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THE story of 'The Island,' a South African prison drama, suggests that symbolic resistance to oppression can play a role in giving birth to freedom itself.
The play's persuasiveness derives from the circumstances of its creation. 'The Island' was written and performed in South Africa in 1973 in response to the country's racist apartheid laws. The white South African dramatist Athol Fugard had begun a theater company, the Serpent Players, to encourage theatrical collaboration between black and white artists. Together with the black actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, he wrote a two-character play based on the experiences of an actor they knew who had been sent to Robben Island, the notorious prison where political dissidents, including Nelson Mandela, were held.
In 1974, 'The Island' was presented on Broadway in repertory with another drama by the three men, 'Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,' both directed by Mr. Fugard. Mr. Kani and Mr. Ntshona shared the 1975 Tony Award for best actor for their work in the two plays. Now, nearly 30 years later, the performers, who are both 60 and who spent time in jail under apartheid, will reprise their original roles in a production of 'The Island' that begins performances on Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater.
Athol Fugard Biography
This version was conceived in 1999 when the eminent English director Peter Brook was presenting his play 'The Man Who' in Johannesburg at the Market Theater, which is renowned for its daring theatrical depictions of race relations during apartheid. Mr. Kani, who is the Market's artistic director, asked Mr. Brook to help him and Mr. Ntshona restage 'The Island' for a production by the Market Theater. The men worked on it at Mr. Brook's theater in Paris, Les Bouffes du Nord, and since then it has toured to Europe and America as Mr. Kani's schedule allows. It is being presented in Brooklyn by the Market Theater and the Royal National Theater in London.
Speaking recently by telephone from Johannesburg, Mr. Kani recalled the conditions that inspired the play. 'Athol was directing a production of 'Antigone' by Sophocles with a black actor named Shark, who could never remember his lines. I was the prompter, and Athol arranged for me to be a soldier onstage so I could whisper his lines to him during the show, but Shark was arrested before it opened. Then we heard he was doing a one-man version of 'Antigone' in prison during lunch hour, and we wondered how he did it, because we knew he could never get the lines right.'
'At that time, it was forbidden to mention that Robben Island even existed, so we knew it would be illegal,' Mr. Kani said about 'The Island.' 'But we wanted to make a play about prison because we all knew so many people who were in jail, including my brother.' Mr. Kani's brother Xolile was killed by the police in the 1980's.
According to Mr. Fugard, performing 'Antigone' in South Africa was just as dangerous as performing 'The Island.' ' 'Antigone' is the most powerful political play ever written,' Mr. Fugard said by telephone from what he calls his 'home away from home' in San Diego. 'It is the first play that raised the issue of standing up and being counted in a situation that involved oppression and injustice. The entire time we were working on it, the government was harassing us, barging into rehearsals and confiscating manuscripts. Several members of the group were arrested and sent to Robben Island on trumped-up charges.'
The central action of 'The Island' is the effort by two prisoners to stage 'Antigone' as a form of protest in prison. The story of a grieving woman forbidden to give her brother an honorable burial, the play has always resonated with political dissidents, as has Antigone's choice to sacrifice her life in a challenge to the unjust laws of Thebes. 'The Island' works on three different levels that heighten its universality: Antigone's burial of her brother defies the repressive state, just as the characters in 'The Island' denounce apartheid by performing 'Antigone' for their guards and fellow inmates on Robben Island, at the same time that Mr. Kani, Mr. Ntshona and Mr. Fugard were risking arrest by staging a play that challenged the government.
Mr. Fugard remarked on the parallels to another performance of the play in a different time and place. 'During the German occupation of France,' he said, 'Jean Anouilh produced a version of 'Antigone' in Paris. In an exact parallel to the situation on Robben Island, the first five rows of German jackbooted officers admired what they thought was a straightforward piece of classical culture, but the French audience behind them knew what it was about.' Speaking of the actor Shark's performance of 'Antigone' at Robben Island, Mr. Fugard continued, 'the Boers were in the first row and enjoyed it, but the prisoners were the ones who got the real message.'
Now that apartheid no longer exists in South Africa, Mr. Fugard said, 'The Island' has 'become a much more general statement about the question of political prisoners.'
In London (where the current production was presented at the Royal National Theater in 2000 and again at the Old Vic in 2002), Mr. Fugard said: 'The press made the point that the play had not dated because it was about political prisoners and, God knows, there are enough of them in the world at this time. You can talk about Guantanamo Bay or about what Saddam Hussein does to prisoners on his side but there is resonance on both sides of the fence.'
Putting on theater in prison may seem inconsequential. But seeing Mr. Kani and Mr. Ntshona perform 'The Island' in 2001 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington made me recall informal performances I had seen in a South African jail where I was briefly held after observing a protest demonstration in Johannesburg in 1992.
Like the characters in 'The Island,' the several hundred black men I shared a cell with refused to be dehumanized by the squalor of their conditions. First, they sang, joining their voices in rough and vital renditions of protest songs they had grown up with. Then they danced, hopping to the relentless beat of a step known as the Toyi Toyi. In a recent documentary film about the significance of South African protest music, 'Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony,' a white former South African police officer recalls the fear he felt when he saw throngs of black demonstrators dancing this simple step. In jail in South Africa, I sensed that the officers who guarded us also felt intimidated by the performance they saw through the bars.
It was a demonstration of solidarity that unified the prisoners into what seemed like a single organism of shared opposition to the system that gave the guards their jobs, their power and their identities. Even if they did not hear the scatological insults directed against them, or pretended not to hear, the guards could not help but know that the rhythms of protest were undiminished by conditions meant to silence them.
As the only white man in the cell, I was surprised to be invited to join in and exhilarated by the energy of people whose actions were animated by unwavering faith in the justice of their cause.
After hours of song and dance, one exhausted man asked if we could take a break. A voice in the crowd shouted back: 'Why should we be quiet? We can do anything we want. We're in jail!' The man yelled 'We're in jail!' as if it were a cry of emancipation. The men had used songs, dances and jokes to transform the prison into a place of freedom. Outside the jail, the invisible bars of apartheid restricted their every move, but inside they could do whatever they wanted, and what they wanted was to proclaim their right to be free. It was so intoxicating that when the guards asked if I wanted to leave the cell, I declined. Why would anyone want to leave a celebration like that to enter a grim world of soldiers with guns and drooling police dogs?
When Mr. Mandela was freed from Robben Island and saw thousands dancing and singing protest songs in front of the presidential palace in Pretoria, he called it a tidal wave of democracy. Two years later, he danced the Toyi Toyi to celebrate his election to the presidency of South Africa.
The artists who created 'The Island' and the prisoners who inspired it understood that theater alone was not going to change their world. But Mr. Kani, Mr. Ntshona and Mr. Fugard built a haven in the theater for freedom that could not yet be achieved in the society at large. In jails, in theaters and on the streets, black South Africans expressed their opposition to tyranny with a sense of inevitability that transformed their collective performances into a self-fulfilling prophecy of freedom, willing their liberation into existence by performing as if it had never been in doubt.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Athol Fugard (born 11 June 1932) is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director who writes in English, best known for his political plays opposing the South African system of apartheid and for the 2005 Academy-Award winning film of his novel Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood.[1] He is an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting, and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.[2] For academic year 2000–2001, he was the IU Class of 1963 Wells Scholar Professor at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana.[3] The recipient of many awards, honors, and honorary degrees, including the 2005 Order of Ikhamanga in Silver 'for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre' from the government of South Africa,[4] he is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[5]
Personal history
Athol Fugard was born as Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, in Middelburg, Eastern Cape, South Africa, on 11 June 1932, to English and Afrikaner parents; his mother, Elizabeth Magdalena (née Potgieter), an Afrikaner, operated first a general store and then a lodging house; his father, Harold, was a disabled former jazz pianist of Irish, English and French Huguenot descent.[1][6][7] In 1935, his family moved to Port Elizabeth.[8] In 1938, he began attending primary school at Marist Brothers College, a private Catholic school founded by the Marist Brothers[9]; after being awarded a scholarship, he enrolled at a local technical college for secondary education and then matriculated at the University of Cape Town, but he dropped out of the university in 1953, a few months before final examinations.[1] He left home, hitchhiked to North Africa with a friend, and then spent the next two years working in the Far East on a steamer ship, the SS Graigaur,'[1] where he began writing, an experience 'celebrated' in his 1999 autobiographical play The Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage.[10]
In September 1956, he married Sheila Meiring, a University of Cape Town Drama School student whom he had met the previous year.[1][11] Now known as Sheila Fugard, she is a novelist and poet, and the Fugards' daughter, Lisa Fugard, is also a novelist.[12]
The Fugards moved to Johannesburg in 1958, where he worked as a clerk in a 'Native Commissioners' Court,' which 'made him keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid.'[1] The political impetus of Fugard's plays brought him into conflict with the national government; in order to avoid prosecution, he would have his plays produced and published outside South Africa.[11][13]
He and his wife live in San Diego, California,[14] where he teaches as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting, and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD),[2] and maintain a residence in South Africa.[13]
On 12 February 2010 a theatre named in honor of Athol Fugard, The Fugard Theatre, opened in The District Six area of Cape Town, South Africa. The theatre has opened with performances by the Isango Portobello theatre company and a new play written and directed by Athol Fugard, entitled The Train Driver, will play at the theatre in March 2010.
CareerEarly period
In 1958, Fugard organized 'a multiracial theatre for which he wrote, directed, and acted,' writing and producing several plays for it, including No-Good Friday (1958) and Nongogo (1959), in which he and his colleague black South African actor Zakes Mokae performed.[1]
After returning to Port Elizabeth in the early 1960s, Athol and Sheila Fugard started The Circle Players,[1] which derives its name from their influential production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, by Bertolt Brecht.[15]
In 1961, in Johannesburg, Fugard and Mokae starred as the brothers Morris and Zachariah in the single-performance world première of Fugard's play The Blood Knot (revised and retitled Blood Knot in 1987), directed by Barney Simon.[16]
In 1962, Fugard publicly supported the Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959–1994), an international boycott of South African theatres due to their segregated audiences, leading to government restrictions on him and surveillance of him and his theatre by the Secret Police, and leading him to have his plays published and produced outside South Africa.[13]
Lucille Lortel produced The Blood Knot at the Cricket Theatre, Off Broadway, in New York City, in 1964, 'launch[ing]' Fugard's 'American career.'[17]
In the 1960s, Fugard formed the Serpent Players, whose name derives from their first venue, the former snake pit at the zoo,[13] 'a group of black actors worker-players who earned their living as teachers, clerks, and industrial workers, and cannot thus be considered amateurs in the manner of leisured whites,' developing and performing plays 'under surveillance of the Security Police.'[18]
Their plays utilized minimalist sets and props improvised from whatever materials were available; often staged in black areas for a night, the cast would move on to the next venue, such as a dimly-lit church hall or community center, where the audience consisted of poor migrant labourers and the residents of hostels in the townships.[citation needed]
According to Kruger,
the Serpent Players used Brecht's elucidation of gestic acting, dis-illusion, and social critique, as well as their own experience of the satiric comic routines of urban African vaudeville, to explore the theatrical force of Brecht's techniques, as well as the immediate political relevance of a play about land distribution. Their work on the Caucasian Chalk Circle and, a year later, on Antigone[13] led directly to the creation, in 1966, of what is still [2004] South Africa's most distinctive Lehrstück [learning play]: The Coat. Based on an incident at one of the many political trials involving the Serpent Players, The Coat dramatized the choices facing a woman whose husband, convicted of anti-apartheid political activity, left her only a coat and instructions to use it.[18]
In The Coat, Kruger observes, 'The participants were engaged not only in representing social relationships on stage but also on enacting and revising their own dealings with each other and with institutions of apartheid oppression from the law courts downward,' and 'this engagement testified to the real power of Brecht's apparently utopian plan to abolish the separation of player and audience and to make of each player a 'statesman' or social actor.. Work on The Coat led indirectly to the Serpent Players' most famous and most Brechtian productions, Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973).'[18]
Fugard developed these two plays for the Serpent Players in workshops, working extensively with John Kani and Winston Ntshona,[18] publishing them in 1974 with his own play Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (1972). The authorities considered the title of The Island, which alludes to Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela was being held, too controversial, so Fugard and the Serpent Players used the alternative title The Hodoshe Span (Hodoshe being slang for prison work gang).[citation needed]
These plays 'evinced a Brechtian attention to the demonstration of gest and social situations and encouraged audiences to analyze rather than merely applaud the action'; for example, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, which 'combined Brechtian critique and vaudevillian irony-–especially in Kani's virtuoso improvisation-–even provoked an African audience's critical interruption and interrogation of the action.'[18] While dramatizing frustrations in the lives of his audience members, the plays simultaneously drew them into the action and attempted to have them analyze the situations of the characters in Brechtian fashion, according to Kruger.[18]
Blood Knot was filmed by the BBC Television in 1967, with Fugard's collaboration, starring the Jamaican actor, Charles Hyatt as Zachariah and Fugard himself as Morris, as in the original 1961 première in Johannesburg.[19] Less pleased than Fugard, the South African government of B. J. Vorster confiscated Fugard's passport.[6][20] Four years later, in 1971, partially as the result of international protest on his behalf, the South African travel restrictions against Fugard eased, allowing him to fly to England again, in order to direct Boesman and Lena.[citation needed]
Later period
'MASTER HAROLD..and the boys, written in 1982, incorporates 'strong autobiographical matter'; nonetheless 'it is fiction, not memoir,' as Cousins: A Memoir and some of Fugard's other works are subtitled.[21]
Fugard demonstrates that he opposes injustices committed by both the government and by its chief political opposition in his play My Children! My Africa!, which attacks the ANC for deciding to boycott African schools, based on recognition of the damage that boycott would cause a generation of African pupils.[citation needed]
His post-apartheid plays, such as Valley Song, The Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage and his latest play, Victory (2007), focus more on personal issues than on political issues.[22][23]
I have to be back among the versions of the compiler so that it can generate the latest version of lazarus. 2 6 6 6 allegheny steam locomotive. I finally updated the compiler causes the problem.
The Fugard Theatre, in The District Six area of Cape Town, South Africa, opened with performances by the Isango Portobello theatre company in February 2010 and a new play written and directed by Athol Fugard, entitled The Train Driver, will play at the theatre in March 2010. [24]
Fugard's plays are produced internationally, have won multiple awards, and several have been made into films, including among their actors Fugard himself.[25]
His film debut as a director occurred in 1992, when he co-directed the adaptation of his play The Road to Mecca with Peter Goldsmid, who also wrote the screenplay.[25]
The film adaptation of his novel Tsotsi (Afrikaans for hoodlum), written and directed by Gavin Hood, won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006.[25]
Plays
Bibliography
Filmography
The Island By Athol Fugard Pdf Reader Free
Selected awards and nominations
The Island By Athol Fugard Pdf Reader Online
The Island By Athol Fugard Pdf Readers
See alsoNotes
References
Athol Fugard PictureExternal linksThe Island By Athol Fugard Pdf Reader Download
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