About the Play:

HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still available.

Blood Knot has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues and Male/Male Scenes.

Hello and Goodbye has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, and Female/Male Scenes.

The volume Blood Knot and Other Plays contains the three Port Elizabeth plays which established Athol Fugard's international reputation. In Blood Knot two biracial half-brothers, one of whom appears black and one of whom appears white, live together in a shack during South Africa's apartheid era, enacting daily routines and games that reveal their dangerous co-dependence.

Blood Knot is a full-length drama about two Black half-brothers who share a one-room shack near Port Elizabeth, South Africa: Zachariah is dark-skinned and Morris is light-skinned. Born of different fathers, they share the same black mother but the relationship between them deteriorates because one has lighter skin and can pass for white, which ultimately leads to him treating his darker half-brother as an inferior. Saving to buy a farm where they may retire, Morris keeps the house, cooking and cleaning while Zachariah earns money for them both. When Morris joins a lonely hearts club on his brother's behalf, they find themselves awaiting the visit of a white woman who will never arrive. (Cast: 2 male)

Blood Knot premiered in 1961 in Johannesburg. It was the first play in South Africa with a black and white actor – Athol Fugard himself – performing in a front of a multiracial audience, before the apartheid regime introduced laws prohibiting mixed casts and audiences after just one performance. When Blood Knot was produced in England, the South African government withdrew his passport for four years. This stinging indictment of the South Africa's racism starred James Earl Jones when it was staged at the Cricket Theatre off Broadway three years later. It debuted on Broadway in 1985 at the Roundabout Theatre in a production starring Athol Fugard and was nominated for a Tony Award for best play.

What people say:

"Best play of the year." — The New York Times

Boesman and Lena is a full-length drama about a mixed-race couple who are thrown off their land by whites and have to scrape by as they wander the mudflats of the River Swartkops in South Africa loaded with their total possessions: the makings of a shack and a battery of pots and pans but nothing to cook in them. They are the dregs of society, the stepped upon, the spat upon. (Cast: 1 female, 2 male)

Boesman and Lena premiered in 1969 at the Rhodes University Little Theatre in Grahamstown, South Africa. It was staged Off Broadway at the Circle in the Square in a 1970 production that earned Athol Fugard an Obie for for Best Foreign Play and also drew awards for director John Berry and actress Ruby Dee, who starred in the production with James Earl Jones.

What people say:

"The play is carefully structured as a dance first with Lena's solo, then with a pas de deux , then with Boesman's verbal self expression. An old man stumbles on the two Hottentots, and becomes the physical catalyst of their relationship, precipitating a crisis and a credible resolution." — Hollywood Reporter

"Athol Fugard, the South African playwright, has written some fine plays, but certainly none better than the amazing Boesman and Lena, which is great; absolutely superb." — ABC TV

Hello and Goodbye is a deceptively simple full-length drama about a South African who is visited by his sister after a very long absence. Yes, he says; he and Dad have been getting along well enough, but no, she can't talk to him because he's asleep in the next room. Sister has really come home because she believes Dad has secreted 500 Pounds somewhere in the house, and she wants to make a deal with her brother; he can keep the house as his part of the heritage, if he'll let her find and keep the money. Their memories work back and forth, and the brother tries to keep passions down so that father will not be awakened. But in the end the terrible truths of this family drama develop into an image of the disastrous plight of the entire nation of South Africa. Father is dead; the only inheritance they have is the land, the squalor and the misery. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops. (Cast: 1 female, 1 male)

About the Playwright:

Athol Fugard (1932-2025) was an internationally acclaimed South African playwright whose work deals with the political and social upheaval of the apartheid system in South Africa. In a career that spanned 70 years, he wrote more than 30 plays that are regularly performed in theatres in South Africa, Great Britain, the United States and around the world. Several of his plays have been adapted for the screen and his novel Tsotsi was made into a film that won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2011 he received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre, while Time magazine described him in the 1985 as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world.