With respect to the plays Sizwe Bansi is Dead, The Island. Apartheid, Athol Fugard, John Kani, Oxford University Press. Fugard explained that the Sizwe Bansi script had already been published in Plays.
Two men grunt and sweat under the sun, heaving wheelbarrows of sand from one place to another. In the distance there's noise, but is it the crash of the surf or the angry buzz of flies? Everywhere, but never seen, the unblinking gaze of the warden.
Athol Fugard's The Island, created with actor-activists John Kani and Winston Ntshona for Cape Town's Space theatre, may be 40 years old this year, but it has the rough majesty of a classic. While Robben Island itself has long since been given over to birdlife and tour groups snapping pictures of Mandela's cell, this short but potent play has lost little of its force. In an era of Guantánamo and secret terrorism courts, there seem to be more Islands in the world than ever.
The Young Vic's new studio staging, by the award-winning young director Alex Brown, keeps contemporary parallels at a distance, and is all the more suffocatingly effective for it. On a shallow platform-cum-cell built up on sand, sparely designed by Holly Pigott, inmates Winston and John act out the routines they have performed every day for the last three years: squabbling over a bucket of cold water, fantasising about home, doing their utmost to carve out a sense of self against an indifferent system. But that isn't all they're doing – a prison entertainment evening is being planned, and John attempts to persuade Winston that together they should stage a scene from Sophocles. Winston, tongue-tied and uncertain, is doubtful: 'Take your Antigone and shove it up your ass,' he snarls.
The pair are as indissolubly bound as Vladimir and Estragon, and Daniel Poyser and Jimmy Akingbola conjure a strong sense of men whose relationship – tender, comic and at times scaldingly resentful – has all the pressures and pains of a still-young marriage. Poyser's itchily expressive John is forever battering against the prison bars; Akingbola's Winston has lost the key to his own self somewhere deep inside. When news arrives that one is to get early release, you can't work out whether they will hug each other or lash out. This might be liberation, but it's also a divorce.
Fugard's script has its clunks, and you feel the actors could mine still deeper the men's discovery of their similarities as well as their differences. But when Winston swallows down his fears and goes on stage as Sophocles's outcast heroine, pleading bitterly for justice against the depredations of the powerful, it not only suggests how art can offer its own freedoms: it has the force of a wave crashing down on us all.
• Did you catch this show – or any other recently? Tell us about it
using #Iwasthere
using #Iwasthere
I have always had slightly mixed feelings about the South African playwright Athol Fugard. I would rate his Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island, on which he collaborated in the 1970s with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, as among the supreme testaments of the dehumanising nature of apartheid. Fugard's 1982 autobiographical play Master Harold and the Boys is a deeply moving study of ineradicable liberal guilt. Other works, such as Dimetos (an allegorical play about a man living in rural exile with his niece) and A Lesson from Aloes (in which a white Afrikaner hosts a farewell dinner for his black activist friend), strike me as top-heavy with symbolism. But watching a new two-hour documentary about Fugard, by award-winning director Tony Palmer (Bird on a Wire, with Leonard Cohen; 200 Motels, with Frank Zappa), I felt I got a new insight into both the man and his times.
Palmer's prime achievement is to see Fugard's work in the context of South African history. It is astonishing to watch Hendrik Verwoerd, who in the 1950s was the principal architect of racial separatism, blandly describing apartheid as 'a policy of good neighbourliness'. It is also horrifying to see again documentary footage of the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, in which 69 people were killed and 180 wounded when police opened fire on demonstrators protesting against new laws restricting non-white movements. Fugard recalls being in London at the time and seeing the images of Sharpeville in an evening paper. As he recalls that moment, he simply buries his head in his hands in silent despair.
The film reminds one just what Fugard was up against, both politically and culturally, in writing about marginalised people in the South Africa of the 1960s and 70s. Not only was apartheid in operation, Fugard had to work to enlist the help of the people he was seeking to champion. Kani was a militant supporter of ANC when he first collaborated with Fugard in a drama workshop: he recalls that he had been taught to hate whites in general and to believe that, when the revolution came, his first duty would be to kill them. But Fugard was also, in setting up small theatre groups in Cape Town and Johannesburg, defying a tradition that associated theatre with warmed-up versions of West End hits. Antony Sher recalls the sheer astonishment of going to see Fugard's Hello and Goodbye in late 1960s Cape Town: 'To see on a South African stage, a play about two destitute poor whites was like a blow in the face.' It made Sher determined to pursue a career in theatre.
Fugard's obstinacy and courage emerge strongly from Palmer's film. His father was a liberal-minded ex-jazz pianist, descended from Manchester immigrants. His mother, who ran a tea shop in Port Elizabeth, came from a Calvinist, Afrikaans background that left an even more decisive mark on the young Athol. As the comic actor Pieter-Dirk Uys says: 'Athol's plays are really Afrikaans works translated into English.' But it is also the physical context that helps to explain the man. When we see Fugard wandering around the semi-desert Karroo region that was his homeland, we understand how its 'Calvinist landscape', as he describes it, has shaped the bone-dry austerity of his plays. There is a revealing moment when we see him visiting the Port Elizabeth public library and recalling how he would go to the top floor to read the novels of William Faulkner. 'He encouraged me,' says Fugard, 'to tell regionally specific stories without fear or compromise.'
What also comes across is the high price Fugard and his fellow artists had to pay to practise their art. He and his wife, Sheila, were constantly harassed by state security police. Their passports were taken away in 1967, and they were encouraged to believe that their best bet was to take a one-way exit permit. For Kani and Ntshona, it was even worse. Palmer uses footage of them jointly receiving the Best Actor award at the 1975 Broadway Tonys, for their performances in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead. With great dignity, they say a brief 'thank you' as they receive a standing ovation from the black-tie audience. But no sooner did they return to South Africa than they were arrested and imprisoned. Theatre was part of the struggle in South Africa. As Janet Suzman says, 'Athol's plays were always driven by a moral outrage and, when you have an enemy, your aim is sure and true.'
What of Fugard's post-apartheid years? This is less vividly sketched, although at one point in Palmer's film he says: 'I think I failed. Our whole generation failed. We didn't get it right.' It's not altogether clear whether he is offering an indictment of today's ANC-led South Africa, which has its own restrictive laws, or whether he is suggesting that writing and performing plays was an ineffectual means of countering apartheid. If the latter, I think he is wrong. His work helped expose the inhumanity, injustice and blind stupidity of the system to audiences around the world. That is no small achievement; and the reason why, on his 80th birthday, we should remember this fearless, flinty, obdurate Afrikaner.
•Falls the Shadow, a documentary by Tony Palmer, will be screened on Sky Arts on 8 June.