[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—sensual fragments, incidents, quotations, speculations. Writing now, I find in them the content of all that I can possibly say about my work. (p. viii) I began working seriously on Hello and Goodbye towards the end of 1963. My notebooks have [an] extensive record of both the genesis of this play and my problems in writing it.

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 resolved at its end: much more terrifying, their bitterness and suspicion are simply revealed and then thinly covered over as the work draws to a close….

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 can match "'Master Harold' … and the Boys." Mr. Fugard's drama—lyrical in design, shattering in impact—is likely to be an enduring part of the theater long after most of this Broadway season has turned to dust. "Master Harold" … may even outlast the society that spa...

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 work and threaten to render some of its more didactic passages superfluous. We are early instructed that aloes are a kind of plant to be found growing on the South African veldt; prickly and not very pleasing to look at, they survive in a hostile climate, and the lesson they furnish is that even against high odds life can assert itself and ...

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 my mind underserved. (p. 102) There can be no doubt that Fugard means us to be as deeply involved as he is with his characters' fates; for years he has been heroically exposing the cost of apartheid in human suffering. Yet it is not his sincerity but his art that I question; for all its deep wells of feeling, which Fugard is not afraid...

[Athol Fugard's Master Harold … and the boys] like this South African playwright's other works, is distinguished more by his majestic spirit than by his artistic gifts. Fugard is not a dramatist of the first rank in a class with Beckett, Brecht, or even the late O'Neill—he makes no deep metaphysical probes, he fashions no striking poetic images, he doesn't change our way of looking at the world. His theatrical impulses are similar to those of Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthu...

"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 into those words is a loving, fierce, unremitting confrontation with the outrageousness of the existence of the nameless many who inhabit that corner: the Eastern Cape region of South Africa…. The characters in his plays reverberate with life…. Poverty, pain, dumb dreams are their lot yet—battered, bruised, with their vi...

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 plays about the tragedy of apartheid; he avoids the spectacular horrors and concentrates instead on the subtle corrosion and corruption, on the crumbling of the spirit for which the cure would be heroic action that may not be forthcoming, and which the blacks try to assuage with the salve of dreams, the whites with the cautery of oppressio...

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 in the English language. "The Island," "Boesman and Lena," and "Sizwe Banzi" bob their human cockleshells just upstream from a giant whirlpool. The jaunty resilience of their characters has a tragic significance in the face of the racial and social rigors that will crush them.

[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 play, but when it explodes, like an unexpected thunderclap, it doesn't make the rafters ring, it eaves them blackened. And this intensely, but subtly political play, leaves the audience drained by the barely simulated intensity of its experience. It is a play that grabs you to its own heart with bands of steel.

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 régime and a philosophy which condemned him to the shanties of Sophiatown, and then virtually orphaned him in a police raid when he was a child of ten. Tsotsi leads a gang of four young black men. They mug and murder, chiefly for money but also for kicks…. One night, he meets a young black woman who hands him a shoebox and runs awa...

["'Master Harold' … and the Boys"] has been almost universally hailed as a masterpiece, perhaps in part because its subject is a meritorious one—the turpitude of South Africa's continued policy of apartheid and, on a deeper level, the heartbreak implicit in every failure of respect and affection that takes place between human beings of whatever color, gender, age, and social position. To my mind, the play has a tendentious neatness of design that we often see...

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 later to use expanded and elaborated in his plays…. Tsotsi is evidence that had Fugard chosen a career as a novelist instead of being a playwright, he would have done important work. Here he develops at least three major characters and even more secondary ones. Tsotsi himself is a disturbing, haunting creation who remains in the reader�...

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 doing so for years, tending lawns, growing marigolds, but has little security—he hasn't the right papers. Melton … is a farm boy, unemployed and facing eviction. With a child dead from malnutrition and a desperate wife, he arrives in the village in search of work—and is seen by Daan as a threat to his security.

Athol Fugard is a political tragedian, a very rare kind of writer indeed. His characters—sometimes consciously, more often not—revolt against the social order, but they are neither beaten back by it nor do they defeat it. They destroy each other instead. The idea of personal growth, of change, of effective individual action is banished by the very nature of South Africa. Fugard does not cry for the beloved country—he describes with painful detail a nation in which daily activities are t...

[Tsotsi] is an intense work set in a South African slum. The protagonist, a tsotsi ("thug" or "hoodlum")—he knows no other name—is a brutal leader of a small-time gang of murdering thieves; he has no past he can remember, no feelings, no conscience; his vision reaches no farther than the planning of each day's crime. Fugard attempts to convey the workings of this tsotsi's mind as it moves from a brutish, atemporal condition toward the beginnings of &#x...

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 Africa in the late fifties…. Mr. Fugard appears to have found his subject and, to a large extent, his talent immediately. Himself a white man, he has written play after play about the various races—singly and in combination—imprisoned in his racist country, but in doing so he has never stooped to propaganda or case history&#...

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 of Fugard's later work is, this piece of juvenilia [Nongogo] is creaky, predictable, unconvincingly simplistic, and afflicted with a particularly awkward dramatic failing: overacceleration…. As in ancient newsreels, where people seem to move in a funny little quickstep, the plot skips ahead from expected twist to unsurprisin...