FALLS THE SHADOW (PG)

The Life and Times of Athol Fugard 

TONY PALMER’S film portrait of Athol Fugard called ‘Falls the Shadow’ won the Gold Medal at the New York Film & TV Festival in 2013

Athol Fugard is the most performed playwright, besides Shakespeare, in the world. His thirty or so plays are performed everywhere. In Poland, in Brazil, Australia and Japan. In the United States, even Iran. The story’s very clear. Man’s inhumanity to man. Totally understandable wherever it is played. And audiences are shocked to have it presented so raw and shocked to often find themselves in tears.

His contribution has been huge. It’s been almost incomparable, and in a South African context of course, the best playwright South Africa has produced. He has been pioneering and, like the greatest of artists, he was still pioneering, still trying out new things. He had incredible energy, new ideas, new images, you know one just staggers back in front of this fount of creative energy.  

It’s given to very few playwrights to create a new voice in drama. Beckett does, Pinter does.  And Fugard does.  An absolutely unique voice that is Athol Fugard. Any playwright who speaks in a new voice makes you sit up and I think that’s why the world sat up and listened to Athol Fugard because he was speaking in a new way.  

"The South African government confirmed Fugard's death and said the country 'has lost one of its greatest literary and theatrical icons, whose work shaped the cultural and social landscape of our nation'" (Mark Kennedy and Gerald Imray, The Independent, 10 March 2025, click here).

"Fugard defined the essence of what he called "pure theater" as nothing more "than the actor and the stage, the actor in space and silence." As an artist he resisted labels, but he conceded that if his work is to be categorized "then it must be as 'actors' theatre.' Humanity was always at the core of Fugard's art" (Mark Kennedy and Gerald Imray, LA Times, 10 March 2025, click here).

"Fugard brought critical, wrenching portrayals of South African society under apartheid to international stages, including Broadway, helping to generate the wave of worldwide criticism that eventually led to the end of that policy in the country, in the process gaining wider access for South African dramaturgy outside that nation" (Carmel Dagan, Variety, 10 March 2025, click here).

"His longtime friend and collaborator John Kani mourned: 'I am deeply saddened by the passing of my dear friend Athol Fugard. May his soul rest in eternal peace'".

"Now he is dead, and a writer of true integrity has gone. He loved the actor who had played Miss Helen in Mecca, the great Yvonne Bryceland – his muse. He loved women; he wrote about the feral stoicism and optimism of the female animal with a warmth quite unusual in a writer – maybe excepting Ibsen. He understood fatalism, and loneliness, and had the ear of a poet for ordinary folk" (Janet Suzman, The Guardian, 9 Mar 2025)