more--a period of progressive paranoia, fear, terror--she committed suicide.

I wrote a play based on the extraordinary story of this lady. I took all sons of liberties with it. It's in no sense a documentary. The reason I took liberties is that the story of Helen Martins--that was her name--gave me a chance to do something that I realized it was time in my life to do. I have lived my life and written my plays with a sense of having kept appointments with certain things. I have a mysterious sense of appointments come to me, and this was one of those appointments I suddenly realized I had to keep. The reason I had to use the story of Helen Martins was because it was time for me to understand the genesis, the nature, and the consequences of creative energy. I have some sort of creative energy. I'm not going to be falsely modest and not acknowledge that fact. I will leave others to deride what its significance is. I know that I am propelled, obsessed, driven to make things. That is all I understand in terms of creative energy. I think that every human being on God's earth has got a spark of that energy. Some people have great big conflagrations and furnaces burning away. (American music lost one of those blast furnaces, I think it was the day before yesterday, with the death of Leonard Bernstein.)

The story of Helen Martins gave me an opportunity to try and understand this demon that has possessed me all of my life. The writing of The Road to Mecca helped a great deal. The play also gave me a superb metaphor for dealing with one of the things that I have been terribly frightened of. What am I going to do with myself if I can't write anymore? What am I going to do with myself if suddenly the appointment book is empty--if it doesn't come? This is a real dilemma, because I have fashioned my life around the fact that I am a storyteller. I tell my stories in the form of plays. There's nothing else in my life. From the writing of the plays I go to directing them, sometimes to acting in them. Then, as I said earlier, when that umbilical cord to the latest play is cut and I am free of it, there is a painful limbo period where I wander around feeling a little bit like a lost soul. Then, miraculously, the next appointment comes, and I get involved in telling another story, and it all makes sense once more. I've lived a life like that. What would happen to me if the stories stopped coming? The Road to Mecca showed Helen Martins's fear of darkness and her discovery of the miracle that lighting a candle means. Her life gave me the opportunity to use that symbol of what creative energy tries to do, light a candle. What happens when there are no more candles left to light? Athol Fugard the man could go on a lot longer than Athol Fugard the playwright. Writing that play has helped me to confront that possibility. I hope to die in harness. I'll make sure of that by giving myself three more plays and two prose works to write. I've planned them out. That will look after me for a few years to come. But anyway, this exploration of self was part of The Road to Mecca.

I followed The Road to Mecca with a play which I haven't been able as yet to share with a New York audience. Its called A Place with the Pigs. That was a special experience for me because, about seven or eight years ago, I confronted and for the first time tried to deal with, and I'm still in the process of trying to deal with, a problem involving the use of alcohol. A Place with the Pigs was based on a story of three or four inches in the New York Times, about a Russian deserter from the Second World War. This immediately baffled all the critics. They couldn't understand why I wasn't writing about South Africa anymore. This item about a Russian deserter who had hidden away in a pigsty for forty-two years, until circumstances had forced him out into the light of day, gave me a magnificent opportunity to make a statement about the fact that we as human beings make and crawl into pigsties. We make them out of all sorts of things. I made a pigsty out of a bottle of Jack Daniel's whiskey. I have known people who have made pigsties out of a lot of money. I know of people who have made pigsties out of food. I know of people who have made pigsties out of their bed. I wrote the play because I had an experience. The experience was that I had left the pigsty. I had discovered that to get out of a pigsty you just have to stand up and get out of it. That shattering revolution climaxes this play. The man realizes that judgment is waiting for him outside, but nothing can be worse than the nightmare he has been living. He's been living in pig shit for forty-two years, and he's hated it. Suddenly he realizes his hell is self-inflicted. It's not God's punishment. He just has to leave it. I wrote the play for that reason.

My most recent play, My Children! My Africa!, will give me an opportunity to strike the final note in these few words to you, and then open myself to questions you might like to ask. Again, I wrote My Children! My Africa! because I was vain and conceited and wanted to show the world I could still write a play. I wrote it because I wanted to make some money. I wrote it because I was appalled at certain things that were happening in my country. And I wrote it because it had come time to do two things which again involved my sense of an appointment. One was to come out of my faith in the power of the spoken and the written word. That's a faith that has been sorely tested during the thirty-two years I have been making theatre in South Africa. There were times when I have truly doubted whether, as a response to the appalling things happening around me, writing a play, and then in some cases doing it underground (because the authorities wouldn't allow us to do it publicly), was an adequate response to that situation. Perhaps I would have been better advised to make bombs. Believe me, I'm not trying to be melodramatic in making that statement. There were times in South Africa when I really had doubt in what I was doing as a man of theatre. I think my faith must have hung on by a silken thread at times. I can thank my lucky stars it did, because if you ever break faith with something like that, I don't know that you can put it together again. Anyway, I never lost faith. In fact, as time passed, my faith in the power of the spoken and the written word has grown in strength. I stated that faith through one of the characters in my play, My Children! My Africa!

I said there were two personal agendas involved in writing the play. The other one involved an act of celebration. The word "celebration" is what I would like to end with. I wanted to celebrate the youth of South Africa, black and white. They have been an extraordinary inspiration to me. I know as a South African just how hard it is to take on a fight, and to try and escape the terrible twisting of your mind and soul caused by that society and the sting of apartheid. That is changing fast now. We will never go back to the bad old days. But until recently I saw succeeding waves of young South Africans, white South Africans, having to confront that terrible system. I have been moved to see the many young men and women who, with an innate instinct for decency and justice which every human being is born with (no human being is born evil--there are no chromosomes, there's no DNA that defines evil), fight free of that system. And then the appalling dilemma, which I have had to use my imagination to comprehend, of young black South Africans. There again I have had the most unbelievably inspiring encounters over the years, with young men and women who have had every reason to hate, to resent, to be hell-bent on destruction, and who instead turn out to be individuals of love and tolerance and forgiveness. I know how unbelievably moved New York was, and how extraordinary your reception of Nelson Mandela was, when he arrived in your city. I give him as an example of that quality I am talking about. How that man, having had twenty-seven years of his life taken away from him, could come out and forgive, and then sit down and talk to, and listen to--provided that they in turn did some listening on their side--the very people who had taken away the best years of his life! I think we'd be hard pressed to find a more extraordinary example than Nelson Mandela of just how generous and forgiving the human soul can be. And he's not alone in that. That preparedness to forgive, to understand, is part of the South African situation. And I wanted to celebrate it, and have it be the final word on which I end my talk.

That is why this perception of myself as a political writer disturbs me. An attitude like that closes off an individual to an important thing I have tried to do. I became conscious, as I was thinking about talking to you today and as I was looking back over my plays, that in addition to all the judgments, the condemnations, the angers, the outrages, the whatever else I have expressed, I've tried to celebrate the human spirit--its capacity to create, its capacity to endure, its capacity to forgive, its capacity to love, even though every conceivable barrier is set up to thwart the act of loving. Yes, I would like to leave you with that as a final word on my side about my work and my dilemmas. I am prepared now to answer any questions you might have.

Some of the reviewers that I have read say you are the greatest evangelist of the century.

That makes it just as difficult.

Are you still working with Zakes Mokae?

Oh, yes. He called me from Los Angeles a few days ago and left a message on my machine. Zakes is very much part of my life. I've just spoken of celebrating, and your question gives me a chance to share with you one of the greatest celebrations I've ever had. Some twenty-nine years ago, after an apprenticeship, I found my voice and realized what sort of theatre I wanted to do with a play called The Blood Knot. It involves two characters, two brothers, one light-skinned, one dark-skinned. Nobody wanted to do that play except me and an actor called Zakes Mokae. Neither of us had much theatre experience, but we sorted out the traffic, we learned the lines, we got together a few props, and we did that play in an attic space in downtown Johannesburg. That was the start of it for Zakes and myself. And I had this extraordinary experience, three or four years ago, of being on a Broadway stage: the same play, the same Zakes Mokae. In a business like theatre, which is not known for the longevity of its relationships, the amount of love that prevails among its practitioners, that really was something. But then again, you see, so typical of South Africa and its capacity to serve up paradoxes. Yes, Zakes Mokae is and will always be a part of my life.

Have you found the same creative spark that you find in writing plays either in acting or in writing novels?

No. No. I only wrote one novel, and that was way back. In fact, I can't believe I wrote it, but they say I did. Apart from two personal memoirs, which would involve writing in prose, that I would want to deal with at some point in my life, I will never attempt fiction again. I never learned how to use that craft. I know how to handle the tools that go with the craft of playwriting. Acting, directing, those are the two other significant identities I have outside of playwriting. You could take my acting away from me now, and I would lose a certain opportunity. I've enjoyed it. I'm something of a performer, and I enjoy going onto a stage. I think I take acting very seriously; but it could be taken away from me and my life wouldn't really suffer. I'd come to terms with that fairly quickly. To a certain extent I would say the same even about directing. I would miss enormously the camaraderie of the theatre, of the rehearsal room. I would miss enormously the challenge and the experience of realizing a virginal text for the first time. That's an unbelievable moment, when you sit in the theatre and you watch that first audience with your words for the first time. I'd survive even if you took that away from me. My essential identity is that of playwriting. No, I don't experience the same spark. I couldn't stand here and talk to you as an actor and as a director in the way I have tried to talk to you as a playwright.

What has been the official state response to your growing international reputation as a playwright?

Their reaction has been hands off. I've had the inevitable problems with the plays, like the censoring of plays, the closing of performances, and that sort of thing. The extent of the harassment I myself have had to endure was that they took away my passport at one period and wouldn't allow me to leave the country unless I decided to do so on a one-way ticket. They wanted to force me into exile, I think. That was their way of coping with dissident elements in the society. Oh, I've had police searches in the middle of the night, my phone is tapped, mail has been interfered with, that sort of thing. But I've had friends who have landed up on Robben Island and lost years of their life. And then, in response to your question, as my reputation grew overseas they realized it would be wiser to leave me alone, even though I was an irritant, because the adverse publicity that would come from it would outweigh any benefits to them. I think their sense of me is that, even though he makes a lot of noise, he's one of those dogs that bark but don't bite.

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.

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.

In what country do you feel your plays have been most favorably received?

I've no hesitation in answering that question. I must exclude South Africa because I write my plays for myself in the briefest instance, then for fellow South Africans, and that is such an incestuous relationship that I can't talk about it. Without any question, I would say America. It is not only that you have had, and are still dealing with, a race problem in your own society. I think, over and above that, the textures and qualities of America are very akin to South Africa. If I ever had to think about, and were able to tolerate, the thought of exile, it would most probably be in America that I'd live, because I could feel at home here. Americans have made a connection with my plays, for which I am profoundly indebted, and for which I thank you all very much.

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