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Crossing boundaries: the genesis of the township plays - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Dennis Walder
What I would like to do here, then, is offer a brief account of his collaborative ventures, including some hitherto obscure or unpublished testimony from their point of view. I believe this to be the most important aspect of his work in the changing situation in South Africa now, because it shows how he found the voice of the voiceless, challenging "white complacency and its conspiracy of silence" (Notebooks 142) as he put it when, at the key moment of the Serpent Players' production of The Coat in 1966, he effectively provided a medium for their testimony, thereby helping many others find an alternative to the dominant, Western, conventional hierarchy of author-text-production.
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As Mongane Wally Serote has pointed out, theatre is one of the art forms which have shown the greatest potential for development in the years of most intense struggle in South Africa, in particular the form of theatre introduced by the Serpent Players, through The Coat, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, and The Island (45). Serote mistakenly included The Blood Knot in this group, but even that play, developed as a two-hander by Fugard for himself and Zakes Mokae in Johannesburg in 1961, reflects a more transgressive urge than has generally been admitted--it was, after all, The Blood Knot which first proposed a kind of theatre involving performers crossing the racial divide to fulfill their given roles as characters whose destinies are intimately, indissolubly linked. Its successful local production involved Fugard and Mokae in repeatedly breaking the law to live, travel, and perform together (Richards), challenging the status quo by showing the fundamental conflict between a free theatre and apartheid. Moreover, following the success of The Blood Knot in the Rehearsal Room at Dorkay House, Union Artists sponsored a series of important productions of modern plays with black casts before multiracial audiences, including an extraordinary Waiting for Godot directed by Fugard with Cornelius Mabaso and David Phetoe, which Fugard thought more important in its effect even than the achievement of The Blood Knot (Notebooks 65).
But Fugard's collaborative work across the deep divisions of South African society began before The Blood Knot, with the first of his "township" plays, No-Good Friday. What I am calling the township plays have their common inspiration in the everyday life of urban black people, and were created and performed in increasingly close partnership with their black amateur casts--there is only one white role, and that is a small one, in the first play. Set out in the order of their initial production, these plays fall naturally into two groups, representing two distinct phases in Fugard's involvement across racial boundaries: the "Sophiatown" plays, No-Good Friday (1958) and Nogogo (1959), first performed in the Bantu Men's Social Centre, Johannesburg, by members of the so-called African Theatre Workshop that Athol and Sheila Fugard had organized in the vast, multiracial ghetto; and the "New Brighton" plays, including The Coat, The Last Bus (1969) and Friday's Bread on Monday (1970), improvised by the Serpent Players of New Brighton, followed by Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972) and its companion piece, The Island (1973), both first performed by their co-creators and well-known Serpent Players, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, in Brian Astbury's Space Theatre, Cape Town.
