Fugard's plays typically engage his audiences' sympathies for the fate of two or three marginalized characters closely entangled by the ties of blood, love, or friendship, struggling to survive in an arbitrary, bleak, and almost meaningless universe--almost meaningless because his dark vision of pain never finally excludes the potential for light, for humor, and for compassion. The characteristic intensity of effect gained by his work, an effect of painful, shared awareness, is wrought by the revelatory "living moments" he always seeks from a production, as a means of "bearing witness"--a favorite phrase, adopted from the broadly Christian, humanist tradition of the West, whose influence on his thought has been decisive.
Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard was born on 11 June 1932 on a farm near Middelburg, Cape Province--a dry, dusty little village in the semidesert Karoo region of South Africa. He has two siblings: an older brother, Royal, and a younger sister, Glenda. His parents ran a small general dealer's "cash store" in Middelburg. His father, Harold, a crippled former jazz pianist, was descended from Manchester immigrants, possibly Irish Huguenot in origin, "sort of good, English-speaking Eastern Cape stock," as he put it in a 1980 interview with Craig Raine.
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