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    The Shadow of the Hummingbird
    The Shadow of the Hummingbird
    The Shadow of the Hummingbird
    Ebook60 pages1 hour

    The Shadow of the Hummingbird

    By Athol Fugard and Paula Fourie

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    About this ebook

    The Shadow of the Hummingbird explores the loss of innocence and the need to maintain a sense of wonder at the fleeting beauty of the world. The play premiered at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, USA, in 2014, and an expanded version was subsequently staged at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town, as well as in Johannesburg and Bloemfontein. Athol Fugard returned to the stage for the first time in 15 years to play the role of Oupa in these two productions. This publication reflects the South African production, and is regarded by the authors as the final and definitive one.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHuman & Rousseau
    Release dateFeb 15, 2015
    ISBN9780798169943
    The Shadow of the Hummingbird
    Author

    Athol Fugard

    Athol Fugard is a South African playwright and occasional director and actor who actively critized the Apartheid system through his work. He worked with actors such as Zakes Mokae and John Kani and soon gained international recognition for his plays. His fifty years of playwriting include The Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena, Master Harold ... and the Boys, The Road to Mecca and The Train Driver. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 2011. The film based on his novel, Tsotsi, won an Oscar for best foreign film.

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      Book preview

      The Shadow of the Hummingbird - Athol Fugard

      The Shadow of the Hummingbird

      Athol Fugard

      Prelude by Paula Fourie,

      with extracts from Athol Fugard’s unpublished notebooks

      The final version

      Human & Rousseau

      For Gavyn

      He lives a day.

      What is he? What is he not?

      Man is a dream of a shadow.

      Pindar: Pythian 8, 95-6.

      Foreword to the Play

      Athol Fugard

      One day in 2010, in the little study in Southern California where I used to write, I saw the shadow of a hummingbird on the wall opposite my desk. It didn’t take me long to realise that the bird in question was visiting and drinking deeply from the nectar feeder on the small patio outside. The particular angle of the sun that day, and for the following few days, had thrown the bird’s shadow on my wall. Although I could not see the feeder, nor the real bird from my armchair, I became fascinated with the dark smudge that hovered and shot away even as I focused on it. For about a week, I would sit there waiting for it. It was during that period of tense expectancy that I realised consciously for the first time that I had had a long fascination with shadows – both the word and the phenomenon. I had in fact ended a much earlier play – Exits and Entrances – with an entry from one of my very early notebooks in which I had explored this fascination. It is the very same entry that Paula has chosen as Oupa’s focus in the Prelude. That period, during which I sat riveted by the shadow on the wall, coincided with the realisation that it was time to reckon with, perhaps more nakedly and autobiographically than ever before, the only creative energy I have ever brought to my work – love. The immediate focus of my love was my grandson, Gavyn, then six years old. These disparate elements came together in the play I now call The Shadow of the Hummingbird. It is the second, and probably the last of my plays set in America.

      As this play is already in a sense based on my relationship with my grandson, Paula’s opening scene, which interlaces newly written monologues with material taken from three decades of notebooks, further confuses my life and my work. As Paula often points out – Oupa is not Athol Fugard, and yet he is. That is also part of the reason I decided to play the role myself. The Prelude made exploring the role of Oupa a very complex emotional experience. Paula’s selection from the unpublished notebooks is uncompromising. I never once attempted to censor her, even though this resulted in me exposing some very private moments in real time. I might have been more comfortable with a reader quietly encountering these entries on their own in a published text, rather than out of my own mouth in a situation where I was already exposing myself as an actor. This became possible because Oupa was, in effect, a fig leaf that hid my nakedness.

      The first version of this play was staged at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. The role of Boba (Gavyn) was played by two wonderful ten-year-old twins, Aidan and Dermot McMillan, who alternated in performances. This was a critically important stage in the journey

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