Athol Fugard obituary

Apartheid in South Africa cut both ways. The white Afrikaner playwright Athol Fugard, who has died aged 92, was not allowed inside a black township in his home country for many years, so was heavily reliant on black actors keeping him informed on how life was – and wasn’t – for them and their families.

His collaboration with two of them, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, from the township of New Brighton near Fugard’s home in Port Elizabeth, in the early 1970s, resulted in three extraordinary plays; they dealt with the injustices and absurdities of the apartheid era in profoundly moving dramas of great eloquence and dignity of spirit.

The first of them, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972), is the story of a man who, unable to work because of the wrong stamp in his passbook, steals a dead man’s identity; the new ID allows him to earn a pittance for his family who live 150 miles away. Ntshona’s beaming visage as the man recites his new number in the photographer’s studio is one of the indelible images of my theatre-going life.

Related: Janet Suzman on Athol Fugard: A writer of true integrity has gone

The second play, The Island, showed the same actors in a cell on Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison), refracting their struggle for self-esteem and independence in a performance of the last, highly charged scene of Sophocles’ Antigone.

And Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act – performed in Britain by Fugard’s great muse and inspiration, Yvonne Bryceland, and Ben Kingsley – charted the dangers and indignities of the prohibited relationship of a black man and a white woman.

The plays were initially produced by the Serpent Players in Port Elizabeth, and all three were thunderously acclaimed when imported to the Royal Court, London, in 1973. Sizwe transferred to the West End and The Island began a long life around the world; it returned to the National Theatre in 2000 and, two years later, was no less powerful, still with Kani and Ntshona, at the Old Vic.

Fugard, who had first visited Britain in 1959, was recognised as the leading South African playwright of his time, on a par with Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee in literature. He never went beyond a basic format of biographical monologues and spare, electrified dialogue between two (at most, three) characters; but that’s all he needed.

“Space and silence,” he once told me, “are the two definitive challenges in theatre. The one the actor fills with his body, the other he fills with his noise and, finally, with silence itself. Those are for me the two dimensions.” He was clearly influenced by Samuel Beckett, whom he revered, but loved music (“the most sublime assault on silence, and also the most sublime challenge to it”) and said that no writer taught him more than did the cello suites of Bach.

All playwrights are conditioned by their backgrounds and dig deep for their best plays, but Fugard ploughed richer terrain than most. Born in the Karoo village of Middelburg on the Eastern Cape, he was, he said, “the mongrel son” of Harold Fugard, an English-speaking, disabled former jazz pianist and alcoholic of Polish and Irish descent, and Elizabeth (nee Potgieter), an Afrikaner, and woman of highly developed moral probity, who could barely sign her name.

The family moved in 1935 to Port Elizabeth, where Elizabeth, the breadwinner of necessity, ran a boarding house and, later, the tearoom in St George’s Park. Fugard was educated at the Marist Brothers college, the Port Elizabeth Technical college, where he studied motor mechanics, and the University of Cape Town, where he studied philosophy and social anthropology, and was the university boxing champion, before dropping out in 1953 without taking his finals.

He hitchhiked across the continent and joined a ship in Port Said, Egypt, travelling the world as a merchant seaman. On returning to Cape Town in 1956, he wrote news bulletins for the South African Broadcasting Corporation and launched an experimental theatre group. That year, he married the actor Sheila Meiring. The couple moved to Johannesburg and, on discovering the black township of Sophiatown, Fugard wrote his first play, No Good Friday (1958), for a group of black actors, including Zakes Mokae; there was a writers’ group, too, which included Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba and Nat Nakasa.

By day, he worked as a clerk in the pass laws court but, after writing and directing his second play, Nongogo (1959), he found a job as a stage manager in the National Theatre Organisation. His watershed play, and the first to be performed in South Africa with an interracial cast, was The Blood Knot (1961), a lacerating duologue for two brothers, played by Fugard and Mokae, one of lighter skin colour than the other (they had different fathers, the same mother).

When the film of The Blood Knot was released in 1967, Fugard had his passport withdrawn by the government of PW Botha, shortly after he had appeared in the play’s British premiere at the Hampstead Theatre Club. But an international campaign had the passbook restored to him in 1971. Janet Suzman and Kingsley appeared as an estranged brother and sister battling over their inheritance in Hello and Goodbye at the King’s Head in Islington in 1973; the show was taken up by the Royal Shakespeare Company as Fugard simultaneously triumphed at the Royal Court. He was now a major theatrical figure.

The National Theatre presented the metaphysical, poetic A Lesson from Aloes in 1980, importing Fugard’s own production from the recently formed Market theatre in Johannesburg, a collaboration repeated in 1983 with “Master Harold” … and the Boys, which Fugard described as his most immediately autobiographical play; the Fugard character, Hally, visits his parents’ tearoom where the black waiters are his best friends.

A Place with the Pigs (1988), directed by Fugard at the National, with Jim Broadbent as a Soviet army deserter and Linda Bassett as his scavenging wife, was a metaphorical reflection, he said, on his protracted battle with alcoholism. He sobered up as apartheid crumbled and then faced the even sterner challenge of writing about his country in a totally new way, much as political playwrights in Europe had to adjust with the fall of communism.

Not everyone felt that Fugard succeeded, but My Children! My Africa!, which arrived in the National Theatre repertory as Mandela was released from prison in 1990, anticipated trouble ahead: the black township schoolmaster, played by Kani, is murdered by a mob after his star pupil rejects literature in favour of political activism; another pupil, a white girl played by Fugard’s daughter Lisa Fugard, achieves a more hopeful political maturity.

His plays became calmer, more conciliatory. Playland at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 1993 was warmly received as his first post-apartheid piece – the story of two men, one black, one white, both haunted by a violent past, finding forgiveness and reconciliation in an amusement park on New Year’s Eve in 1989.

With the election of Mandela as president in 1994, Fugard expressed relief at being unburdened of the responsibility he had felt as a writer.

Sorrows and Rejoicings (2001) at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn, north London, was the first of his plays to be written abroad, in California, where he taught at the university in San Diego; an exiled poet returns home to face the three women he left behind, a white wife, a “coloured” mistress, and a mixed-race daughter.

Nothing was perfect in the new South Africa, and Fugard became only slightly less angry with the government of Thabo Mbeki than he was with earlier regimes. But he never sold up at home, and was very moved to have a theatre named in his honour in Cape Town in 2006. He wrote his first play in 10 years, The Train Driver, for the Fugard theatre, and his production ran at the Hampstead theatre in 2010.

The new play, like so many, was a two-hander, and a deeply disturbing one. The figures in a bleak landscape were a black grave-digger and a white railwayman haunted by the ghosts of a mother and her three small children from a nearby squatters’ camp who stood on the track, on a windswept plain on the edge of Cape Town, where such distressing suicides are common. The driver had turned the tragedy in on himself and had lost his wife, his job and his sanity.

Fugard published his Notebooks 1960-1977, edited by Mary Benson, in 1983, and Cousins: A Memoir in 1994. They form one of the most courageous and illuminating artistic testaments of our time. Gavin Hood’s 2005 film of Fugard’s 1980 novel, Tsotsi, won the Oscar for best foreign language film.

Fugard’s first marriage ended in divorce in 2015. He is survived by his second wife, Paula Fourie, a writer and academic, whom he married in 2016, and their children, Halle and Lannigan, and by Lisa, the daughter from his first marriage.

• Athol Harold Lannigan Fugard, playwright, born 11 June 1932; died 8 March 2025