Athol Fugard returns to SA to direct what he says may be his last play in a theatre that bears his name. The always-tetchy Lin Sampson files this highly readable interview with the Sunday Times:
Let me be honest. I always found Fugard with his ability to romance poverty and his enduring concerns for the moral state of his homeland to be a bit of a bore. His plays were peopled by “rough and tough and from the bluff” characters grinding out a living and dopping like mad. He was the magician of the marginalised.
Now he is back home from America, sitting in a space that bears his name, The Fugard, on the outskirts of District Six. Two warehouses and an old church transformed into a 270-seater working space by the Isango Portobello company, it’s a place that already beckons the creatively hopeful.
“Dames en Here, vergun my om u voor te stel aan Breyten Breyntenbach, die maer man met die groen trui”.
Die teaterstuk Verse in my vingers, begin met hierdie bekende woorde uit Breytenbach se gedig “Bedreiging van die siekes”. In dié produksie, wat tydens die Woordfees opgevoer is, is voorlesings uit Breytenbach se werke en toonsettings van sy gedigte gebruik om hierdie groot digter se lewensverhaal te vertel.
Breytenbach word vanjaar 70. Ander groot skrywers wat vanjaar die mylpaal van 70 of 75 jaar haal, is by die Woordfees gehuldig. Breytenbach was ongelukkig nie by die fees aanwesig nie, maar Verse in my vingers het wel in sy afwesigheid sy 70 lewensjare gevier.
Musiek is deur Laurinda Hofmeyr verskaf en Johann Nel, Waldemar Schultz, Eugenie Wiggens en Hugo Theart het gedigte en ander skryfwerk van Breytenbach voorgelees. Gedigte, prosa en musiek het in die produksie soomloos in mekaar gevloei.
Daar is begin met gedigte en prosa oor Breytenbach se herkoms en familie. Hofmeyr het ‘n toonsetting van “Ek sal sterf en na my vader gaan” gesing. Daarna is Breytenbach se liefdesgedigte voorgedra en “Ek wag in my hart” is onder andere gesing.
Breytenbach se ontnugtering toe sy vrou gedurende apartheid toegang tot die land geweier is, is in sy eie woorde oorgedra. Die gehoor is bewusgemaak van Breytenbach se ambivalente gevoelens van liefde én haat teenoor Suid-Afrika.
Breytenbach se gedigte uit sy periode in die tronk is met gevoel voorgedra en so ook sy gedigte oor die dood.
Die applous aan die einde van die produksie was nie net vir die akteurs se gevoelvolle voordrag nie, maar ook vir dié meesterdigter: die maer man met die groen trui.
Hoor jou storie op die draadloos met die 2010 RSG en Sanlam het so pas die radiodramaskryfkompetisie. Jy kan ook lekker geld maak – die eerste prys is R20,000 en die tweede R10,000. Verlede jaar se eerste prys het gegaan aan Piet Steyn vir Die mynramp en die tweede prys aan Leon van Nierop vir Twyfelberg. Kompetisie besonderhede volg onderaan.
Doop jou veer in ink, want die radiostasie RSG en Sanlam se radiodramaskryfkompetisie vir 2010 is pas aangekondig.
Margot Luyt van RSG sê enigeen met bewese skryftalent kan vir die kompetisie inskryf, ongeag of hulle al voorheen ’n radiodrama aangepak het of nie.
Deelnemers moet net seker maak hulle hou by die voorgeskrewe riglyne.
Oor verlede jaar se inskryf-oes sê Luyt dit was lekker om te sien dat mense respek vir die radiodrama as genre begin ontwikkel.
Athol Fugard can’t bring himself to say the name of the new theatre named in his honour. “I’m just going to call it the District Six Theatre,” he says, pen in hand to autograph a copy of his Notebooks.
For just under an hour, we have been sitting in the front row of the Fugard. For the past half-century, Fugard, reputedly the most performed playwright in the world after Shakespeare, has chronicled the realities of life in South Africa.
Starting with the earliest surviving text, No-Good Friday, performed in the Bantu Men’s Social Centre in Johannesburg in 1958, Fugard has shown not only our wickedness, but also the soul still struggling to free itself, and to blossom in common cause with all who live in this country.
Alert! Athol Fugard is bringing his latest play, “The Train Driver” – which is set near Motherwell, Eastern Cape – to the new theatre in Cape Town that bears his name.
The Fugard Theatre will see the play’s world première on Wednesday, March 24, with preview performances from the 19th.
Here is the play’s blurb from the Fountain Theatre, where “The Train Driver” will have its US debut:
“This may be the most important one I’ve ever written as far as I’m concerned for personal reasons,” says Athol Fugard. The newest play by the world’s great playwright. Inspired by a true event. A tormented train driver is compelled to visit a makeshift graveyard in the middle of nowhere, determined to find the unmarked grave of the woman he unintentionally killed. A haunting, mesmerizing and deeply personal journey into the human soul.
Bookings are now open for the play, online at www.thefugard.com or by telephone: 021 461 4554. Here’s the Fugard Theatre’s press release:
The Train Driver, a new play written and directed by iconic South African theatre master Athol Fugard, will have its world première on 24 March 2010 on the stage of the new Fugard Theatre in Cape Town’s District Six, with preview performances from 19 March.
“For me, it is the biggest of them all,” said the 77-year old Fugard, currently in the country for rehearsals of the new play.
The Train Driver is set in an Eastern Cape graveyard outside Motherwell. Sean Taylor plays Rudolf Visagie, an emotionally disturbed train driver wandering into the graveyard of a desolate squatter camp near Port Elizabeth, trying to find the grave of a nameless woman and child. Owen Sejake is Simon Hanabe, a gravedigger who buries the nameless dead.
The play is dedicated to Pumla Lolwana and her three children – Lindani, Andile and Sesanda – who died on the railway tracks between Philippi and Nyanga on The Cape Flats on Friday 8 December 2000.
In an online interview Fugard refers to his latest play as “…a very stark reality about the state of South Africa.”
After each preview performance there will be a question-and-answer session with Athol Fugard and the cast. It will be an opportunity for the audience to talk to Athol Fugard, co-director Ross Devenish, and actors Owen Sejake and Sean Taylor about the production.
Recognised for hard-hitting, yet compassionate, political and social commentary in his work, Fugard is renowned for writing a number of internationally acclaimed plays including No-Good Friday (1958), Hello and Goodbye (1965), People are Living There (1968), Boesman and Lena (1969), Sizwe Banzi is dead, Statements after an arrest under the Immorality Act (1972), The Island (1973), Master Harold and the Boys (1982), The Road to Mecca (1984), My Children! My Africa! (1989), Sorrows and Rejoicing (2001) and Booitjie and the Oubaas (2006). The Oscar-winning film Tsotsi (2006) was also based on the novel by Fugard.
Some of Fugard’s other recent plays include Have you seen us? (2009) and Coming Home (2009), which is the sequel to Valley Song (1996).
Fugard currently lives in Southern California in the USA. He also owns a home in the Karoo, which he visits frequently.
The Fugard Theatre opened on 12 February. An emotional Fugard was there to receive the keys of the new theatre, alongside Producer Eric Abraham, Artistic Director Mark Dornford-May and Theatre Patron Minister Trevor Manuel.
“Athol Fugard is an international giant of drama who has over half a century created iconic South African plays featuring narratives of its entire people,” said Abraham.
Of the gala opening, Fugard said in an interview with Katy Chance from Business Day, “I feel truly humbled, but I could give you many names that should come before mine for the honour… The only way I can reconcile my name being put to it is to see it as a challenge. I defy any writer to sit in the auditorium and look at that stage and not want to create work for that space – it’s thrilling!”
The Fugard Theatre is having a very successful opening season with sell-out performances of Isango Portobello’s The Magic Flute – Impempe Yomlingo leading to additional dates being added to accommodate the demand for tickets.
The Fugard Theatre is in Caledon Street, Cnr of Harrington Street, District Six, Cape Town.
Performances of The Train Driver will be on Tuesdays to Saturdays at 19:30 and Sundays at 15:30.
Preview prices are R50 and normal prices (from 24th March) are Tuesdays R50, Wednesdays and Thursdays R80, Fridays and Saturdays R120 and Sundays R80.
Bookings for The Train Driver are now open and can be made at the theatre, online at www.thefugard.com or by phoning 021 461 4554.
Galgut’s story, “The Lover”, appeared in The Paris Review’s Winter 2008 issue. It has been selected alongside the likes of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Headstrong Historian”, Annie Proulx’s “Them Old Cowboy Songs”, and Alice Munro’s “Some Women”. His inclusion in the collection will only serve to enhance his position in the van of SA’s leading literary lights.
Meanwhile, news from the author is that he’s set to direct a stage production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at UCT’s Little Theatre from 18 May – 5 June. This is around the time that his next book, In a Strange Room, will appear from Penguin, so it will be quite a fraught period!
The Godot cast is heavy-hitting: it’s set to feature David Isaacs and Oscar Petersen (from Joe Barber), Graham Weir (Not the Midnight Mass) and Martin le Maitre (from TV shows like Hard Copy). Mark your calendars now!
Wole Soyinka headlined last week’s Jaipur Litfest and the reports are trickling through. Here’s Soyinka on the day he learned of his Nobel:
Jaipur: Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, the first African to have received the honour [...] told the Jaipur Literature Festival that he was shocked to win the coveted prize. Although speculations were rife about him winning the prize but the announcement came as a shock.
The normally composed writer got animated at the mention of the topic and decided to ‘entertain’ the audience with the story of his Nobel Prize. “I was on my way to Nigeria, and was stopping at Paris when the first burst of rumour happened. I alighted in Nigeria amidst the news. One of my cousins, asked me about it. I said, ‘I want to go to sleep’. This wretched cousin, I will call him a traitor, let in a Swedish journalist. The journalist said, ‘My newspaper has asked me to be with you when the announcement takes place.’ And when the announcements were made I couldn’t absorb it,” he said.
And here’s the laureate on racial profiling and terrorism:
First African Nobel laureate Akinwande Oluwole ‘Wole’ Soyinka feels that racial profiling is a “complete failure” when it comes to curbing global terrorism.
“The arrest of the Nigerian national from the flight to Detroit in December for alleged possession of explosives does not call for racial profiling of all terror suspects. The Nigerian national may have fallen into bad company. It should be inquired where he was indoctrinated. He may have been of a spiritual nature and was indoctrinated into the jihadist philosophy,” Soyinka told the media at the Jaipur Literature Festival Friday.
“It is unfair to discriminate against terror suspects on racial grounds. Several Nigerian nationals lost their lives in the London underground terror attacks and in strikes elsewhere across the globe,” said the 75-years-old Nigerian novelist, poet and playwright.
Theatre lovers are in for a treat with the official opening of the Fugard Theatre on February 12th this year – first on the planks will be the The Magic Flute, followed by The Train Driver,the new play by Athol Fugard himself, which he describes as perhaps the most important he’s ever written. Marianne Thamm catches up with Mannie Manim, the man in charge:
The sight of a smiling Mannie Manim, striding about a building site with a blue hard hat in one hand and cement dust on his sneakers, is a rather exhilarating one.
It is a vision that echoes his early involvement with the late Barney Simon in the now iconic Market Theatre, which rose from the partial debris of Joburg’s old produce market in 1976.
Manim, the recently retired artistic director of the Baxter Theatre, is clearly revelling in his new role as executive director of a truly magnificent new theatre, The Fugard, that will open soon in one of the city’s oldest, historic districts.
Hey, how come we haven’t seen this quirky, “occasional series” appearing in the LA Times before? It stretches back to 2004, and each wee snippet might be extrapolated into a proper story of its own. Pleasant, desultory reading this Sunday:
May 24, 2009 PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING Stephen Belber: ‘Is it better to write for Hollywood?’ My name is Stephen Belber and I am a playwright … and I’m not sure why. Or let me put it this way: I make a tidy living writing studio screenplays; an indie movie just came out that I wrote and directed; and if all goes well, I’ll be directing another of my scripts in the near future — all of which has led me to seriously question the Sisyphean endeavor that is playwriting. I mean let’s be serious, even Tony Kushner’s writing movies now, so what kind of wall are the rest of us banging our heads against?
March 29, 2009 PLAYWRIGHTS ON WRITING Playwright Theresa Rebeck likes to tell stories Last year I attended a cocktail party for a theater that was doing one of my plays. The artistic director was making a little presentation, introducing me to his staff and his board, and he said — in front of everybody — “Theresa’s plays are always really well-structured, but don’t hold that against her.”
Alert!Suite101.com’s Cathy Sunshine – yes, that’s her real name – has, erm, spread some light on post-apartheid fiction for the online magazine’s rather gigantic audience (last known absolute ranking on the web: a fearsome 819).
Fiction writers in SA, as Sunshine points out, have been broadening their scope since democracy’s advent, and thus present an illuminating snapshot of the country – as long as you choose the right reads. Sunshine includes work from JM Coetzee, Zakes Mda and Sello K Duiker, plus BOOK SA members Niq Mhlongo and Rozena Maart; here are her top ten recent SA novels:
For half a century, South African novelists, poets, and playwrights focused on the brutality of apartheid and the struggle for a nonracial society. Prominent writers such as André Brink, Dennis Brutus, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and Alan Paton challenged apartheid, and some of their books were banned by the racist state.
The country’s first democratic elections in 1994 ended the era of anti-apartheid protest literature. But while legalized apartheid is gone, its toxic effects linger. Recent South African novels remain concerned with race, but they also look at urgent issues in the post-apartheid society: unemployment, poverty, and economic inequality; HIV/AIDS; rape and domestic violence; xenophobia (South Africa is a magnet for immigrants); and homophobia.
Athol Fugard returns to SA to direct what he says may be his last play in a theatre that bears his name. The always-tetchy Lin Sampson files this highly readable interview with the Sunday Times:
Theatre lovers are in for a treat with the official opening of the Fugard Theatre on February 12th this year – first on the planks will be the The Magic Flute, followed by The Train Driver,the new play by Athol Fugard himself, which he describes as perhaps the most important he’s ever written. Marianne Thamm catches up with Mannie Manim, the man in charge:
Hey, how come we haven’t seen this quirky, “occasional series” appearing in the LA Times before? It stretches back to 2004, and each wee snippet might be extrapolated into a proper story of its own. Pleasant, desultory reading this Sunday:
