In his first performance back on a Johannesburg stage, 82-year-old Athol Fugard is a white-bearded, cardigan-clad dynamo, crackling and fizzing with theatrical life force. Later that August night, leaving the Market Theatre, he suddenly looks his age, sunken beneath a flat cap and seeking to exit untrumpeted through the draughty foyer. Perhaps he is pushing himself too far.
But the following morning, in a discreet guesthouse down a discreet street, Fugard is firing again. South Africas greatest-ever playwright turns out to be also one of its most likeable. Ebullient and gregarious, sprinkling my name into a few of his answers with never a false note, he settles into a seat on a veranda overlooking a manicured garden, lights a pipe and is interviewed against a ripple of birdsong it is a scene that could be taken from one of his recent elegiac works.
Even as we sit here talking, a few of the remaining brain cells are dealing with and thinking about and keeping on a back burner another play I want to write, he says, smiling. Its slowly, slowly surfacing and taking shape.
Like the artist Paul Klee, he says, he prefers to work on small canvases. But his words moved mountains in apartheid South Africa. His works include The Blood Knot , Master Harold and the Boys and The Road to Mecca and collaborations with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, including The Island set in the Robben Island prison and Sizwe Banzi is Dead , recently revived at the Young Vic in London. Fugard won a Tony lifetime achievement award. A recent Market Theatre platform event billed him as a Legend, using a capital L.
I couldnt hit a nail in straight if I tried, he admits. But pen in hand and blank paper, yes, I know exactly who I am, why I am, who I am and what it is all about.