Exits and Entrances Notes on the Production
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard was born on June 11, 1932 in Middelburg, Eastern Cape, South Africa. His mother, Elizabeth Magdalena, was an Afrikaner, and his father, Harold, was of Irish, English, and French Huguenot descent. Fugard's father was disabled, in and out of hospitals, and in constant pain. Fugard would sit by his father's bedside growing up and listen to him tell stories of his own making and of classics like Three Musketeers and The Call of the Wild. In a 1983 Boston Globe article, Fugard admitted that he always knew on some level that he would be a writer. (1) After working as a seaman and a journalist, Fugard finally found his way to writing. He began as a novelist. However, he soon discovered that his real gift was not in prose, but plays. His first play, No-Good Friday, was produced in Cape Town in the mid-1950s, but it was difficult during that time to get audiences to come to the theater. Most of the blacks living in and around Cape Town weren’t used to theater, and they didn't understand what it meant to be a part of an audience. Fugard and his wife, Sheila, took No-Good Friday on the road, where the play was seen by mostly black audiences. Eventually, they were able to perform before a white audience in Johannesburg at the Brian Brooke Theatre. The house was packed. No-Good Friday was well-received that night, but no theater company was willing to produce a full run of the show. (2)
While still in his twenties, Fugard left South Africa and went to London to pursue a career as a playwright. He was not terribly successful and found little work. On March 21, 1960, 69 black men were massacred, and 180 more were injured during a protest in Sharpeville, South Africa. The incident weighed heavily on Fugard's conscience. He and his wife returned home where his voice would be relevant and could provoke change. At first, he found work as an actor and a stage manager. Then, in 1965, he started the Serpent Players, named after their first venue, which was the former snake pit at a zoo. The Players were a mixed company of black and white actors (illegal in many South African towns) and were under constant threat from the government. The plays they presented dealt directly with Apartheid policies. As a result of his plays and his politics, the first decade of Fugard's career was filled with political harassment and economic hardships.
During his life, Fugard has written many plays, the majority of which are considered social protests. Among his most notable are: Blood Knot (1961); the trilogy of The Island, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, and Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (1972); Master Harold and the Boys (1982); and My Children! My Africa! (1989). In a speech given to students at New York University in 1990, Fugard said of his writing:
There were times when I have truly doubted whether, as a response to the appalling things happening around me, writing a play, and then in some cases doing it underground (because the authorities wouldn’t allow us to do it publicly), was an adequate response to that situation. Perhaps I would have been better advised to make bombs. Believe me, I'm not trying to be melodramatic in making that statement. There were times in South Africa when I really had doubt in what I was doing as a man of theatre. I think my faith must have hung on by a silken thread at times. I can thank my lucky stars it did, because if you ever break faith with something like that, I don’t know that you can put it together again. Anyway, I never lost faith. In fact, as time passed, my faith in the power of the spoken and the written word has grown in strength... (3)
THE POLITICS OF SOUTH AFRICA
Apartheid – derived from the Afrikaans word for separateness or apart:
Apartheid was a governmental and social policy of segregation that lasted from 1948 to 1994. The Population Registration Act, passed in July of 1950, formally broke the people of South Africa up into three distinct racial categories: Bantu (black African), White, and Colored (people of mixed race). An Asian group was added several years later. Apartheid was further systematized by the Group Areas Act and the Land Acts, which assigned different races to specified business and residential areas and restricted non-white residents to certain areas. These three Acts gave authorities permission to prohibit non-whites from owning land and even coming into contact with whites, effectively enforcing public segregation. (4) Non-whites were also barred from holding government positions. For over a century before the Acts were instituted, non-whites were required to carry their passbooks (i.e. passports) with them at all times, but under the Acts, non-whites could be jailed and heavily fined for not having documentation. The police began to regularly stop non-whites to check passbooks.
The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960:
In protest of the laws requiring non-whites to carry documentation, the Pan-African Congress (PAC), an anti-Apartheid group, urged all of the non-whites in South Africa to go to the police stations in their township without their documentation and demand to be arrested. The PAC requested that the protesters act without violence. The turnout was tremendous, and, in most cases, the police did not attack or go through with the arrests. One exception was a town near Cape Town where the police opened fire, killing three men and wounding another 25.
Another exception was Sharpeville, a town 28 miles southwest of Johannesburg. Approximately 20,000 Black Africans descended on the police station where about 20 police officers were on duty. The officers panicked and called for help. Soon 130 reinforcements in armored cars were sent in. The crowd responded by hurling stones at the vehicles and also into the police compound. The police countered by drawing their weapons. The protesters immediately pulled back and began to flee. The police then opened fire into the crowd. Some of the dead were trampled to death, but most were shot in the back while trying to escape. An estimated 69 men and women were shot dead and over a hundred more were injured. (5)
The Aftermath:
The Sharpeville massacre not only angered South African communities, but it also quickly gained attention globally as other countries began speaking out against the government and their handling of the conflict. In response to the criticism about the attacks, the South African Prime Minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, outlawed political groups like the Pan-African Congress and the African National Congress (ANC), another anti-Apartheid group. Twelve members of the PAC surrendered and were jailed for organizing the mass protest which resulted in the massacre. Nelson Mandela, a member of the ANC, called for the creation of a military wing within the ANC. In 1962, Mandela was arrested for organizing the wing and was sentenced to five years of hard labor. However, in 1963, other leaders from the ANC were brought to trial, and Mandela was tried again alongside this group on charges of treason. In 1964, Mandela, along with seven other people, was sentenced to life imprisonment, where he remained until February 11, 1990. (6)
The End of Apartheid:
Opposition groups, mostly led by white sympathizers, began popping up in South Africa during the 1960's. In 1961, South Africa was forced to withdraw from the British Commonwealth after other member states became critical of the Apartheid system. It wasn't until 1985 that the United States got involved by implementing selective economic sanctions against South Africa. As pressures from opposition groups intensified, South African president F.W. de Klerk began to dismantle the system in the early 1990's. In 1994, South Africa rewrote its constitution and held its first free general election in 46 years. Nelson Mandela was elected as South Africa's first black President, and the system of Apartheid was completely outlawed.
FUGARD AND SOUTH AFRICA
Athol Fugard does not identify himself as a "political playwright." In his New York University speech cited earlier, he talks about the necessity of not trying to be "universal" in his approach to writing, but instead speaking from the heart and telling the story that needs to be told. He speaks frequently about the importance of human connection and the love of one's country. He said,
I identify passionately with my country, and the thought of any form of exile from it is to me the vision of living death. I know it would mean the end of Athol Fugard the playwright, that any creative energies I have would wither away and die. Everything that I am, good and bad, as man and artist, I owe to that country. In fact, I sometimes think of my writing as an attempt on my side, hopelessly inadequate, to acknowledge, to pay back, something of the colossal debt that I owe to South Africa. I said once I think the most important thing a human being does with his life is how he loves in the course of it. The little or the lot that I know about loving was taught to me by South Africa and South Africans, and you can’t have a more profound tie to any place. (3)
References:
1 Kevin Kelly, "Fugard on 'Master Harold'," Boston Globe, March 6, 1983.
2 Shelia Fugard, "The Apprenticeship Years," Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 39, 1993.
3 Athol Fugard, "Some Problems of a Playwright from South Africa," The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 1994; 29: 125-238.
4 <http://www.africanaencyclopedia.com/apartheid/apartheid.html>.
5 "The Sharpeville Massacre," Time Magazine, April 4, 1960.
6 <http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1993/mandela-bio.html>.
Notes on the Production by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary