Athol Fugard's great gift as a playwright has been an almost journalistic evocation of the distorting impact of apartheid on blacks and whites in his native South Africa, coupled with a lyric ability to lift those observations to the level of metaphor. It is not enough for an artist to be right-minded on even the most potent political issues of his day. To earn a lasting place in literature, to rank with Ibsen or Shaw or Brecht, he must also demonstrate subtlety of craft, power of language and insight into character -- and probably must reach beyond his immediate context into...
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