Athol Fugard in 2014. (Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)
Athol Fugard, an acclaimed South African playwright whose works explored the brutality of his country’s apartheid regime, using anger and empathy to protest the dehumanizing effects of racial segregation, died March 8 at his home in Stellenbosch, near Cape Town. He was 92.
The cause was a heart incident, said his daughter, Lisa Fugard.
Mr. Fugard, who often acted in or directed his own plays, was dubbed the “conscience of South Africa” for exposing the racial injustices of his homeland in such works as “ ‘Master Harold’ . . . and the Boys,” “Boesman and Lena,” “A Lesson From Aloes” and “The Blood Knot.” But his concerns were universal. In 1985, Time magazine’s William A. Henry III, echoing the view of many critics, called him the “greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world.”
Most of Mr. Fugard’s approximately 40 stage works were performed in New York, where in 2011 he received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement. Meanwhile, in South Africa, the apartheid-era government at various times harassed him, spied on him and prevented him from traveling abroad.
“Master Harold,” which opened on Broadway in 1982, was the most autobiographical of Mr. Fugard’s plays. Set in a cafe in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1950, it focused on the relationship between Hally, the son of the establishment’s White owner, and Sam, a Black waiter who had become his friend and surrogate father.
Hally’s tender conversation with Sam and a second waiter (together called “the boys”) shifts when Hally, in light of their respective races, demands to be addressed as “Master Harold.” (Harold was Mr. Fugard’s given name.)
The backdrop of the play was South Africa’s system of laws, instituted in 1948, that segregated the country’s population by race and subjugated the Black majority. But the play never addresses apartheid directly. “The question that Mr. Fugard raises — how can men of all kinds find the courage to love one another? — is dealt with at such a profound level that ‘Master Harold’ sweeps quickly beyond the transitory specifics of any one nation,” New York Times theater critic Frank Rich wrote, adding that the play was “lyrical in design, shattering in impact.”
Mr. Fugard said the play was based closely on an episode from his childhood. When he was about 12, he spit at a Black waiter at his mother’s cafe. “I was hurting deeply because of certain things that had gone wrong in my family,” he said in a 1992 interview with Durban-based Tekweni TV. “But I did it, and I’m as ashamed of it to this day as I was 10 seconds after having done it.”
Mr. Fugard didn’t consider his works openly political. He told talk show host Charlie Rose in 2012, “I don’t write plays about ideas. My plays are about people.. . . If you tell the human story, the propaganda will take care of itself.”
One of his earliest plays was “The Blood Knot” (1961), about the tension that develops between two half-brothers of different skin tones. When it opened off-Broadway in 1964, with James Earl Jones playing the anguished darker-skinned brother, it was a career-making hit for Mr. Fugard.
Mr. Fugard also appeared in several films, including the epic “Gandhi” (1982), in which he played South African military leader and statesman Jan Smuts, and “The Killing Fields” (1984), as a doctor at a Cambodian hospital. His novel about a young hoodlum, “Tsotsi,” written in 1961 but published in 1980, became the basis for a 2005 South African movie that won the Academy Award for best foreign language film.
Early in his career, Mr. Fugard was praised for bringing Black characters to life. But in later years, as the concept of cultural appropriation took root, he was, he told Tekweni TV, “accused of a certain impertinence in writing about the Black people of South Africa because after all, how can you as a White person remotely understand what a Black man’s reality is?”
“I say by the same token you must take away from me the right to write about women,” he continued. “You must ultimately take away from me the right to write about anyone other than myself. My job, as an artist, is to keep my imagination strong enough to make those leaps out of my reality into other realities.”
Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard was born in Middelburg on June 11, 1932, and grew up in Port Elizabeth, an industrial city on the coast between Cape Town and Durban. His father, who lost most of a leg in a childhood boating accident, was an alcoholic. His mother supported the family with her cafe.
On a scholarship, Mr. Fugard attended the University of Cape Town, where he studied philosophy and social anthropology and was a competitive boxer. He dropped out a few months before graduation in 1953, afraid he would be “trapped as an academic.” Instead, he hitchhiked more than 5,000 miles north to Port Sudan and found work on a tramp steamer bound for the Far East.
During the two years he spent on the ship, he wrote a novel based on his mother’s life but threw the manuscript overboard in Fiji, in a fit of drunken despair. A heavy drinker for decades, he quit in the early 1980s.
In 1958, recently married and living in Johannesburg, he took a job as a clerk in a Native Commissioner’s Court, an apartheid-enforcement mill where, he said, Blacks who broke racial laws were sentenced “one every two minutes.”
“I saw more suffering than I could cope with,” he recalled to the Paris Review of his six months at the court. “I began to understand how my country functions.” He also made his first Black friends and visited them often in their segregated shantytowns, settings for many of his works.
In 1959, Mr. Fugard and his wife moved to London to study theater. But the next year, they learned that 69 Black protesters had been killed and about 180 injured outside a police station in what was then the Transvaal province, an event that became known as the Sharpeville Massacre. The Fugards flew home, he said, “in solidarity.”
After the success of “The Blood Knot” — which had premiered in 1961 in Johannesburg with a racially mixed cast and nonsegregated audience — Mr. Fugard denounced a government decision soon thereafter to implement strict racial separation in all forms of live entertainment. He wrote an open letter to European playwrights asking them to prohibit their works from being performed before segregated audiences.
Amid the burgeoning international anti-apartheid movement, his letter helped precipitate a boycott of South African theater by foreign playwrights. Ironically, Mr. Fugard, who had hoped the letter would lead to more, not less, engagement between foreign playwrights and South African theaters, found the boycott a disappointing response.
In 1963, he formed the Serpent Players with a group of b actors in Port Elizabeth and produced such works such as “The Island,” about the offshore prison where anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela was being held, with Mr. Fugard credited as a co-writer. Mr. Fugard had his phone tapped and his mail ripped open.
In 1967 he traveled to London to appear in a BBC production of “The Blood Knot.” (He later retitled the play “Blood Knot.”) When he returned to South Africa, the authorities confiscated his passport. He was prevented from leaving the country until 1971, when he was permitted to direct his play “Boesman and Lena” in London.
That play, written in 1968, centered on a Black couple evicted from their home and forced to live in the mudflats near the Swartkops River in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. It had a year-long run off-Broadway, featuring Jones as the brutish husband and Ruby Dee as a woman brutalized by society and her husband. (The work was adapted into a 2000 film starring Angela Bassett and Danny Glover.)
Another of Mr. Fugard’s most successful plays was “A Lesson from Aloes” (1978), about a White Afrikaner hosting a farewell dinner for his Black activist friend, during which the host’s embittered wife tries to destroy their friendship. (The 1980 Broadway cast included Jones.)
After apartheid was abolished in the early 1990s, Mr. Fugard wondered if he would be at a loss for material. He told the Times that it was as if “somebody had pulled the plug, in a sense, on what was one source of energy in my work — my feeling of outrage and anger.”
His play “A Place With the Pigs” (1987) was based on the true story of a Soviet army deserter who hid for 40 years in a pigsty. But the subject matter confused the audience, who, he said, had pigeonholed him as a writer about apartheid.
For years Mr. Fugard taught playwriting at the University of California at San Diego. In 2012 he decided to return to South Africa full-time. His wife, Sheila Meiring, remained in California and the couple divorced after 60 years of marriage.
In 2016 he married author and director Paula Fourie, who was more than 50 years his junior and with whom he had worked on the 2014 play “The Shadow of the Hummingbird.” In addition to his wife, survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Lisa; two children from his second marriage, Halle and Lanigan; and a grandson.
Looking back on his career in 1990, Mr. Fugard confessed that he had often wondered whether he had done enough to combat apartheid.
“I really went through burning hoops trying to work out whether making theater was an appropriate response. And I came perilously close on occasion to deciding it wasn’t, that I would be better off making bombs,” he told the Boston Globe. “Fortunately, I arrived at a deep and unshakable conviction that, yes, when it comes to change in the world, the arts make a very, very important contribution.