Word: fugard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Athol Fugard's great gift as a playwright has been an almost journalistic evocation of the distorting impact of apartheid on blacks and whites in his native South Africa, coupled with a lyric ability to lift those observations to the level of metaphor. It is not enough for an artist to be right-minded on even the most potent political issues of his day. To earn a lasting place in literature, to rank with Ibsen or Shaw or Brecht, he must also demonstrate subtlety of craft, power of language and insight into character -- and probably must reach beyond his immediate...
...Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., last week, have no black characters and concern wholly different kinds of repression and liberation. Pigs, about a Soviet World War II deserter, as yet amounts to an unfinished work. Road, if not as poignant or politically apt as Master Harold, is Fugard's wisest, most balanced and most nearly universal play...
...regarded as normal. His attitude echoes the values of a police state; when Road opened at Yale in 1984, then more effectively at Britain's National Theater in 1985, the pastor seemed a humbug, professing affection for an old friend while ruthlessly trying to have his way. In Charleston, Fugard directed and also played the pastor. He found great sympathy in the man and showed compassion for the common throng's yearning -- in this or any society -- for ritual pieties as an alternative to reason...
Spoleto's brief production would not have been possible were it not for London's, which provided the other two members of the cast. Yvonne Bryceland, a fellow South African for whom Fugard wrote the role of the folk artist, won an Olivier Award, the West End's equivalent of a Tony, for her performance. At Charleston, she once again convincingly blended the workaday and the visionary, making an audience see glory even in Douglas Heap's set -- in truth, reminiscent of a tatty disco. Her manic scurrying in denial of advancing age was a shrewd counterpoint to the prematurely...
...threesome falter but once, as they move toward the climax of the play. They need to take more time, to let each line sink in, and we would feel the shattering moment with all of its power. All in all, though, director and cast do great justice to Master Fugard...