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The apprenticeship years - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Sheila Fugard
Athol was inspired not only by our meeting with Joe Matlou but also by meetings with others like the politician Robert Resha, as well as Bloke Modisane, a journalist. We spent many evenings in conversation with Bloke in his small kitchen, where he served us dry martinis. He was a stocky forty-year-old man, and a great raconteur. Perhaps the most memorable figure of those early township visits was a man known as Temba Mqota. We met him in a dark street, a tall consumptive man with hollow cheeks. He was an activist, and mysterious in his ways. Temba was not one of those politicians who sat round the kitchen table with a glass of brandy. He was different, a man of action, ready to give up his life for the struggle. Athol was fascinated by Temba, and so was I. We only had that one strange encounter with him in the Sophiatown darkness. A year later we heard that our freedom fighter had died of tuberculosis in the Transkei.
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These encounters convinced Athol that he could find men and women in the township who had the makings of actors. It was a daunting challenge, for there seemed to be no amateur black actors, let alone professionals. Athol found inspiration for his first township play in a Johannesburg newspaper story. The Sunday Times carried a weekly column by an experienced journalist, James Ambrose Brown. One of his columns immediately caught Athol's eye, for it concerned the township. Brown's subject was not a political issue, but rather extortion by small-time township gangsters, a theme especially prevalent in American films. This topic allowed Athol to explore with excitement the different characters he had observed in Sophiatown.
Athol wrote No-Good Friday in three weeks, but was so anxious to cast the play that he did not finish it. Perhaps the ending needed more thought than he was capable of giving the material at the time. In my opinion No-Good Friday is a fluid script, an inner dialogue between Athol and his own fascinating experience of the township. Much later, when Athol was an experienced playwright, he used a workshop method to create the theatre documents Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island. For those plays Athol had two actors whom he had trained and who were able to improvise, to talk easily about their township background and experience. They were very different from the actors Athol finally found for No-Good Friday. These were men thrust upon a stage, who needed speeches already written for them. They were unable to verbalize their life experience. The written play, No-Good Friday, gave them the opportunity.
We held auditions at the Bantu Men's Social Centre, which was situated beyond Eloff Street, in the less respectable area commonly known as motortown. It had car dealerships and Greek stores with cheap food for blacks. Blacks and whites moved freely there, away from business interests and the better stores frequented by middle-class white shoppers. The Centre was a community building, with a gymnasium, and also a stage used for concerts. It was a meeting place where young black men socialized. Our main interest was the Centre's stage, on which No-Good Friday was to have its premier.
