阿瑟尔·富加德

阿索尔·富加德（Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard，1932年6月11日—2025年3月8日）是南非剧作家、小说家、演员和导演 ， 他写了30多部戏剧，并且他反对南非种族隔离制度。他的母亲是阿非利卡人，父亲拥有爱尔兰、英国和法国胡格诺派血统。 他的小说被改编为电影黑帮暴徒，该电影于2005年获得奥斯卡金像奖。2011年，他获颁托尼奖终身成就奖。

Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard ( ATH-əl FYOO-gard; 11 June 1932 – 8 March 2025) was a South African playwright, novelist, actor and director. Widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright and acclaimed as "the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world" by Time magazine in 1985, he published more than thirty plays. He is best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system of apartheid, some of which have been adapted to film. His novel Tsotsi was adapted as a film of the same name, which won an Academy Award in 2005. Three plays he wrote, and two plays he co-authored, were nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play.

Fugard also served as an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.

Fugard received many awards, honours and honorary degrees, including the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver from the government of South Africa in 2005 "for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre". He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1986. Fugard was honoured in Cape Town with the 2010 opening of the Fugard Theatre in District Six. He received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.

Early life

Fugard was born as Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, in Middelburg, Cape Province (now Eastern Cape), Union of South Africa, on 11 June 1932. His mother, Marrie (née Potgieter), an Afrikaner, operated a general store and then a lodging house; his father, Harold Fugard, of Irish, English and French Huguenot descent, was a former jazz pianist who had become disabled.

In 1935, his family moved to Port Elizabeth. In 1938, he began attending primary school at Marist Brothers College.

Fugard attended Port Elizabeth Technical College for his secondary education from 1946 to 1950, then studied philosophy and social anthropology at the University of Cape Town on a scholarship. However, he dropped out of the university in 1953, just a few months before final examinations.

Fugard left home, hitchhiked to north Africa with a friend and in Port Sudan, aged 18, enrolled in the crew of the steam ship SS Graigaur. On board, and bound for Japan, he began writing a novel, but deciding it was terrible, threw the manuscript into the sea. He "celebrated" his two years as a merchant seaman in his 1999 autobiographical play The Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage.

In September 1956, he married Sheila Meiring, a University of Cape Town Drama School student whom he had met the previous year. In 1958, the couple moved to Johannesburg, where Fugard worked as a clerk in a Native Commissioners' Court. He became "keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid", and befriended local anti-apartheid activists, an experience that was to colour his earliest work.

Career

Early period

In 1958, Fugard organised "a multiracial theatre for which he wrote, directed, and acted", writing and producing several plays for it, including No-Good Friday (1958) and Nongogo (1959), in which he and his colleague, black South African actor Zakes Mokae, performed. In 1978, Richard Eder of The New York Times criticized Nongogo as "awkward and thin. It is unable to communicate very much about its characters, or make them much more than the servants of a noticeably ticking plot." Eder said, "Queenie is the most real of the characters. Her sense of herself and where she wants to go makes her believable and the crumbling of her dour defenses at a touch of hope makes her affecting. By contrast, Johnny is unreal. His warmth and hopefulness at the start crumble too suddenly and too completely."

After returning to Port Elizabeth in the early 1960s, Athol and Sheila Fugard started The Circle Players, which derives its name from the production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht.