Athol Fugard
Athol Fugard
Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard OISis a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director who writes in English. He is best known for his political plays opposing the system of apartheid and for the 2005 Academy Award-winning film of his novel Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood. Fugard is an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. For the academic year 2000–2001, he was the IU Class of...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth11 June 1932
Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.
How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. I've always known that in my writing it is the dark troubled sea of which I know nothing, save its presence, that carried me. I've always felt that creating was a fearless and a timid, a despairing and hopeful, launching out into that unknown.
Life is just a plain bloody mess, that's all. And people are fools.
To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life.
For you in the West to hear the phrase 'All men are created equal' is to draw a yawn. For us, it's a miracle. We're starting out at rock bottom, man. But South Africa does have soul.
If the nature of human experience changes with the color of a man's skin, then the racists have been right all along.
What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
Every boy needs a role model that he can be proud of and talk about to the other kids in the playground.
I've always sensed for myself an obligation to bear witness to my time.
All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring with nobody else and realising you've to take the gloves off and get out and reinvent yourself.
Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again.
As fascinated as I was by words on paper, it was matched by my fascination with words in people's mouths. The spoken word. And that is the world of theatre.
Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.
You can't answer violence with counter violence ... The answer is love. The best sabotage is love.