Fugard, Athol (Vol. 14) | John Simon
JOHN SIMON
Fugard has not only become South Africa's leading dramatist, he has also, as much as any man, made the world conscious of the horrors of apartheid. But good as some of Fugard's later work is, this piece of juvenilia [Nongogo] is creaky, predictable, unconvincingly simplistic, and afflicted with a particularly awkward dramatic failing: overacceleration…. As in ancient newsreels, where people seem to move in a funny little quickstep, the plot skips ahead from expected twist to unsurprising reversal. What, in more experienced hands, could have had the measured pace of the inevitable, displays only the tugging of a nervous puppeteer. (pp. 88, 90)
John Simon, "Futile Fandango," in New York Magazine (copyright © 1978 by News Group Publications, Inc.; reprinted with the permission of New York Magazine), Vol. 11, No. 51, December 18, 1978, pp. 88, 90.∗
[The entire page is 147 words long]
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