Some Problems of a Playwright from South Africa

Abstract

Thank you for this opportunity to be self-indulgent. I'm going to talk at a personal level about some of the problems I find myself dealing with as a playwright, and as a playwright from South Africa. At the beginning of this year I returned to South Africa, more specifically my home in Port Elizabeth-a little windswept industrial town on the eastern seaboard of the country-after a six-month stay in the United States, during which I had directed two of my plays: The Road to Mecca at the Kennedy Center in Washington, and a tryout in New York at the Perry Street Theatre of my latest play, My Children! My Africa! I was desperate to be back on South African soil again, as I always am after an extended absence from it. Returning home has always been a complex and emotional experience for me. I identify passionately with my country, and the thought of any form of exile from it is to me a 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