The Train Driver and Other Plays

Athol Fugard

Oct 2012 · Theatre Communications Group

About this ebook

"For me [The Train Driver] is the biggest of them all. Everything I have written before has been a journey to this."—Athol Fugard

"A dramatic, moving theater experience written for South Africa. . . . It will save us from hopelessness. See it."—Sunday Independent

The Train Driver is classic Athol Fugard, and one of his most important plays. The playwright, known throughout the world as a chronicler of his native South Africa's apartheid past, directed its premiere at the newly opened Fugard Theater in one of Cape Town's most politically contentious areas. This seminal work was inspired by the true story of a mother who, with her three children, committed suicide on the train tracks in Cape Town. The two-person drama unfolds between the train's engineer and the grave digger who buries "the ones without names." This edition also includes Coming Home, Fugard's first work addressing AIDS in South Africa, and Have You Seen Us? his first play set in America, about a South African transplanted to San Diego, where the playwright currently resides.

Athol Fugard's works includes Blood Knot, Master Harold. . .and the Boys, Boesman and Lena, Sizwe Banzi is Dead and My Children! My Africa! He has been widely produced in South Africa, London, on Broadway, and across the United States.

About the author

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. 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).