Apartheid in  cut both ways. The white Afrikaner playwright Athol Fugard, who has died aged 92, was not allowed inside a black township in his home country for many years, so was heavily reliant on black actors keeping him informed on how life was – and wasn’t – for them and their families.

His collaboration with two of them, John Kani and , from the township of New Brighton near Fugard’s home in Port Elizabeth, in the early 1970s, resulted in three extraordinary plays; they dealt with the injustices and absurdities of the apartheid era in profoundly moving dramas of great eloquence and dignity of spirit.

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### Athol Fugard obituary

South African playwright whose work dealt with the injustices and absurdities of the apartheid era

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**Date:** Sun 9 Mar 2025 13.22 EDT  
**Last modified:** Tue 11 Mar 2025 05.42 EDT

Apartheid in  cut both ways. The white Afrikaner playwright Athol Fugard, who has died aged 92, was not allowed inside a black township in his home country for many years, so was heavily reliant on black actors keeping him informed on how life was – and wasn’t – for them and their families.

His collaboration with two of them, John Kani and , from the township of New Brighton near Fugard’s home in Port Elizabeth, in the early 1970s, resulted in three extraordinary plays; they dealt with the injustices and absurdities of the apartheid era in profoundly moving dramas of great eloquence and dignity of spirit.

### A Place with the Pigs

1988, directed by Fugard at the National, with Jim Broadbent as a Soviet army deserter and Linda Bassett as his scavenging wife, was a metaphorical reflection, he said, on his protracted battle with alcoholism. He sobered up as apartheid crumbled and then faced the even sterner challenge of writing about his country in a totally new way, much as political playwrights in Europe had to adjust with the fall of communism.

Not everyone felt that Fugard succeeded, but My Children! My Africa!, which arrived in the National Theatre repertory as Mandela was released from prison in 1990, anticipated trouble ahead: the black township schoolmaster, played by Kani, is murdered by a mob after his star pupil rejects literature in favour of political activism; another pupil, a white girl played by Fugard’s daughter Lisa Fugard, achieves a more hopeful political maturity.

His plays became calmer, more conciliatory. Playland at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 1993 was warmly received as his first post-apartheid piece – the story of two men, one black, one white, both haunted by a violent past, finding forgiveness and reconciliation in an amusement park on New Year’s Eve in 1989.

With the election of Mandela as president in 1994, Fugard expressed relief at being unburdened of the responsibility he had felt as a writer.

Sorrows and Rejoicings (2001)  in Kilburn, north London, was the first of his plays to be written abroad, in California, where he taught at the university in San Diego; an exiled poet returns home to face the three women he left behind, a white wife, a “coloured” mistress, and a mixed-race daughter.

Nothing was perfect in the new South Africa, and Fugard became only slightly less angry with the government of Thabo Mbeki as he was with earlier regimes. But he never sold up at home, and was very moved to have a  named in his honour in Cape Town in 2006. He wrote his first play in 10 years, The Train Driver, for the Fugard theatre, and his production ran at .

The new play, like so many, was a two-hander, and a deeply disturbing one. The figures in a bleak landscape were a black grave-digger and a white railwayman haunted by the ghosts of a mother and her three small children from a nearby squatters’ camp who stood on the track, on a windswept plain on the edge of Cape Town, where such distressing suicides are common. The driver had turned the tragedy in on himself and had lost his wife, his job and his sanity.

Fugard published his Notebooks 1960-1977, edited by Mary Benson, in 1983, and Cousins: A Memoir in 1994. They form one of the most courageous and illuminating artistic testaments of our time. Gavin Hood’s 2005 film of Fugard’s 1980 novel, , won the Oscar for best foreign language film.

Fugard’s first marriage ended in divorce in 2015. He is survived by his second wife, Paula Fourie, a writer and academic, whom he married in 2016, and their children, Halle and Lannigan, and by Lisa, the daughter from his first marriage.

_Athol Harold Lannigan Fugard, playwright, born 11 June 1932; died 8 March 2025_

This article was amended on 10 March 2025.  had his passport withdrawn by the government of BJ Vorster, not that of PW Botha as stated in an earlier version.
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