Athol Fugard: The Capeman cometh

The giant of South African theatre? Athol Fugard, in London to direct his new play, doesn't like the phrase: it messes up your head, he tells Matthew Lewin.

The playwright Athol Fugard furiously pounds the smooth black surface of the South African stinkwood table that is one of the props in his new play, Sorrows and Rejoicings, which opens tonight at the Tricycle Theatre in North London. But he's not talking about the play. The fire in his eye, the body language and the resonance of his voice are directed at the government of Thabo Mbeki.

"Just look at the whole issue of Aids." Bang on the table. "Look at South Africa patting Mugabe on the back." Bang. "I find myself profoundly ashamed as a South African of my government – something I never believed I would feel again.

"Hell, man, we have to have the courage to stand up and start criticising our government; to stop thinking that it is an act of betrayal to criticise the new South Africa. We have to get past that, grow up and mature. And the government has also got to grow up and realise that it must take responsibility for the situation we are in and not always blame everything on the past."

He may be 70 in June, but the playwright is still burning with passion – about life, about justice and equality, about his writing, and about the stinkwood table he is currently lugging with him around the world. It has already been flown from Cape Town to New York before coming to London. "Hell, man, it's earned more frequent-flyer miles than I have recently," he says, his small face breaking into an almost childish grin, while his fingers roam constantly over the black hardwood.

When his slightly shaky hand spills some coffee on it, he urgently wipes up the mess – with his hat. His speech is peppered with heavily accented exclamations – "Hell, man," "Wow!"and "My God!" – and if you couldn't see the true fervour in his eyes, you might dismiss some of his comments as sentimental ornaments of speech. Thus when I ask him why the table is so important to him, he answers: "For the South African cast, this table on stage is like having the soul of the country with us". There is no mistaking the intensity of his belief. This is from the heart. He really means it.

The new play, which he is directing, is on a theme that has been in the back of his mind since the 1960s, when he witnessed writers and poets exiled from South Africa finding that their creativity had inexplicably dried up – or, as Fugard puts it, "Their voices die."

In Sorrows and Rejoicings, just such an exiled poet, played by Marius Weyers, returns after 17 years in London to face the three women he left behind – his white wife, his coloured mistress and his mixed-race daughter – as well as his own imminent death.

The table is one of the points of focus in the play, as the unwanted inheritance of the poet's daughter, who angrily describes herself as "the white man's bastard in the new South Africa". The issue for her is what from the past is worth keeping, and what should be rejected. "That is the challenge of the play," he says. "That is the question: Is there anything in South Africa's past that is worth keeping? I suppose the answer depends on who you are."

Fugard has previously been securely glued to South Africa, even when persecuted by the apartheid regime. He refused to take the "exit visa option" and go into exile. He used to say that he could not write away from the streets of Port Elizabeth and the stark landscape of his beloved Eastern Cape. And yet he now lives for half the year in southern California, and this play was actually written in the US, the first to be penned abroad.

Could the new play's theme of exile and return be connected with his recent wanderings? "Of course! Wow! You know, a lot of things changed for us after our extraordinary election of 1994, and we are experiencing a degree of personal liberation unlike anything we ever expected to feel in our lifetimes.

"That has really freed me as a writer. During the years of apartheid, the sense of my responsibility, the fact that I could put words down on paper, and to a certain extent influence people, sort of held me locked in the country. There was this feeling that this is where I had to be, this was where the work had to be done, where the fight had to be carried on. I no longer feel that way. We've been released."

Fugard was born in 1932 in Middelburg, a small town in the semi-desert area of the Cape known as the Karoo. It's not very far from the town of New Bethesda, where he still has a home and where he has set some of his plays, including the new one. He attended the University of Cape Town for a while, but dropped out, determined to become a writer. He hitchhiked up through Africa to Europe, where he joined the crew of British tramp steamer and sailed the world for a year or two.

That's when he started writing a profound novel based on his mother's life. But one night, drunk, homesick and depressed, he threw the manuscript overboard into a lagoon in Fiji. "I realised that what I had written was a load of rubbish," he told me.

Was it? He throws his hands up. "Oh God, I don't know. All I know is that it was important to me at the time as an act of homage to my mother, that simple Afrikaner woman who somehow had been endowed with a sense of justice and decency that made her look at the world around her and realise that there was something very wrong with it – and then pass on that sense to me."

The very strong women who appear in many of his plays are all versions of his mother, or at least contain her spirit. His father, on the other hand, was a weak and rather dissolute character, a hotel-lounge jazz pianist who was also "a cripple and an alcoholic" and never the father Fugard wanted him to be. "But my father did give me this extraordinary instrument called the English language, and my God, you can't get a better gift as a playwright."

By 1961 he was already making his mark on the South African scene with his ground-breaking play, The Blood Knot, about people crossing the colour line, in which he appeared with the black actor Zakes Mokae. Many others followed during the next 40 years, including Boesman en Lena in 1969, and the remarkable series of township plays at the Royal Court in the 1970s, including Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island (a revival of which is now running at the Old Vic, 30 years later, and with the same cast). Other plays premiered at the famous Market Theatre in Johannesburg and at the National Theatre in London during the 1980s and 1990s, and his work has also attracted a huge following in the US.

When I mention that I read somewhere that he was the undisputed giant of South African theatre, Fugard frowns and for the first time the fire and playfulness disappear from his eyes. "Hell, man, I can't allow myself to listen to that kind of thing." He waves his arms dismissively. "If you let those noises in, it just messes up your head.

"The one thing you have to do as you get older and your work begins to accumulate, is do your best to retain a degree of innocence. If you start listening to people saying things like that, you are going to end up trying to imitate yourself, because whatever you did in the past that made them say that, you hope to God they'll say it again – so you take away a certain freedom from yourself."

And will he keep on writing? A stupid question, as it turns out: he is contemplating further volumes of his autobiography (the first volume, Cousins, was published in 1994) and he is already writing a play about Hildegard of Bingen, a remarkable 12th-century Benedictine abbess who was a philosopher, healer, composer and mystic.

"The trouble is, I remain as passionate about the business of writing plays as I was 40 years ago. It's a love affair that has never palled, but has just got hotter and more passionate as the years have passed."

'Sorrows and Rejoicings' previews from tonight at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn High Road, London NW6(020-7328 1000) Press night is 25 March and it runs to 20 April