Alert! Athol Fugard’s latest play, Coming Home - a sequel to Valley Song - opened in Philadelphia, USA this week, prompting a flurry of coverage on the playwright and his new work. (Coming Home first appeared on stage at the beginning of the year, as far as we can tell.)
The pick of the interviews comes from The Philadelphia Enquirer, which has Fugard waxing rather bitter on the state of SA affairs - and brings news of two new plays from his pen, Have You Seen Us?, coming in December, and The Train Driver, which will premier in Cape Town next June:
He cited the “idiocy” of Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela as president and refused to acknowledge that AIDS was caused by a virus.
“We stayed in darkness, back in the Middle Ages of witch doctors. The minister of health advised eating bananas” to counter the epidemic, and “more people were killed in that decade than died under apartheid.”
“Having once invited audiences to have hope for South Africa, I realized now I have to set the record straight,” Fugard said. In Valley Song, he played both Veronica’s mixed-race grandfather, her Oupa, and a white character called “The Author,” who had been drawn back to the farmland of his birth in the semi-desert Karoo. Fugard was born there and now owns a house he tries to visit once a year (from Southern California, where he spends much of his time) in a “return to my beginnings.”
Book details
Photo courtesy Philly.com and poster image courtesy the Wilma Theater
Please register or log in to comment
