10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
How Athol Fugard made political theater so riveting
Athol Fugard's work has the sharp, gleaming edge that culture can have when forged during political ordeals. But that's only one of the reasons we gravitate to the idiosyncratic plays of the great South African dramatist, who died Saturday at age 92.
Riveting audiences around the world, Fugard explored tensions, tender bonds and explosive ruptures between people, often obliquely suggesting how the racially discriminatory apartheid system of the late 20th century roiled and distorted relationships. In works like his early play 'Blood Knot' (1961), about the tormented rapport between two half-brothers born with different skin tones, and ''Master Harold' … and the Boys' (1982), about a white teenager's painful exchange with two Black men in a tearoom, Fugard hinted at the way South Africa's political status quo flooded the whole of national life, exacerbating loneliness and misunderstanding and tinging even real human connections with desperation.
