The Craft of Athol Fugard: Space, Time, and Silence

For more than five decades, the passionate plays by the South African playwright Athol Fugard have traced the history of his nation, and its people. Perhaps the world s most-performed playwright writing in English today, Fugard has created works that continue to touch audiences throughout the world because they address the struggles that all human beings inevitably face. Critics and scholars have called him the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world and the best political dramatist writing in English today. In a 1982 New Yorker profile, Mel Gussow called him the greatest living playwright writing in English, and said that he has achieved his reputation as high as that of any other living playwright, with the exception of Fugard's idol, Samuel Beckett with plays that have social and political content. Gussow added that Fugard was also a humanitarian a rare playwright, who could be a primary candidate for either the Nobel Prize in Literature or the Nobel Peace Prize. The 2012 BBC film on Fugard's life by Tony Palmer claimed that Fugard, along with Shakespeare, is the most performed playwright in the world. Jack Kroll said of Fugard: If there is a more urgent and indispensable playwright in world theatre, I don't know who it could be, and in a New York Times article (November 18, 1980), Frank Rich wrote: Short of Beckett, it's hard to think of a contemporary playwright who so relentlessly and unsentimentally tracks down humanity in the midst of apocalypse. A poll by the National Theatre in London selected Master Harold ...and the boys as one of the top plays of the twentieth century written in English. South African writer Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, has said: significant South African drama in English has been created, single-handed, by Athol Fugard, and Robert Berner said that he may very well be the most distinguished dramatist writing in English today. Kim Stanley Robinson has described Fugard's searing passionate plays anatomizing institutionalized prejudice, the xenophobia of the soul as the best English language plays since Shakespeare. Richard Hornby wrote: Fugard is a white South African whose plays are biting indictments of apartheid, yet at the same time are subtle and philosophical. And in the years since the fall of apartheid, Fugard has turned his pen to its aftermath and continued his search to understand humanity s place in the universe.