The Island By Athol Fugard Pdf Free

1. The Island By Athol Fugard Pdf Free Download
2. Athol Fugard Quotes

Page/Link:Page URL:HTML link:The Free Library. Retrieved Jan 30 2020 fromDespite the many features that ground Antigone in the particularpolitical ideology of fifth-century Athens, Sophocles' Antigone has'spoken more to the modern imagination than any other Greek tragedyexcept perhaps his Oedipus the King.' (1) It may not therefore seemsurprising that of all Greek plays Antigone is the most often revived,revised, or rewritten for performance in African and Caribbeancountries. (2) Clearly the play exposes the nexus of the personal andthe political as a fault line, calling into question the conventionalverity that places loyalty to the state above family relationships andprivate conscience.

Throughout the twentieth-century South African drama had beendominated by an English model of the well-made play whose late-Victorianform propagated British imperialist values in the colonies. Afrikaanstheater was lively but, between 1948 and 1992, proscribed by thehegemony of National Party race ideology. The growth of English-languagetheater was stunted by a colonial subservience to the home culturetypical of settler societies. British actors regularly toured SouthAfrica in Shakespeare and modern plays, and local English-languageproductions slavishly mimicked dated styles of acting, production, andwriting that were once considered appropriate for the Old Vic andLondon's West End, but which stunted the development of indigenousforms of performance and writing. (4) South Africa's first majorblack playwright, the Zulu writer Herbert Dhlomo (1903-1956), hadwritten a series of plays in English based on the lives of the Zuluchiefs Dingane, Ceteswayo, Moshoeshwe, and the tribal prophet Mtsikane.But as adventurous as Dhlomo's plays were in their time they werealso to a large extent constricted by the paradigm of the'well-made' West End play.

In the fifties, English-languageSouth African playwrights did make sporadic attempts to tackle localsubjects, but their plays tended to be straitjacketed by the forms ofWest End dramas and could not compete with the more ambitiousdevelopment of prose fiction in works such as Alan Paton's Cry theBeloved Country (1947) and Nadine Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953),(6) both reflecting the injustice of race discrimination immediatelybefore and after the advent of apartheid. This was a poor drama that aimed to find a poetics appropriate tothe poverty of a bastardized settler culture, but its adherence tonaturalism meant it could be neither a poor theater nor a genuinelySouth African form of drama. It was his deployment of workshoptechniques as a member of the Serpent Players that influencedFugard's sequence of experiments from The Coat to Orestes andculminated in his exploitation of the radical techniques of sixtiesavant-garde theater for a new kind of playmaking. Fugard's mostimmediate inspiration in the seventies was the poor theater of JerzyGrotowski. The achievements of Sizwe Banzi is Dead, Statements after anArrest Under the Immorality Act, and The Island were made possible by alaboratory process involving the actors Yvonne Bryceland, John Kani,Winston Ntshona, Val Dunlop, and Wilson Dunster.

Fugard's averreddesire to move beyond the confines of his own inflection of anessentially modern American drama of well-made realism, reveals not onlya dissatisfaction with the inappropriate constrictions imposed byinherited models of scripted drama, but also a recognition that thepostdramatic experiments of Grotowski could be directly relevant to thecreation of a hybrid form of theater that would marry African traditionsof oral literature and dance performance with the semiotic density ofpostmodern Western theater forms. It is likely that Fugard recognized hewould need to collaborate closely with black South Africans in order todiscover a genuinely intercultural South African form whose storytellingtechnique was fast-moving and economical, while displaying aphenomenological richness in the deployment of contemporary history andmythical narrative, representational gesture, authentically SouthAfrican dialect, mime enactment, and psychophysical presence. To haveattempted an authentic South African drama by means of a nostalgicrevival of tribal forms of African performance would have beenregressive and indeed colonialist. (7) Sizwe Bansi ls Dead and TheIsland transform the author-actors' own inherited kinaestheticsense of African storytelling and tribal dance forms into townshipdiction and a gestural poetry that immediately evokes urban SouthAfrica.

By devising the two plays in collaboration with Kani andNtshona, Fugard was able to supply the structural frame and Westerntheatrical intertexts, while the black writers/performers made theauthentic speech, mental attitude, and habitus of each characteraccessible in material terms. It is significant that both plays wereinitially dependent on the particular identity of the two blackauthor-actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, thereby paralleling theprocess through which Grotowski had composed his laboratory theaterproductions on the bodies of his performers, accessing their ownpersonal subjectivity through deep self-exploration in which privatememories and images were grafted together with a physical performancescore to form the kinaesthetic structure of the piece.

(8)Having directed the black actors of the Serpent Players in Antigonein 1965, Fugard began his dramaturgical exploration of Greek tragedy ina specifically South African context with the devising of a radicallyexperimental workshop piece, Orestes. According to the playwrighthimself, the major provocation for the work he did with three actors indevising Orestes was Grotowski:For a long time I had wanted to try and make a valid theatricalexperience using methods other than completed script, set rehearsalperiod, performance deadline, etc., etc. The three actors andmyself disappeared into a rehearsal room, and ten weeks later wegave our first 'exposure'. We stayed working on and exposing theproject for another six weeks. (117) (9)The program note for the performance explicitly indicated to theaudience the performance's reference to ancient Greek tragedy:From Greek mythology comes the story of Clytemnestra. Her husbandwas Agamemnon.

She had two children, Electra and Orestes. Agamemnonsacrificed their third child, Iphigenia, so that the wind wouldturn and the Greek fleet could leave Aulis for the Trojan War.Agamemnon returned to Clytemnestra ten years later when shemurdered him. Orestes and Electra avenged his death by killingtheir mother. From our history comes the image of a young man witha large brown suitcase on a bench in the Johannesburg stationconcourse.

He was not travelling anywhere. (118)The young man was in fact twenty-six-year-old John Harris, who hadin 1964 exploded a suitcase filled with dynamite and petrol that he leftbeside a bench on a platform in the Johannesburg Railway Station; thehomemade bomb injured a young child and killed an elderly woman, andHarris was apprehended, tried, and executed. The eighty-minute piececonsisted chiefly of mime in which the young man (Orestes/Harris) playswith a matchbox while gradually becoming aware of a young woman(Electra) and then of an older woman (Clytemnestra), who first mimesgiving birth to Iphigenia, then destroys a chair representing Agamemnon.According to Fugard,It was an awesome and chilling spectacle. You cannot destroywithout being destroyed. As she went through the experience Ywrecked her soul.

You cannot witness destruction without beingdamaged. The boy and girl, who had seen everything, move quietly tothe remnant of an identity, the older woman, collapsed among theremnants of a chair called Agamemnon. They are terrified. Theirmetaphor of innocence has met a metaphor of evil. Nothing will everbe the same again. Their abortive games escalate into anightmare at the end of which she has caught him, confined him,taking away from him even the possibility of standing erect as aman. He, breaking a long silence, finally answered thefollowing questions:'Who are you?What is your sex?What is your colour?What is your nationality?Where are you?'

The Island By Athol Fugard Pdf Free Download

South African. (123-25)Some moments later the bombs go off and the old woman mimes herreaction to the explosion in slow motion, then drags herself on herbackside across the floor of the stage. The young man speaks a few linesfrom the testimony of John Harris, ending with 'I knew that what Iwas doing was right. Later I heard that people had been hurt, but thisdid not make sense because I had known that people were not going to behurt' (126), after which the young woman speaks a short sectionfrom R.

Athol Fugard Quotes

Laing's The Divided Self, and the old woman speaks a fewlines from Laing's The Politics of Experience and the Bird ofParadise. (10)In addition to Grotowski an important influence on Fugard'sthinking at this time was Bertolt Brecht. (11) It seems unlikely thatFugard was not aware that one of Brecht's productions in Zurichsoon after the end of the war had been his adaptation ofHolderlin's translation of Sophocles' Antigone.