Athol was always there. There were other South African playwrights, of course, such as Pieter-Dirk Uys, who pilloried the absurdities of apartheid, and the prolific and commercially successful Gibson Kente or theatrical storytellers such as Gcina Mhlophe. But year after year, for as long as I can remember, Athol wrote the plays that, earlier and more consistently than anyone else, expressed in the public arena the suffering caused by apartheid’s full-frontal attack on what it means to be a human being.
We were never close but, over many decades, we’d run into each other from time to time in Cape Town or in London. Once, as we stood together in a crowded theatre foyer, he shared his view that all South Africans, everyone, whatever power they wielded or how much cash they’d piled up in their bank account, they were all – we were all – thoroughly fucked up (“opbefok” in his words) by apartheid. If you were born there you couldn’t escape the damage living within racism did to your sensibility, to your soul.
I think he was right about this and all his plays said it in one way or another. He was just 20 years older than me but I remember as a teenager my parents discussing a play of his they’d seen directed by his early close collaborator Barney Simon. Blood Knot, a play he came back to and revised late in his life, is about two brothers, Morris and Zachariah, raised by the same black mother but with different fathers. One of them is able to pass for white, the other is not. In those days it was amazing and thrilling to my parents and, at one remove, to me that anyone was courageous enough to speak in a theatre about the scandalous possibility that white and black people might be, in some fundamental way, the same.
That the characters were brothers was the whole point. For Athol, I think, the horror and the pain that it was his life’s task to express were principally caused by the ways in which apartheid insinuated itself into and poisoned the most intimate relationships – with friends, with lovers, even, as in this very early play, within one’s closest family. It was, I think, his rage at this outrageous brutalisation of the most delicately experienced aspects of life that powered his best plays such as the wonderful, under-applauded Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act.
Statements was developed from improvisations between Athol and Yvonne Bryceland, his longstanding lead actor in Cape Town in the early 1970s. As an acting student, I helped paint the walls of the new theatre, The Space, that the photographer Brian Astbury created for Athol and for Yvonne, who was Brian’s wife. On the upper floors many workshops took place in which Athol explored with actors his ideas for new plays, such as one about John Harris, the member of the African Resistance Movement who tried to strike a blow against apartheid by placing a bomb at a railway station; he was hanged for killing a woman and injuring many others.
One workshop grew into Dimetos, performed eventually at the Royal Court with Paul Scofield. Athol was a compulsively bold and original writer but, by and large, a conventional director, a “stager”. When I was writer-in-residence at the Royal Court in the mid-1990s I persuaded the artistic leadership to produce his Valley Song, not a masterpiece but, I thought, an effective play and, I argued, the Court had a tradition of loyalty to its writers that should apply in Athol’s case. Under Athol’s direction the play seemed even more ephemeral than, perhaps, it is. Even so, loyalty was owed because, two decades earlier, Athol had given the Court a tremendous success, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead. And Sizwe was also – life being full of paradoxes and surprises – directed by Athol with as much verve and style as any show I’ve ever seen. Written by Athol, John Kani and Winston Ntshona it is, as a play, as great as Sophocles and, as an example of directing panache, right up there with Tadeusz Kantor or Peter Brook.
Receiving an award for her 1985 performance as a recluse sculptor in Athol’s The Road to Mecca, Yvonne Bryceland held the trophy high and announced modestly “I accept this on behalf of all the little people”, but one wanted to shout out “What the play says is that there are no little people”. I think that’s what Athol wanted to tell the world through his whole writing life.
