Athol Fugard tells the story to Pat Schwartz

My Life was a combination of my response to the world around me at a particular time (that moment in South Africa just prior to the election) and to a personal need. In this respect it was like the rest of my work.

My entire writing life has been an attempt to bring those two elements into some sort of harmony, to harness them together so that they could pull forward the project in hand. They could conceivably of course have pulled in opposite directions.

In terms of my response to South Africa and the world around me, I had begun to get more than just a little frustrated and impatient with the middle-aged to ageing men who were doing all the goddamn talking and trading insults. All that rhetoric and bombast that was leading up to the election, and all the politicking that was taking place struck me as being incredibly hollow.

In all that noise I felt the one voice that was not being heard was that of young South Africans, and dammit all, they are the future. What we were doing was not for our selves, my generation and beyond, because we were already too old to get the real benefit of it, we were doing it for those who were going to come after us. I had such a strong sense that nobody was really asking them to speak or listening to them when they did get a chance to speak. It's not all that easy you know to stand up and be heard.

Then in terms of myself there was a sense that the old forms were going. In the same way that South Africa was taking on one of the most amazing and epic political adventures of this century - on a par with the Berlin Wall coming down - 1 wanted to take on a new adventure for myself as a theatre practitioner. The best way I can define it is to say that I wanted to rediscover the potency of the simple, unadorned, uncosmeticised spoken word. I wanted to reconnect in the simplest and most direct way possible with the three things theatre starts out with - an actor, a story, and an audience.