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Crossing boundaries: the genesis of the township plays - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Dennis Walder
Unlike township plays such as The Island, whose appearance in London coincided with Ipi Tombi while drawing a fraction of its audience, these works offer a thoroughly compromised version of township voices. Fugard's workshops have been seen as part of a larger movement of white entrepreneurs exploiting black performers, but not only is that a very partial version of the truth, it fails to account for the fact that the result of his collaborations was theatre the South African authorities tried to stop, whereas they have always supported the packaged presentations of black singers and dancers which continue to appear in the West End or on Broadway--although to some extent nowadays displaced by musicals of more radical intent, if not effect, such as Mbongeni Ngema's Sarafina! (1987).
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In retrospect, some of those involved in the Sophiatown plays have been critical of Fugard's position at the time. Bloke Modisane, for example, whose anguished autobiography Blame Me on History (1963) should be read alongside Huddleston's account of Sophiatown, and who was approached (in August 1958) by the Fugards "with a bottle of brandy" and a request to play Shark, the leading gangster in No-Good Friday. Modisane agreed, because "I had acting pretensions, probably as a result of seeing too many Hollywood films," but also through reading Stanislavsky. He approached the role by thinking about wartime brainwashing, "and the result was a nasty insidious terror, almost always implied, which at times had its effect on the other actors on stage."
We played before such small audiences it was discouraging, and it seemed that all the effort, the money, the sheer physical hard work Athol Fugard--without any backing, even from the Union of Southern African Artists which only invested in certainties at the box-office--had put into it would have been in vain. The play was given two nights in a small hall in Johannesburg--the first before an all-white audience--and attracted the interest of a white impresario who booked the play for four nights in the white Brian Brooke Theatre; but this booking almost destroyed the play itself because Athol Fugard, the playwright and white man who plays the priest . . . was not allowed on the same stage with the black actors, and Athol Fugard had accepted the principle without consulting the actors.
The actors confronted Athol with this betrayal, protesting that there was an agreement not to pander to the bigotry of white South Africa; the actors refused to perform without him in the cast, but he argued that it was a big break for the play, and we became sentimental and relented because it seemed to be his whole life. (289-91)
And so Lewis Nkosi was recruited to play the white priest, his face whitened-up. Nkosi himself later passed over the grotesque absurdity of his role, preferring to criticize the play's political naivete, while praising Fugard's approach, "partly to make the actors improvise and then later to improve on their lines, or the other way around: to write the draft scenes and try them out with the actors, changing the material when necessary to fit a new situation. At the time we were all under the influence of the 'method' of Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio in New York" (Nkosi 3).
