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    A Study Guide for Athol Fugard's "Valley Song"
    A Study Guide for Athol Fugard's "Valley Song"
    A Study Guide for Athol Fugard's "Valley Song"
    Ebook48 pages37 minutes

    A Study Guide for Athol Fugard's "Valley Song"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Athol Fugard's "Valley Song," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literature of Developing Nations for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literature of Developing Nations For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateNov 3, 2016
    ISBN9781535842037
    A Study Guide for Athol Fugard's "Valley Song"

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      A Study Guide for Athol Fugard's "Valley Song" - Gale

      1

      Valley Song

      Athol Fugard

      1995

      Introduction

      Athol Fugard’s Valley Song premiered in Johannesburg, South Africa in August, 1995. The playwright himself directed the production and played two of the play’s three characters: The Author, a figure modeled on Fugard himself, and Abraam Jonkers, the elderly coloured farmer who represents the old South Africa. Fugard repeated this theatrical tour de force when the play reached America, in a production by the Manhattan Theatre Club at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey in October, 1995. Both performances were warmly received by audiences and critics, several of whom expressed gratitude that Fugard was still writing intense, meaningful dramas about the lives of ordinary South Africans, even in the post-apartheid era.

      Since the playwright had built his career over four decades of writing about the injustices of apartheid and state-mandated racial segregation, there was some concern when apartheid officially ended in 1992, and Nelson Mandela, a black leader, was elected president in 1994, that Fugard may have run out of things to say. However, as Jack Barbera observed in the Nation, "Valley Song is as timeless as it is timely, a story of the old fearful of change and the young with their hopes and impatience, and of a teller of stories."

      Like most of Fugard’s plays, the plot of Valley Song is quite simple, and less important than the secrets it reveals about its characters are the themes it presents its audience. The play contains two stories woven into one. In the first, a young, black South African girl decides to leave her elderly grandfather behind on their farm in the Sneeuberg Valley so she can escape to the city and pursue her dreams of becoming a famous singer. The other story concerns an aging white South African playwright who is prepared to leave behind the artificial world of the theater and urban life and move himself back to his origins in the farmland of the Karoo. His days of planning and dreaming about the Glorious Future are nearing an end just as the young girl’s are beginning, and Valley Song is really the tale of the torch of hope passing from one generation to the next—a bold and magnificent gesture by a man whom many critics have dubbed one of the greatest living English-language playwrights.

      Author Biography

      Athol Harold Lannigan Fugard was born June 11, 1932 in Middelburg, a small village in the semi-desert Karoo region of South Africa. His mother, Elizabeth Magdalena Potgieter Fugard, was an Afrikaner who could trace her ancestry back to the earliest Dutch settlers of 1652. His father, Harold David Fugard, was a South African with English and Irish roots. At his grandmother’s request, the boy who would one day become his country’s most famous playwright was named Athol after a former British governor of South Africa, the Earl of Athlone.

      When he was three years old, Fugard’s family moved to Port Elizabeth, where the playwright has since spent most of his life. In his introduction to Boesman and Lena and Other Plays, published in 1978, Fugard

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