XPost: rec.arts.theatre.plays, alt.literature, soc.culture.south-africa
XPost: za.misc
From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net
On Mon, 10 Mar 2025 16:28:05 +0200, Steve Hayes
wrote:
>OBITUARY: Athol Fugard — global playwright who shone a light into dark
>corners of the SA psych
Herman Lategan
I’ll sound like a grouch, but the local obituaries on Athol Fugard are
simply not good enough. I don’t know about the Afrikaans press (I
don’t read Afrikaans anymore) but I have read other local and
international publications about his death.
How can you just harvest a quote by John Kani posted on Twitter? The
Guardian at least got hold of Janet Suzman.
She recalls: “In an earlier time, 1969, I remember sitting in his
living room in Port Elizabeth, a group of young actors babbling,
drinking, arguing, and one in particular, John Kani, already showing a
mastery of English that makes him the best off-the-cuff speaker ever,
accusing me roundly of white snobbery by not having learned his
language, Xhosa; I had to agree I was the loser.”
You phone people who knew Athol Fugard. You phone Pieter-Dirk Uys,
John Kani, Fatima Dike, Paul Slabolepszy, Fiona Ramsay, et cetera ad
infinitum. You build a personality profile, piece by piece. Then you
contact the head of a drama department and ask them their opinion on
Fugard’s oeuvre.
You make the obit come alive in such a way that you feel you’ve known
the person. Titbits from his childhood, quirky habits, offbeat stuff.
Why did he stop drinking at one stage?
This brings in a human angle. What was his dark side? Do people know
that he had a fall-out with one of his best friends, Yvonne Bryceland?
Why did he separate from his wife after six decades? Where is she?
Where is his daughter from that marriage? What do they say?
And what about Brian Astbury's Space Theatre and the vital connection
between them? How can you write something that reads like a CV, a
piece with dead words, scraped from old sources off the net. The man
was one of the world’s biggest playwrights and he was a South African.
It’s huge.
Yes, I’m also guilty of writing a lot of mediocre rubbish over the
years, but Fugard? You pull out all the stops, you go big, you bring
out the brass bands.
You stay away from words such as legend, acclaimed, well-known,
renowned. This is the New York Times headline: “Athol Fugard, South
African Playwright Who Dissected Apartheid, Dies at 92.”
Simple, a headline that is to the point.
I suspect people are simply overworked, underpaid, constantly worried
about when the publication will fold, so quality suffers. Nothing good
can come from unmotivated and depressed journalists.
And then the ending, it must grab you, it must leave you with a
FEELING. An obituary without FEELING (and I’m not talking about
sentimentality), is not an obituary.
The ending of the New York Times obit: “Guilt, both his own and other
people’s, provided a powerful and painful strain in Mr. Fugard’s work.
In 1984, he published Notebooks 1960-1977, a collection of journal
entries, none more revealing than the recollection of a childhood
encounter with the Black man who was his friend and mentor that became
the most famous scene in his best-known play.
Fugard writes: “Can’t remember what precipitated it, but one day there
was a rare quarrel between Sam and myself,” he wrote. “In a truculent
silence we closed the cafe, Sam set off home to New Brighton on foot
and I followed a few minutes later on my bike.
"I saw him walking ahead of me and, coming out of a spasm of acute
loneliness, as I rode up behind him I called his name, he turned in
mid-stride to look back and, as I cycled past, I spat in his face.
“Don’t suppose I will ever deal with the shame that overwhelmed me the
second after I had done that.”
Boom, what an ending, it was the engine that drove his writing, in one
last sentence.
- Disclaimer: It’s Monday and tomorrow the writer of this rant might
feel differently about everything.
--- SoupGate-DOS v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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