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Resituating Fugard: South African Drama as Witness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Dennis Walder
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Abstract

The recent work of the South African dramatist Athol Fugard has addressed the present realities of a country undergoing traumatic change. But on whose behalf does it speak today? The common claim of critics has been that his work ‘bears witness’: but what does this claim amount to in the context of current debates about culture in South Africa? Central to these debates is the contextualizing work which has arisen out of the neo-Marxist emphasis on previously marginalized black dramatic forms: tending to supplant the liberal, universalizing approach which helped promote Fugard, this is fast becoming a new orthodoxy, diminishing his contribution and historic influence alike. In this article, Dennis Walder looks more closely at the European origins among the liberal-left of the idea of ‘bearing witness’, and considers its continuing potential as taken up by Fugard himself at a turning-point in the development of his plays – the moment from which sprang both Boesman and Lena and the collaborative Sizwe Bansi and The Island. These plays can still be understood to offer a voice to the voiceless – above all to Lena, the ‘Hotnot’ woman, an outcast among outcasts, who affirms her identity through her body and her language. Dennis Walder, who was born and brought up in South Africa and educated at the Universities of Cape Town and Edinburgh, is now Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Open University: a Dickens scholar, whose Dickens and Religion appeared in 1981, he also wrote the first book-length study of Athol Fugard (Macmillan, 1984), and is currently editing Fugard's plays for Oxford University Press.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue 32 , November 1992 , pp. 343 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

Notes and References

1. ‘Beware of “cultural commissars” of the left, warns Fugard’, in a lecture to Rhodes University staff and students, Grahamstown. See Cape Argus, 20 June 1991.

2. See, for example, Arthur, Thomas J., ‘My Children! My Africa! by Athol Fugard’, Theatre Journal, XLII, No. 2 (1990), p. 246–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Billington, Michael, ‘The Word versus the First’, The Guardian, 8 09. 1990Google Scholar; Truss, Lynne, ‘Variations on the Riot Act’, Independent on Sunday, 9 09. 1990Google Scholar.

3. Gray, Stephen, ‘“Between Me and My Country”: Fugard's My Children! My Africa! at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg’, New Theatre Quarterly, VI, No. 21 (1990), p. 25–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. For the most important and influential views to date, see de Kok, Ingrid and Press, Karen eds., Spring is Rebellious: Arguments about Cultural Freedom by Albie Sachs and Respondents (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990)Google Scholar.

5. Paz, Octavio, On Poets and Others, trans. Schmidt, M. (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987), p. 111–12Google Scholar.

6. See Miller, Jane, Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture (Virago, 1990), p. 108–35Google Scholar.

7. See Kavanagh, Robert, Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa (Zed Books, 1985), especially p. 61–83Google Scholar.

8. See, for example, Steadman, Ian, ‘Collective Creativity: Theatre for a Post-Apartheid Society’, in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. Trump, Martin (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1990), p. 307–21Google Scholar.

9. Serote, Mongane Wally, ‘Art as Craft and Politics: Theatre’, Arekopeneng, London, 1986Google Scholar, reprinted in On the Horizon (Fordsburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1990), p. 45–7.

10. Fugard, Athol, Notebooks: 1960–1977, ed. Benson, Mary (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1983), p. 81Google Scholar, entry for May 1963. All subsequent references are to this edition, silently revised and modified as it has been, unless otherwise specified.

11. See my Athol Fugard (Macmillan, 1984), p. 79–82, for a more detailed account.

12. Kavanagh, op. cit., p. 161.

13. Levi, Primo, If This is a Man and The Truce, trans. Woolf, Stuart (Abacus, 1987), p. 47Google Scholar.

14. Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Rosenthal, R. (Abacus, 1988), p. 63Google Scholar.

15. Lewin, Hugh, Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison (Barrie and Jenkins, 1974), p. 134–48Google Scholar; Nkosi, Lewis, Mating Birds (Constable, 1986), p. 183–4Google Scholar.

16. Albert Camus, ‘Notebook 1, May 1935’, reprinted in Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, trans. Philip Thody (Penguin, 1970), p. 235.

17. Sartre, Jean-Paul, What is Literature?, trans. Frechtman, B. (Methuen 1978), p. 80Google Scholar.

18. Ibid., p. 80.

19. Ibid., p. 58–9.

20. Gray, Stephen, ed. and Introduction, Athol Fugard (Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 1982), p. 27Google Scholar.

21. Seymour, Hilary, ‘Sizwe Bansi is Dead: a Study of Artistic Ambivalence’, Race and Class, XXI, No. 3 (1980), p. 273–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. ‘An Island of Dreams’, Weekend Argus, Cape Town, 2 Nov. 1985.

23. See, for example, Ndebele, Njabulo, ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary’, Journal of Southern African Studies, XII, No. 2 (04 1986), p. 144–57Google Scholar; Manaka, Matsemela, ‘Human Problems that Come from a Political Situation’, interview in The Drama Review, XXX, No. 4 (06 1986), p. 48–50Google Scholar.

24. wa Thiong'o, Ngugi, Introduction, Decolonizing the Mind (James Currey, 1986), p. 3Google Scholar.

25. Personal interview, National Theatre, London, September 1990.

26. Not fugitive for very much longer: see my forthcoming edition of The Township Plays (Oxford University Press, 1993).

27. Fugard, Athol, ‘When Brecht and Sizwe Bansi met in New Brighton’, Observer Review, 8 08 1982Google Scholar.

28. ‘Winner Through Hard Work’, Cape Times, 8 August 1991.

29. Anonymous, unpublished manuscript, 28 May 1965, Fugard Collection, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown.

30. Quoted by Vandenbroucke, Russell, Truths the Hand Can Touch: the Theatre of Athol Fugard (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), p. 126Google Scholar.

31. Compare the earlier, pre-Benson version of this part of the Notebooks, reprinted in Athol Fugard, Boesman and Lena and Other Plays (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. xxv: ‘How do I align myself with a future, a possibility, in which I believe but of which I have no clear image?’

32. Orkin, M., Drama and the South African State (Manchester: Manchester University Press; Johannes-burg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1991), p. 231Google Scholar.

33. Ibid., p. 141. Again, note that this oft-quoted remark does not appear in Fugard's own first, 1974 version of the Notebooks, reprinted in Boesman and Lena and Other Plays, op. cit., p. xx-xxv. Was it added later?

34. The correct version of the text may be found in my edition of Fugard, Athol, Selected Plays (Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 200Google Scholar. Subsequent references are to this edition.

35. Unpublished personal interview with Yvonne Bryceland, London, 21 Sept. 1983.