Statements

The tragic personal consequences of life under South Africa’s apartheid laws are treated with honesty and deep compassion in these three landmark plays written and premiered in the early seventies.

World-renowned dramatist Athol Fugard, along with his actor/collaborators John Kani and Winston Ntshona, has explored the painful particulars of his native land and created works with universal implications—plays that carry within them ringing cries for social and political change without ever uttering a word of political rhetoric.

-Sizwe Bansi is Dead reveals the perversities of human identity in a country where a man is equal to his passbook.
-The Island celebrates the strength of man’s connection to man, even within the dehumanizing confines of a prison cell on Robben Island.
-Statements After an Arrest Under the Immortality Act depicts the shattering of two lives under the harsh glare of South Africa’s miscegenation laws.

All three works, developed and launched at The Space in Cape Town, have since been widely produced in the U.S. and abroad, and remain as urgent today as they were almost forty years ago.