The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World. By Albert Wertheim. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000; pp. 273. $39.95 hardcover.

Abstract

One of the most celebrated African writers of a generation, Athol Fugard has come to be regarded as a great playwright throughout the world. This white South African playwright witnessed firsthand the tyranny and eventual transformation of his racially polarized country into a multicultural society. Beginning with his play No-Good Friday (1958) about black African township life, Fugard has created a large body of work which includes plays about the destructiveness of racial apartheid, the alienation within families, and the role of artists in society. Although Fugard often writes autobiographically, dramatizing scenes and characters from his past, he has refrained from documenting political events in a sweeping social allegory of South African repression. On the contrary, as Wertheim points out, Fugard emulates the minimalist staging and style of Samuel Beckett by letting his disenfranchised and alienated characters speak for themselves about their condition in an inhumane society.