"My job," Athol Fugard has said, "is to witness as truthfully as I can the nameless and destitute of one little corner of the world." Packed into those words is a loving, fierce, unremitting confrontation with the outrageousness of the existence of the nameless many who inhabit that corner: the Eastern Cape region of South Africa…. The characters in his plays reverberate with life…. Poverty, pain, dumb dreams are their lot yet—battered, bruised, with their violence and mockery directed against each other—they are alive. Forced to face the facts of their wretchedness, outraged they yet survive. And because Fugard writes as close as he can get to the bone—"meat is something that must rot or be cut away before the hard white truth is exposed"—essentially local characters from the littered slums around the industrial center of Port Elizabeth become universal; his language, often stemming from crude Afrikaner earthiness, is harsh, lyrical, comic. (p. 55)

He formulated the 'pure theatre experience' back in 1961: "The actor and the stage, the actor on the stage. Around him is space, to be filled and defined by movement; around him is also a silence to be filled with meaning, using words and sounds, and at moments when all else fails him, including my words, the silence itself." Now he adds that "this means an existentialist standpoint in theatre: space and silence equals nothingness; the actor's confrontation with our being and nothingness." (p. 57)

[No Good Friday and Nongogo, "The Family" trilogy, and People Are Living There are all plays] about survival—his favorite word. And in each play through a faceless catalyst the characters are precipitated into a confrontation with the facts of their lives, a sense of the here and now; This is my life. It is from the confrontation that outrage springs. Why this faceless character; Fugard says he doesn't fully understand, yet. (p. 58)

After Boesman and Lena, Fugard felt he was about to take a leap. This proved to be [Orestes]…. Some years ago he became impatient with the sequential logic of his play; music, poetry, painting had broken from such rigidity…. [He] continued to ask himself how he could escape. Meanwhile the writings of R. D. Laing led him to "a more direct access to inner space."… He fused a statement of the murder of Iphigenia by Clytemnestra and Orestes' revenge, with the act of protest of John Harris who, in 1964, placed a suitcase containing a bomb beside a bench in Johannesburg station concourse: a woman sitting on the bench was killed. Fugard, describing himself as "scribe"—"this was not being pretentious but accurate"—took the writer into the rehearsal room to be on a par with the actors…. He formed the mandate, fed challenges to them and, out of their responses, their own inner sources and identities, he shaped the play. Orestes, he emphasizes, did not come out of a vacuum; it tapped an energy in that society. (pp. 59-60)