Athol Fugard (born 1932) is a South African playwright known for his subtle, poignant descriptions of the racial problems in his country.Athol Fugard was born on June 11, 1932, in Middelburgh, a small...
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Athol Fugard is the most important South African playwright and the first to have an international reputation. His plays command audiences the world over, despite their local origins and idiom. He has...
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Critical Essay by Mary Benson
"My job," Athol Fugard has said, "is to witness as truthfully as I can the nameless and destitute of one little corner of the world." Packed i...
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Critical Essay by Athol Fugard
[It was during a period in Europe in 1960 that] I began to keep a notebook. It became a daily ritual to record anything that happened to me which seemed of significance&...
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Critical Essay by Richard Eder
Athol Fugard's plays about the knife-edge life of blacks and coloreds in South Africa furnish some of the strongest and most moving stage literature being written...
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Critical Essay by Edith Oliver
If ever there was a born dramatist, it is the South African Athol Fugard…. ["Nongogo"], one of his earliest, was written and performed in South Afri...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
Fugard has not only become South Africa's leading dramatist, he has also, as much as any man, made the world conscious of the horrors of apartheid. But good as some...
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Critical Essay by Terry Curtis Fox
Athol Fugard is a political tragedian, a very rare kind of writer indeed. His characters—sometimes consciously, more often not—revolt against the socia...
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Critical Essay by John Mellors
In Athol Fugard's only novel [Tsotsi], which has been lying unpublished for 20 years, the protagonist is a murderer because he is a victim—victim of a r...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
Except for the overexplicit title, all is well with Athol Fugard's "Master Harold" … and the boys. Fugard has now perfected his way of writing ...
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Critical Essay by Brendan Gill
["'Master Harold' … and the Boys"] has been almost universally hailed as a masterpiece, perhaps in part because its subject is a merit...
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Critical Essay by Robert Brustein
[Athol Fugard's Master Harold … and the boys] like this South African playwright's other works, is distinguished more by his majestic spirit than...
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Critical Essay by Chris Jones
Marigolds in August is [a film] about black workers divided against themselves. The crippled Daan … works as a gardener in a white seaside village. He has been doi...
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Critical Essay by Brendan Gill
The title of Athol Fugard's new play, "A Lesson from Aloes" …, is so apt that its four words serve as an accurate précis of the entire...
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Critical Essay by Tamar Jacoby
Very little happens on stage in A Lesson From Aloes….
The deep mistrust between the three characters is not created by the action of the play or in any way resolv...
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Critical Essay by Robert Asahina
There is little sentimentality to be found in Athol Fugard's A Lesson From Aloes, a searing three-character drama that has been receiving rave reviews—to...
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Critical Essay by Sheila Roberts
What is particularly fascinating about Tsotsi for the student of Fugard's drama is the discovery of so many scenes, ideas and conversations that Fugard was late...
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Critical Essay by George Kearns
[Tsotsi] is an intense work set in a South African slum. The protagonist, a tsotsi ("thug" or "hoodlum")—he knows no other nameȁ...
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Critical Essay by Clive Barnes
[Master Harold … and the Boys] is a molotov-cocktail kind of a play. At first, as it almost creakingly gets going, it seems a homemade, almost ramshackle kind of ...
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Critical Essay by Frank Rich
There may be two or three living playwrights in the world who can write as well as Athol Fugard, but I'm not sure that any of them has written a recent play that ca...
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