Athol Fugard (1932–2025) was a South African theatre maker whose work examines relationships shaped by apartheid and its aftermath. His career encompasses individually written plays, collaborative theatre and performance. His publisher identifies works including Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena, The Road to Mecca, My Children! My Africa! and The Train Driver. These titles offer several entrances into his work, including questions about relationship and power.
For your historical research, the South African government's March 2025 memorial records his birth in Middelburg in 1932 and his upbringing in Port Elizabeth. For rehearsal research, identify the historical setting of each play rather than assuming one South African location or period can stand for all the others.
Collaboration belongs in the credit
When you study The Island, credit Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Its two imprisoned characters prepare a performance of Antigone while confronting the prospect that one will leave prison before the other. This combination makes practical work, friendship, resentment and theatrical representation part of the same encounter.
In your notes, credit Kani and Ntshona as collaborators in the work's authorship, with their own creative contributions. The play’s workshop process involves each participant’s documented account.
Two useful starting points for actors
In “Master Harold”…and the Boys, you follow how a white teenager's relationship with two Black waiters changes within his mother's tea room. The publisher describes the work as drawing loosely on Fugard's experience and records its 1982 Broadway production, directed by Fugard.
In rehearsal: You can study how affection, dependence and social authority can operate simultaneously. A historical system becomes dramatically specific through what one person can demand, what another risks refusing, and what their shared past makes possible. Treating a character as a representative of an argument can obscure those changing transactions.
For your reading and rehearsal, consider these interpretations alongside the complete play.
What the relationship makes visible
What makes the social world of a Fugard play playable? You encounter it in permissions, dependencies and unequal consequences. In the tea room of “Master Harold”…and the Boys, the closeness between the teenager and the two waiters exists within an arrangement that gives his words a power theirs do not have. You have to prepare both the shared relationship and that unequal authority. If you begin with the final injury already settled, you can lose the history of affection that makes the change matter.
The Island gives you a different construction. You follow two people whose survival involves working together, then watch them rehearse another play. Their production of Antigone makes representation itself part of their relationship. You can ask what preparing the performance gives them: a task, an argument, a reason to keep addressing each other, a way to imagine being heard. Each answer needs the evidence of your script. You are working through a play inside a play, where a change of audience can change the force of the same body and voice.
Across these starting points, you can hear how large public conditions enter the smallest exchange. An apparently practical instruction can carry a claim over another person. A refusal can cost more than the speaker is free to explain. Your research gives those costs their historical particulars; your acting gives the listener a person trying to accomplish something now. That combination is the reason to study the plays closely. You can keep their political force and their human contradictions present in the same encounter.
Working with the text
Try these independent study prompts with your chosen play.
- Read the whole play and choose a short exchange. Record the relevant social circumstances separately from each character's immediate request.
- Identify who can leave, interrupt, give an instruction or withhold an answer at that moment. Ground each answer in the chosen edition and the researched setting.
- Rehearse the exchange with one clear objective for each character. Let the partner's behavior affect the next tactic.
- Locate the first point where the relationship changes. What happens immediately before it? Try that transition without anticipating the eventual confrontation.
For The Island, also ask when the performers are addressing a cellmate, a character in the prisoners' play, or an imagined audience. Establish the script's conventions before deciding how to stage those shifts.
Related reading
Objective, Tactic, Obstacle, Craft.
Source for further study: Athol Fugard’s plays and biography at Concord Theatricals.