Crossing boundaries: the genesis of the township plays - Athol Fugard Issue

The Sophiatown phase lasted two years (1957-1959), and was a limited exercise in collaborative theatre, brought to an end as much by the enforced removal of that city-within-a-city as by the departure or exile abroad of its main participants, including the Fugards. The New Brighton phase extended over a decade (1963-1973), and involved, to begin with, a group of amateurs from the township working on classic Western drama from Antigone to The Caucasian Chalk Circle under Fugard's informed and expert eye. It was succeeded by more experimental playmaking using material drawn from their own lives as pressures upon the group increased under the post-Sharpeville clampdown in the Eastern Cape; and, finally, the joint creation by Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona of drama of an unprecedented intensity and impact, in Sizwe Bansi and The Island. Fugard's name is commonly attached to all the township plays, although the improvisations with Serpent Players are usually described as such, and the original title pages of the last two describe them as "devised by" their three co-creators, who also share the rights and royalties. There is an important sense in which all these plays belong less to Fugard than to the black performers whose lives they draw on, and who first helped create them, in rough or makeshift, often appalling, conditions. His other work, from The Blood Knot to Playland, is obviously more his own in theme and approach, even when he has cast black actors from the townships in their first production.

It would be wrong to suggest too hard and fast a division here, since there are obvious shared interests, for example in questions of individual freedom and identity. But Fugard himself distinguishes "two radically opposed methods" he has used: the "orthodox" writing of a play in private over a long period, on the one hand; and, on the other, going into a rehearsal room with a "loose mandate (an image, or sometimes more than that)" to evolve "a text, or an experience" through work with the actors ("Interview" Momentum 22). The method of the recent, post-township plays, as John Kani says, goes "against" his own "character," thereby offering a different challenge from earlier on, when what was more important was the playwright's recognition of the black performer's "need to voice what was grinding my soul" ("Post-Apartheid").

This need for articulation, for space for black people to be heard, had been recognized by other white liberals during the slow but remorseless silencing of their voices after the 1948 elections. Benjamin Pogrund, for example, Fugard's journalist friend, urged the aspiring playwright to come to Sophiatown in 1958--"approaching the sentence of death imposed by Nationalist apartheid, but still raucously alive and like nothing else in South Africa . . . your writing needs it," he said (37). Pogrund had already introduced Fugard to Sheila Meiring, the young drama student who encouraged him to leave journalism and become involved in the theatre, an involvement which led to the writing of two short plays, including The Cell (1956), based on the true story of a black woman unable to make the police who arrest her understand that she is about to give birth, and who becomes deranged after having her baby in prison. Fugard's growing interest in communicating the lives and sufferings of black South Africans coincided with the development of his interest in the theatre; and he was soon proclaiming that the "most stimulating and promising field for a young playwright in South Africa" lay in the world of the black townships, where there were untrained performers capable of "achieving an authenticity and vitality never before seen on the South African stage" (Anon. "Athol Plans")--a prophetic view greeted with scepticism then and later.