40 Fun Facts About Athol Fugard

What did the young Athol Fugard do with the first book he wrote while working aboard a steamship?

He threw it into the sea after deciding it was terrible. Fugard had hitchhiked up Africa and signed on as a merchant sailor, two years he later turned into the play The Captain's Tiger.

In the film of Athol Fugard's Tsotsi, what does the hero find on the back seat of a stolen car?

A baby is in the car he takes at gunpoint, and caring for the child slowly changes him. Two alternative endings were shot for the film, and both survive on the DVD.

In "Master Harold"...and the Boys, which toy did Sam once build from scrap to cheer up young Hally?

A kite made of junk was Sam's gift after the two of them had to carry the boy's drunk father home. Sam could not stay to watch it fly: the park bench was for whites only.

John Kani, co-creator of Athol Fugard's Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, later played King T'Chaka in which Marvel film?

Black Panther's Wakandans speak Xhosa because of Kani, who taught his first language to Chadwick Boseman, his on-screen son. Kani's real son Atandwa plays the younger T'Chaka.

What did South Africa's government take from Athol Fugard after the BBC broadcast his Blood Knot in 1967?

His passport was withdrawn by B. J. Vorster's government and restored only in 1971, after an international campaign on his behalf.

Which birds name the sculpture-filled house of Helen Martins that inspired Athol Fugard's The Road to Mecca?

Owls of cement and glass guard the Owl House, among more than 300 sculptures, most of them facing east towards the Mecca of her imagination. The house has been kept as she left it.

Which ancient Greek tragedy do two cellmates rehearse for their fellow prisoners in Athol Fugard's The Island?

Antigone, who defies the state to bury her brother, speaks for the prisoners themselves. At the end the man playing her pulls off his wig and speaks the last lines as himself.

Which American actor starred in early New York stagings of Athol Fugard's Blood Knot and Boesman and Lena?

James Earl Jones, later the voice of Darth Vader, played Zachariah in 1964 and Boesman opposite Ruby Dee in 1970. That second staging ran for 205 performances.

Which animals share a hiding place with a Soviet army deserter in a 1987 play by Athol Fugard?

Pigs keep the deserter company for four decades in A Place with the Pigs, drawn from a true wartime story. Fugard played the part himself and called it a parable of his battle with alcoholism.

Which Academy Award went to the 2005 screen version of Athol Fugard's Tsotsi, a first for South Africa?

Best Foreign Language Film went to Gavin Hood's adaptation at the 2006 ceremony. It was also the first African winner of the prize that was not made in French.

Tsotsi, the source of an Oscar-winning 2005 film, holds which distinction among Athol Fugard's many works?

His only novel was written some time before it finally appeared in 1980. In 2022 it was chosen for the Big Jubilee Read, a list of 70 books by Commonwealth writers.

Which South African city's townships are the setting of the Oscar-winning film of Athol Fugard's Tsotsi?

Johannesburg's townships also supply the soundtrack: kwaito music performed by the local star Zola, who has a part in the film as well.

Which pastime are Sam and Willie practising for a big competition in "Master Harold"...and the Boys?

Ballroom dancing gives the play its central image. Sam describes a dance floor where no couple ever bumps into another as his picture of how the world could be.

Athol Fugard's "Master Harold"...and the Boys unfolds on a rainy afternoon in which kind of family business?

A tea room in St George's Park was run by Fugard's own mother, the family breadwinner. He called this his most immediately autobiographical play.

Which actor was the first Willie in "Master Harold"...and the Boys and later starred in the film Boesman and Lena?

Danny Glover won a Theatre World Award as Willie, then returned to the play on Broadway in 2003 as the older man, Sam. On screen he played Boesman opposite Angela Bassett.

Which city, officially renamed Gqeberha in 2021, was Athol Fugard's childhood home and the setting of Blood Knot?

Port Elizabeth is the setting of so many Fugard plays that three early ones were published together under the city's name. He was born inland, in the small town of Middelburg.

Which 1958 job showed Athol Fugard the pass laws at work, as black South Africans were jailed before his eyes?

Court clerk was his job in a Native Commissioner's Court that tried pass-law offenders. Years later the memory fed his play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead.

In Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, what does Sizwe take from a dead man so he can stay and work in town?

His identity book carries the work-seeker's permit Sizwe lacks, so he takes the dead man's name, Robert Zwelinzima. The price is that Sizwe Banzi must officially die.

Which acting honour did John Kani and Winston Ntshona share in 1975 for two plays devised with Athol Fugard?

A Tony Award for Best Actor went to the pair jointly, an unusual move, for both Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island. Fugard's own came in 2011, for lifetime achievement.

Which South African general and statesman did Athol Fugard play in Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi?

Jan Smuts and Gandhi were adversaries who respected each other. Before leaving South Africa in 1914, Gandhi gave the general a pair of sandals he had made himself.

Which Cape Town neighbourhood, emptied by apartheid removals, became home to the Fugard Theatre in 2010?

District Six lost more than 60,000 residents to forced removals after 1966. The theatre was built into an old church hall and two warehouses, and Fugard premiered The Train Driver there within weeks.

In which semi-desert region of South Africa did Athol Fugard keep a village home and reserve his own grave?

The Karoo village of Nieu-Bethesda was his retreat. He wanted his gravestone to carry the words a child once called out to him on an uphill run there, urging him to keep going.

Which practice in South African theatres led Athol Fugard to back an international boycott in the 1960s?

Segregated audiences left white theatre with every dignity except human dignity, he wrote. Backing the boycott brought him new restrictions and surveillance.

Which former jazz saxophonist acted opposite Athol Fugard in Blood Knot at its 1961 premiere and on Broadway in 1986?

Zakes Mokae had played in Trevor Huddleston's band before he turned to acting. He and Fugard went back to the same two roles on Broadway 25 years after creating them.

Which pointless task do two prisoners mime at length in the opening scene of Athol Fugard's The Island?

Shovelling sand onto a pile at the other man's feet means neither heap ever shrinks. The punishment is designed to exhaust the body and break the prisoners' morale.

Which kind of business does Styles run in New Brighton township in the opening scene of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead?

A photography studio is where Sizwe comes for a portrait to send to his wife. Before he arrives, Styles tells a comic story about his old job at the Ford Motor Company.

Which apartheid law, broken by the play's two lovers, is named in the full title of Athol Fugard's Statements?

The Immorality Act banned sex between white and black South Africans from 1927, was widened in 1950 and lasted until 1985. The play opened Cape Town's Space Theatre in 1972.

Which hardy succulent plants does Piet Bezuidenhout collect in Athol Fugard's 1978 play about a suspected informer?

Aloes thrive in the harshest conditions, which is the point of A Lesson from Aloes. Piet stays rooted in South Africa while a friend just out of jail leaves on a one-way exit visa.

Which American university's repertory theatre gave "Master Harold"...and the Boys its world premiere in 1982?

Yale Repertory Theatre made it the first Fugard play to open outside South Africa, where it was at first banned. Two more of his plays had their premieres there later in the 1980s.

Which Irish playwright, a Nobel laureate, did Athol Fugard revere and echo in his spare two-character dramas?

Samuel Beckett's bare stages and stranded pairs run through Fugard's plays, and his township actors staged Beckett in the 1960s. Fugard also said Bach's cello suites taught him more than any writer.

Athol Fugard's Serpent Players were named for their first stage, an old snake pit at which kind of institution?

A museum in Fugard's home city housed the pit. The players were teachers and factory workers, and they opened with a Machiavelli comedy that Fugard moved to the township.

Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena follows a homeless couple across which bleak landscape beside the Swartkops River?

Mudflats are where the evicted pair camp for the night. Fugard got the idea after giving a lift to an old woman walking a hot country road, newly widowed and in pain but far from defeated.

Which American actress played the schoolteacher Elsa opposite Athol Fugard in the 1991 film of The Road to Mecca?

Kathy Bates, an Oscar winner for Misery, already knew the part from the play's New York stage run. Fugard co-directed the film and played the village pastor himself.

In which Californian city did Athol Fugard teach playwriting, acting and directing at a university?

San Diego was his American base for years. Sorrows and Rejoicings, about an exiled poet going home, was the first of his plays to be written abroad, in California.

Athol Fugard's father Harold, who was disabled, had earlier earned his living as which kind of musician?

Jazz pianist Harold Fugard gave his son his own first name, which the playwright dropped. He is the model for the unseen, feared father in "Master Harold"...and the Boys.

Which trade did the teenage Athol Fugard study at a technical college before turning to philosophy at university?

Motor mechanics was his course at the local technical college. A scholarship then took him to university to read philosophy, which he abandoned a few months before his finals to hitchhike up Africa.

In which Athol Fugard play did his daughter Lisa play Isabel Dyson, a white schoolgirl who debates at a township school?

My Children! My Africa! ends in tragedy: the township schoolmaster, played in London by John Kani, is killed by a mob after his star pupil turns from books to political activism.

What does seventeen-year-old Hally do to Sam at the climax of Athol Fugard's "Master Harold"...and the Boys?

He spits in his face, something Fugard admitted doing as a boy to a man he had been close to, to his lasting shame. Sam comes close to hitting back, then offers a fresh start.

What punishment met John Kani and Winston Ntshona in 1976 after they performed Sizwe Banzi Is Dead in the Transkei?

Solitary confinement was ordered by the homeland's justice minister, who said the play's subject matter was inflammable, abusive and vulgar. The two actors had co-written it with Fugard.

Which country's art association awards the Praemium Imperiale, the prize Athol Fugard received for theatre in 2014?

Japan's imperial family presents the prize, a gold medal and 15 million yen, in memory of Prince Takamatsu. Earlier winners in Fugard's category include Tom Stoppard and Judi Dench.