Playland

About the Author
It is somewhat surprising that Athol Fugard, one of the greatest playwrights alive today, whose plays are performed with regularity on the most influential stages of England and the US, is little known in Israel. As a native South African, Fugard portrays the years of apartheid with tortured clarity. As an artist, a thinker, and a man painfully in love with his country, he continues to reflect the nightmares and the dreams of South Africa.

But Fugard is not merely a "political writer." His country, and the collection of waifs, strays and disenfranchised loners that wander so aimlessly off and on his stage, have become metaphors and starting points from which to probe the alienation of the human person lost and rootless on the stage of his or her existence. Experience no longer binds humankind as it claims to have done in classical times. Fugard's characters might have been born to moral, loving parents, but almost all have fallen from Eden long before the lights of their stage go up. No longer can characters stand on stage and tell us their problems. Experience has taught them to lock within the darkness of their separate souls the crimes that have made them who they are. Victims of modernism, Fugard's characters have difficulty communicating either with each other or with their audiences. The conflict within this theatre becomes, then, the attempt of the play itself to wrest from the characters their story. Within the context of these plays, adversity/conflict does not hit Fugard's characters from without, rather it rages silently within each struggling, fragmented soul, each desperately fighting, at one and the same time, to withhold from the stranger who shares his stage, and to reach out to him, against all odds, in the futile hope of salvation.