The lights come up on a bare stage. Two black South African actors, dressed in prison uniforms, mime shovelling sand into wheelbarrows in a quarry. As if perspiring profusely in the glaring noonday ...

All politics is local, the saying goes. But political art often transcends boundaries with ease. Case in point: "The Island," the 1973 South African prison drama written by white playwright Athol ...

“Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” and other works bear witness to forgotten lives and to the moral blindness and blinkered vision of the realities of apartheid South Africa. By Roslyn Sulcas In works like “Blood ...

W.H. Auden, meditating on the role of the artist in a poem by W.B. Yeats, concluded that poetry “makes nothing happen.” While generally true, the precept doesn't hold in the case of playwright Athol ...

South African playwright Athol Fugard has died. He wrote about life during and after apartheid in plays such as "Blood Knot" and "Master Harold... And The Boys." He was 92 years old. With more, here's ...

When apartheid ended, and Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa, Athol Fugard thought his life as a playwright was over, he told NPR in 2015. "I sincerely believe that I was going to be ...

It’s an irony fit to choke on: A sadistic, day-long punishment designed to turn man against man hasn’t broken the friendship between Winston and John, political prisoners and cellmates on South Africa ...