The extraordinary decency of Athol Fugard

18 Mar 2025 | Africa, News and features, South Africa

Gavin Hood directed the 2006 Best Foreign Language Academy Award winning film Tsotsi, based on the acclaimed novel by South Africa’s greatest playwright, the late Athol Fugard. Hood only met Fugard once but the writer’s influence on him has been deep and profound. Index on Censorship asked Hood to offer his personal thoughts on the impact of the legendary artist on his own life and work.

“Decency. You know the word, Tsotsi? Decency? I had a little bit of it, so I was sick. And that big one tonight, with the tie… he had a lot. So, he’s dead.”

It’s 2004. Actor Mothusi Magano, playing self-loathing, guilt-ridden drunk Boston, spits the slurred words at Presley Chweneyagae, the lead in a film I’m directing based on Athol Fugard’s haunting, redemptive masterpiece, Tsotsi. Boston is sickened by his participation in the murder of a dignified older man, stabbed just an hour earlier for nothing more than a few notes in his wallet.

Chweneyagae, chillingly silent, rocks back and forth ever so slightly, an unstoppable rage building behind his hooded eyes. He suddenly launches a vicious attack on Boston, who, like Fugard, just won’t stop talking about human dignity and compassion, even in the face of brutality.

Tsotsi is Fugard’s only novel. He is celebrated around the world as South Africa’s greatest ever playwright – and that is how I first encountered him. It was 1977. I was 13 years old, and attending a privileged, all-white, private boys’ school, when my parents took me to see The Island at The Market Theatre in downtown Johannesburg.

Fugard wrote the explosive two-handed epic in collaboration with his Tony Award winning stars, the legendary South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Less than a year earlier, the two actors had been jailed for their performance in another Fugard play, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, which the apartheid authorities claimed contained “inflammable, abusive and vulgar subject matter”.

Bluntly, I had never seen Black actors performing in a theatre before. I think my mother, who was a high-school English, French and History teacher, had heard that The Island referenced Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, because I vaguely recall her outlining the plot of that play and saying she understood that The Island would also be about defying repressive authority.

Despite the heads up, I was hardly prepared for the raw, visceral power of a tale of human dignity and resistance by two prisoners rehearsing Antigone on a prison island that was clearly a stand in for Robben Island, where the world’s most famous political prisoner Nelson Mandela had been held since 1964.

Through the turbulent 1980s, I studied law at The University of the Witwatersrand. From the relative safety of my liberal white status, I worked at the Wits law clinic, briefly representing a few impoverished clients; I attended my fair share of student protests, got teargassed, and even got arrested once, just for an afternoon for attending a banned Winnie Mandela gathering on campus; I wrote a newspaper article questioning the neutrality of a newly appointed Chief Justice – which got me an unsettling call ominously declaring, “You must be careful what you write” – and I performed in a number of not too controversial theatre productions.

But through all those confounding formative years – marred by state violence I only ever experienced tangentially – I attended every Fugard play that came to The Market Theatre, from Hello and Goodbye to The Road to Mecca to Master Harold… and the Boys. I marvelled at how his intimate, tightly coiled works spoke so bravely and elegantly about the personal moral dilemmas, regrets, and reconciliations of ordinary, imperfect people living under a soul-crushing system. His art gnawed at my conscience while, at the same time, expressing an unyielding optimism and hope.

I completed my degree, worked briefly for a commercial law firm, left to pursue a career as a professional actor and then, in mid-1989, facing a rising risk of being called up to join a military camp to serve in the townships that were quite literally on fire, I secured a student visa to study screenwriting and directing at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and left South Africa for the USA.

Unbelievably, just a few months later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the “Rooi Gevaar” (the “Red Communist Danger”) British and American support for the apartheid regime evaporated and by 1994 I was back in the New South Africa, now led by President Mandela, working for the new Department of Health on HIV / AIDS educational dramas for television.

Fugard was still writing plays, and I was once again watching productions like Valley Song at theatres like The Baxter in Cape Town.

Fast forward to 2000 when, after some minor successes at festivals with a short film ironically starring Fugard’s long-time collaborator Winston Ntshona, and a low-budget first feature, I was asked by producer Peter Fudakowski if I might consider adapting Fugard’s novel, Tsotsi. “Have you read it?” he asked. “Years ago,” I said – which was true!

I read it again immediately. The book is very internally focused, with the emotional and moral conflicts of its title character mostly conveyed through moving inner monologues, which are notoriously difficult to translate into the visual medium of film.

I called Fudakowski back and reluctantly said a screen adaptation would likely require me to take some liberties with the plot and structure – and I was not at all sure how Fugard might feel about that.

Fudakowski called Fugard’s agent. Would he be willing to discuss the adaptation with Gavin and perhaps collaborate with him through the process?

“No,” came Fugard’s blunt reply through his agent a day later. “Athol is a playwright. He tried making a film once and he didn’t enjoy the process. He wishes you only the best and, when the film is complete, he’d love to see it – before it’s released. If he likes it, he’ll say so. If not, he will keep silent, and the critics will say whatever they say.”

I was shaken. It’s not unusual for those who love a book to loathe a film adaptation. Often rightly. What if Fugard hated the film? “What if the critics hate the film?” Fudakowski replied – and decided to hire me anyway.

Cut to five long years later and the film is finally complete. I have just dropped off a print (back then the cinemas still screened reels of film!) and I am sitting with my wife, Nerissa, in a coffee shop a block away from a small art house cinema in San Diego. We are waiting for a call from the projectionist to tell us that Fugard has arrived for a private screening.

The phone rings. He has arrived, with his poet and novelist wife, Sheila Meiring Fugard, and close friend Marianne McDonald, distinguished professor of theatre and classics at University of California, San Diego (UCSD). They are settling in. The screening will be over in approximately 90 minutes.

I push my coffee aside. My stomach acid is already surging, and my heart is pounding. Fugard’s agent has said Fugard has my cell number. If he likes the film, he will call me after the screening. If he doesn’t, I should please be discreet and allow him to leave without a meeting.

Okay. We wait. I don’t recall what Nerissa and I talked about to kill the time but finally my phone rings. “Unknown caller”. I answer – and a thick, sonorous South African accent fills my ear.

“Gavin, where are you? You must come for dinner! I know a great South African chef right here in San Diego. He will deliver to Marianne’s house. It’s not far. Lamb chops, boerewors, babotie, pap, chakalaka, whatever you like. We must talk. Where are you?”

“I’m a block away,” I say, still not sure if his enthusiasm means he liked the film.

“No man, come, get over here. I loved it! You made changes, I know. But thank you for staying true to the spirit of Tsotsi. That young actor, Presley, he’s extraordinary. They all are. The whole cast. Can you come for dinner?”

And so, I finally meet Athol Fugard.

Nerissa and I went for dinner at Marianne’s beautiful home – an old stone-walled monastery. I recall a huge spread on a very long kitchen table. And Fugard talking and talking and pacing around the room with a chop in one hand, never sitting down, asking a million questions about where we’d filmed and how we’d found such wonderful actors, and the challenges of novel writing, playwriting and screenwriting, and saying how the entire crew had done us all proud.

Yes, it is true that in adapting Tsotsi for the screen I took liberties to interpret emotional shifts through action and non-verbal cues. I also updated the time period from 1950s apartheid South Africa to what was then present day in the new South Africa. I did so to reflect the deep scars inflicted by the system through segregation, forced removals and so-called “Bantu education”, which will take decades to heal from. But the core story, the central themes of redemption and the uniquely original principal characters are all Fugard’s, not mine. It is his generous spirit, his cry for basic human decency and compassion toward our fellow human beings that infuses the film.

Athol, I am forever grateful for the privilege of bringing your beautiful novel to the screen. Thank you for your timeless inspiration – your courage in confronting injustice with moral clarity, and your unwavering human decency. Rest well, sir.