Finally, at the end of the play, Winston remembers that he can control how e perceives his situation. He says as much: “I am here because I was defiant.” He sees that he is important and that what he is doing is important.- He enrolled at the University of Cape Town but did not finish his studies, dropping out to travel in Africa and the world. He found work on a ship, and travelled around the world for two years before returning home where he found a job as a court clerk and through this was able to witness the destruction on humans by the apartheid system- His first work in theatres was a piece called the The Rehearsal Room. He wrote, acted, and directed this play which with its multiracial cast openly rejected segregation in South African theatres. This led to most of his works being banned by the government4. In The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona is a perfect example of the power that art has and the place it occupies in political revolution. It can parallel many event that occurred and that are happening at the moment.
Performance and art can be use a weapon for political revolution by making lasting impression that leaves the audience with a sense that justice needs to begin. As it gives a visual for the oppression and treatment that many go through. The Island conveyed that.
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Editorial Reviews. About the Author. The New Yorker has said of Athol Fugard, 'A rare. The Island by Athol Fugard tells the story of two inmates (played by John Kani and Winston Ntshona) planning to perform Antigone for their prison on.
Athol Fugard is one of the most respected and frequently studied of living dramatists. Working in active collaboration with the people of the South African townships, his plays are informed and powerful portraits of the black urban experience. Edited with an Introduction, notes, and a glossary by Dennis Walder, a leading critic of South African literature, this book collects the five `township plays' - Nongogo, No-Good Friday, Sizure Bansi is Dead, The Island, and The Coat - in a single volume for the first time, the latter of which has never been published in Britain before. Born in Cape Town and educated at Port Elizabeth Technical College and Cape Town University, Athol Fugard is a leading white South African playwright. After finishing his education, Fugard worked as a seaman and journalist before becoming an actor, director, and playwright. His commitment to the antiapartheid struggle through his plays and other dramatic productions is as long as it is effective in portraying the traumas of racial tensions in the lives of both white and black South Africans.
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The setting of his plays is contemporary South Africa, but the bleakness and frustrations of life they present, especially for those on the fringes of society, raise the plays to the level of universal human tragedy. Because of their subject, his plays have sometimes met with official opposition.
Blood Knot (1960), about two coloured brothers, one light-skinned and one dark-skinned, was censored, and some of his other works have only been published abroad. Fugard has frequently collaborated in his productions with black playwrights and actors, like John Kani and Winston Ntsona, with whom he produced the highly acclaimed and frequently produced plays, Siswe Bansi Is Dead (1973) and Statements (1972). His work is quite popular in England, and later plays, Master Harold and the Boys (1982), The Road to Mecca (1984), and A Place With the Pigs (1987), have been staged at the National Theatre. Fugard has also written screenplays and a novel, Tsotsi (1980) which was adapted to the screen in 2005 and received an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His recent works are Exits and Entrances (2004), Booitjie and the Oubaas (2006), Victory (2007), Coming Home (2009), Have you seen Us (2009), and The Train Driver (2010).Dennis Walder is Professor of Literature at the Open University and Founding Director of the Literature Department's Colonial and Post-Colonial Research Group. He has published widely on topics ranging from Dickens to V.S.