Athol Fugard: One of the first memories from my childhood

How “relevant” the memory is I honestly don’t know. But it goes back to when I was between two and three: I can no longer remember in what way I’d sinned, but my mother had decided I needed punishment – and I ran away. She was hugely pregnant at the time, and when I ducked under the lowest rung of the fence, she couldn’t catch me. I just ran blindly across the nearest street, and the next, paying no heed to cars (fortunately it was a small Free State village, so traffic was not really a hazard), until I reached my father’s office (he was the magistrate). A black policeman was warming himself in the thin winter sun outside, and he motioned me to where I should go. I threw myself into my father’s arms, sobbing with relief.

He was most amused about my breathless story. And then he gave me the few slaps on my backside he thought I deserved, and sent me home with the policeman. Much of my ambiguous relationship with my father started there. I’m still not sure I’ve come to terms with the mixture of betrayal and security in that encounter.

Athol Fugard (1932). Born in a remote village in South Africa, Fugard grew up in Port Elizabeth, the setting for most of his plays. He attended Cape Town University, spent two years as the only white seaman on a merchant ship in the Far East, then returned to South Africa. In 1958, he moved to Johannesburg where he worked as a court clerk, an experience that made him keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid, the theme of many of his plays. In that same year, he organized a multiracial theater for which he wrote, directed, and acted.
Fugard's attacks on apartheid brought him into conflict with the South African government. After his play Blood Knot (1961) was produced in England, the government withdrew his passport for four years. His support in 1962 of an international boycott against the South African practice of segregating theater audiences led to further restrictions. The restrictions were relaxed somewhat in 1971, when he was allowed to travel to England to direct his play Boesman and Lena (1969).
A Lesson from Aloes won the 1980 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. "Master Harold"... and the Boys (1982) premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre and then was taken to Broadway. He is also the author of Cousins: A Memoir (1997).