{"id":26967,"date":"2025-03-10T10:00:55","date_gmt":"2025-03-10T10:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/?p=26967"},"modified":"2025-04-08T13:57:22","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T12:57:22","slug":"athol-fugard-the-great-south-african-playwright-who-captured-what-it-means-to-be-human","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/arts-social-sciences\/athol-fugard-the-great-south-african-playwright-who-captured-what-it-means-to-be-human\/","title":{"rendered":"Athol Fugard: the great South African playwright who captured what it means to be human"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was shocked to learn that the famous South African writer <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Athol-Fugard\">Athol Fugard<\/a> had passed away. I had known his age to be 92 but somehow I never expected him to die. He was always a survivor, <em>says Dennis Walder, Emeritus Professor of Literature at The Open University.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>When I think about Fugard, the first thing that comes to mind is the first time I interviewed him in Port Elizabeth (today\u2019s Gqeberha) in South Africa. It was for the first of <a href=\"https:\/\/scholar.google.com\/scholar?hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&amp;q=Dennis+Walder&amp;btnG=\">three<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.co.za\/books\/edition\/_\/OD2utAEACAAJ?hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiJ3dSjtP-LAxWhQ0EAHYppGhAQ8fIDegQIDhAO\">books<\/a> I\u2019ve written on his plays. I had just seen his play <a href=\"https:\/\/esat.sun.ac.za\/index.php\/Boesman_and_Lena\">Boesman and Lena<\/a> in London. It absolutely knocked me out with its emotional power.<\/p>\n<p>Boesman and Lena are two mixed-race people who are outcasts and are wandering the mud flats of a river trying to work out where they\u2019ve been and where they come from. They argue and fight and then out of the darkness comes a black man. He tries to tell them his story but they don\u2019t speak the same language.<\/p>\n<p>The black man dies next to their fire. Before they wander off into the darkness there\u2019s a moment when Lena decides to dance and sing a song. It\u2019s a transcendent moment in the bleakness, but it\u2019s only a moment. It gave you a sense that even when people are at their lowest, there is the possibility of some kind of transcendence.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/athol-fugard-the-great-south-african-playwright-who-captured-what-it-means-to-be-human-251829\">Read the full article on The Conversation<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Picture credit: Kilyan Sockalingum from Unsplash<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was shocked to learn that the famous South African writer Athol Fugard had passed away. I had known his age to be 92 but somehow I never expected him to die. He was always a survivor, says Dennis Walder, Emeritus Professor of Literature at The Open University. When I think about Fugard, the first [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":26969,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,3],"tags":[858,860,1525,1643,2200],"class_list":["post-26967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-literature-music","category-arts-social-sciences","tag-faculty-of-arts-and-social-sciences","tag-faculty-of-fass","tag-news-home","tag-ou-news","tag-the-conversation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26967"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27033,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26967\/revisions\/27033"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}