In a sense, Athol Fugard always remained a mystery. He was the sort of person in whose presence you felt a deep well of wisdoms hiding, wisdoms he would never divulge unless he trusted you, and how were you ever to earn that trust? But he once allowed me to cut his play Hello and Goodbye, because he couldn’t be present during rehearsals – an act of generosity quite unprecedented in a writer. They usually hug close every word they have written.
Invoking that generous permission many years later, I made a cut of another play of his – The Road to Mecca – only because it seemed a touch too prolix in this more shorthanded world. When I sent it to him, he said, with the frankness that Athol never softened with colleagues, that he wasn’t up to reading it because he had so many loving memories of that play. Perhaps he’d leave permission with his literary executor to allow a cut to Mecca when he was dead. There was a laughing wryness in his tone, so I don’t think he meant it for a second.
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.
In an earlier time, 1969, I remember sitting in his living room in Port Elizabeth, a group of young actors babbling, drinking, arguing, and one in particular, John Kani, already showing a mastery of English that makes him the best off-the-cuff speaker ever, accusing me roundly of white snobbery by not having learned his language, Xhosa; I had to agree I was the loser. John subsequently did all of Athol’s great collaborative plays; and called Athol “the Old Man”. Never were a white and a black man in greater harmony, bound by mutual respect and high-energy creativity, and during apartheid, the crucible of dissension. Their visions collided most fruitfully, and left South Africa with a remarkable legacy of theatre.
