Athol Fugard’s latest play, The Captain’s Tiger, is currently on at the Pretoria State Theatre – to mixed reviews. Playwright Charles Fourie speaks to him, and Andrew Wilson gives his views on the play
The first time I encountered Athol Fugard was in print. As a first-year student I was given a copy of a collection of his plays. Dreaming of writing plays myself one day, I read Fugard’s collection that same night, and found myself in the early hours of the morning with an empty bottle of Old Brown Sherry. But I was filled to the brim with what I felt were three plays that captured the essence of people’s long journey of reconciliation with the self.
A few years later I met up with Fugard again. This time he was on stage in his own play, continuing his journey in A Place with the Pigs. The play, I felt, was misunderstood by audiences and critics, as Fugard moved closer to the psyche of the self as outsider, hiding out in the pigsty, attempting to reconcile himself with his environment.
The third time we met was in the flesh, for this interview, which would confirm my reverence for him as a playwright and reaffirm his journey as storyteller, theatre craftsman and insomniac …
Charles Fourie: mister Fugard?
Athol Fugard: Athol.
CF: Athol?
AF: That’s right, Athol.
CF: I haven’t got many questions. I’ll stick to talking about writing.
AF: Go ahead, go ahead.
CF: In this new play you’ve written, Captain’s Tiger, you’ve gone back to the beginnings of your writing?
AF: That’s right. The play is very strongly autobiographical … when I was 20 years old, I hitch-hiked up Africa and ended up on an old steamer that went out to the far east, Japan, Singapore. It was on that ship that I made my first real attempt at being a writer. I didn’t know anything about theatre yet, so I was going to write a novel. The great South African novel la Tolstoy.
CF: Why Tolstoy?
AF: He was my great hero in my reading youth, and he still is. I’ve just finished reading Anna Karenina again.
CF: So the writing started on that ship?
AF: Yes. There’s a moment in Captain’s Tiger when the character Owen Sejake plays asks me: “Wy is it that you write so much?” and I answer him in this fanakalo sort of English: “Ever since Tiger was small small bambino; Tiger very much like words … no good play cricket; no good play rugby; no good play with other boys; no good play with girls. But when Tiger read a book or write a story Tiger feel OK, Tiger feel safe.” So that’s where it all really started, the writing.
CF: And playwriting?
AF: Much later. I was about 24 or 25 when I left the ship and I got a job as a SABC news reporter. They transferred me to Cape Town and there I met my wife. She had just finished drama school and wanted to be an actress. It was in talking with her that I discovered theatre as another option in my life.
CF: What was it about theatre as opposed to the novel that grabbed you?
AF: I took to theatre like a fish to water. I discovered that I was fascinated in particular with language in the way it lives in the spoken word, what happens with it in people’s mouths. I enjoy beautiful prose … but I am excited to see and hear how people try to reveal themselves in speech … how much we can actually communicate and how much we don’t manage to say. Dialogue is iceberg territory where you see very little above the water of the real mass that is hidden beneath.
CF: You have travelled a long road with writing within the South African idiom, a regional sense of its people and the places they inhabit, yet you’ve always avoided being labelled a protest playwright.
AF: Absolutely. Most of the protest theatre bored me immensely. I mean, if you want to make a political statement or message, get yourself a soapbox. Theatre is powerful enough on its own, you don’t need to write political pamphlets for theatre. Tell the story and forget about the message.
CF: How do you go about writing a play?
AF: There is a pattern. It always starts with an image or something I read somewhere or heard, or that has happened to me. I put these into my notebook and they lie there fallow for quite a long time … gestating. I’ve never written immediately about something that grabbed my interest. Take Captain’s Tiger. It took me 46 years before I was ready to write it. I let these seminal images gestate in my subconscious until they actually present themselves in demand and claim that their time has come and that I must write them.
CF:So how do you know that this seminal image or idea is ready to be written?
AF: Well, it’s a bit like giving birth. You have the seed in you and the baby tells you when it is ready to be born. You have to obey. Once I sense this, then I know the time has come to write the play. Then follows a period where I make more notes. I live with this central image and I pull things into it from other areas of my life and I just assemble this whole mess of chaotic material. That is a process that can take a couple of months, and then again instinctively I sense that I have accumulated enough, I put pen to paper. I have beautiful pens you know. And I write number one in the top right-hand corner and I open my first brackets for my stage directions and I start writing and I stick with the damn thing until it is finished. This takes me through about four to five drafts and then I stick it into a computer and print it out and give it to Mannie Manim [theatre producer] to read.
CF: Writer’s block? And not the type where you just don’t feel like writing.
AF: I’ve had one particular phase like that and I’ll tell you it is absolute hell, absolute living hell. There is a reference in Captain’s Tiger where this young would- be Tolstoy says: “You know you’ve got it somewhere inside you, but you just can’t find it and get it out and put it on paper … ” I’ve been there and I just couldn’t get it out, and I finally broke it with A Lesson from Aloes where I was in command of my craft again. There are, of course, famous cases of writers who don’t get out of it. Like old Dashiel Hammit … the man who wrote The Maltese Falcon. He tried all sorts of ploys but could never reconnect .
CF: As a playwright who prefers to be subjectively involved with your works by either directing or acting in them, what do you make of it when the critical response is that you stand in the way of your work?
AF: The only reason I direct or act in my own work is because I feel I have a degree of talent as a director and an actor. But, if I never acted again I would miss it only because I enjoy being on stage with my play. If I never directed again, I would miss the camaraderie of the rehearsal-room and the process that leads to this play finally being on stage. But, if I couldn’t write … that will be the end for me.
CF: I just directed a play of my own again (Crime Babies) and the response was I stood in the way of my work.
AF: Don’t listen to those people. It’s rubbish. Write it off. Critics have given me too much bad advice in the past. I remember Kenneth Tynan demolishing The Blood Knot in London. Today Tynan is in his grave and The Blood Knot isn’t. I was once told that my play is too specifically written for a South African audience, and that I should write in a more universal sense … for an English-speaking audience … can you believe advice like that? Thank God I’ve read my Tolstoy and my William Faulkner to know that by virtue of their regionalism they became universal. I have never benefited from a critic’s advice … they see themselves as performers at the expense of your work. If you want advice, go stand at the back of the theatre during a performance of your play and watch the audience. They’ll tell you what works and what doesn’t. If I was ever to be a critic … just for a few months, then I would open every review with this line: “This is one man’s opinion, it is not the truth!”
CF: South African theatre is dangerously moving into a sphere of guilt and over- compensation, trying to come to terms with a national identity rather than a personalised one. Phrases like “socio- political responsibilities” are thrown around.
AF: Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Please Charles. What is that? The death of theatre is when academics, philosophers, critics and politicians try to create agendas for art. If you want to look after art, then just let the artist do his thing. Don’t threaten him with agendas. What is that phrase again?
CF: Socio-political responsibilities.
AF: [Bursting into laughter for the first time during the interview] Oh my God. Will you buy a ticket for that? Write from your heart man, just tell your stories. That is what has come to settle with me in my old age. The sense of storytelling, and I’m doing it now again in Captain’s Tiger. I stand in front of the audience and I almost say: Once upon a time there was … I tell the story. The beautiful Barney Simon used to say, and I quote him: “There will always be theatre because God likes to watch stories.” Tell stories about people, not ideas.
CF: It’s not always easy to do that. To make your work transcend the immediate demands of critics or sometimes even audiences.
AF: If you’re going to try and transcend, you’re not going to. If you’re going to attempt to write the great universal work, you won’t. Transcendence comes by itself. You can’t create transcendence … you can’t create the universal. It is already in your story, in you as a writer and when you tell that story about those two derelict coloured people [Boesman and Lena] trekking around the mudflats of the Swartkopsriver, you have to stay focused on the mud between Lena’s toes, you have to stay focused on Boesman’s empty bottle of cheap ship sherry, and your work will transcend by its own virtue of truth.
CF: Uhm. Well, I think that’s it for now. I suppose I could ask you more questions, maybe even clever ones.
AF: You’ve asked me good questions. Let me leave you with a last thing to end your piece off with: sometimes when I have insomnia, the way I put myself to sleep is I imagine that it is my birthday, maybe my 90th, and I am seated at the head of this long table. There are chairs for all the characters I have created in 40 years of writing, and my problem – and this is what eventually puts me to sleep: the seating of my characters around the table. Who sits next to whom? Because you can’t just put anyone next to Boesman.Who the hell would want to sit next to old Boesman? That’s how I deal with my insomnia.
The world premiere of The Captain’s Tiger is at Pretoria’s State Theatre until August 23 and at the Civic Theatre in Johannesburg from September 4. Fourie’s Crime Babies is at the Market Theatre until September 6