Drama, Modern World Resource Guide

Includes biographical, critical information, and bibliography of critical studies.

Athol Fugard, the leading playwright of South Africa, revealed the evil at the heart of the apartheid system in his home country. Several of his plays, especially Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1974) and Master Harold . . . and the Boys (1982), have been widely performed in Europe and the United States. In addition, Fugard often acts in his own works.

Includes biographical outline, information about plays, works, and bibliographies and critical studies.

A pioneer in breaking racial barriers in South African theater, Athol Fugard used theater to build bridges between blacks and whites from the 1950s to the present. Many of his plays are set in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape Province where he was raised by an English father and an Afrikaner mother.

Widely acknowledged as South Africa’s foremost dramatist, Fugard is also known as the conscience of his country for his plays, which focus on the victims of apartheid, and for his sociopolitical drama, which comments on South Africa’s nonwhite population and on the poor and dispossessed on the fringes of society.

Critical information on Valley Song.
A one-act play set in the Karoo region of South Africa in the postapartheid era; first produced in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1995; published in English in 1995.

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A literary criticism of the original 1982 play "Master Harold...and the Boys," by Athol Fugard, is presented. It examines ignorance and maturity in different levels, the admiration of one character for Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and the ironic disconnect with the egalitarianism philosophy of Tolstoy. Also explored is the role of illness in the play.

Biographical information on Fugard and information on South Africa.

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