It was while studying medicine that I first saw Fugard perform. In 1972 he’d been involved in the establishment of a theatre called The Space/Die Ruimte/Indawo in a converted warehouse below Cape Town’s old Malay Quarter, where I watched him play opposite his regular collaborator, Yvonne Bryceland, in the theatre’s opening production. Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act explored the deformity of human love wrought by authoritarian power – in this case the notorious piece of apartheid legislation officially termed the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act – which banned sexual contact, indeed all forms of intimacy, between people of different racial groups.

Fugard himself had had personal experience of the machinery of repression when his passport was revoked by the South African government in 1967 ‘for reasons of state safety and security’, following the production of an earlier work, The Blood Knot, on British television. The first of his plays to be publicly performed – in Johannesburg, in 1961 – The Blood Knot introduced a central theme of Fugard’s work; the struggle of people trapped in bonds of family, love or dependency, oppressed by systems to which they lack the keys of analysis or insight. He had written it over the previous two years, at the same time that he was setting down his only novel, Tsotsi.

Tsotsi had its genesis in Fugard’s rare insight (for a white South African) into the brutality of the apartheid system. Arriving in Johannesburg in 1958 from Port Elizabeth, he had taken the first job available: as a clerk in a Native Commissioner’s Court that dealt with violations of the Pass Laws. ‘Seeing the machinery in action,’ he said, ‘taught me how it works and in fact what it does to people.’ Further understanding came with his introduction to Sophiatown, Johannesburg’s violent, colourful ghetto: ‘… tremendous poverty, a capacity for humour that was almost proverbial, bitterness and hope’.

Sophiatown was a ‘freehold’ township where blacks had historically been allowed to own title to their properties. Its lively jazz and shebeen subculture, where black and white could drink and dance together, formed the febrile centre of an urban African renaissance of music and theatre. The government now set about suppressing this creative independence. Pass raids were stepped up to catch those blacks in the township who were ‘surplus to labour requirements’. Black writers and musicians found themselves banned or forced into exile. Under the Group Areas Act, Sophiatown was ‘re-zoned’ as a white suburb – to be called Triomf (Triumph) – and its demolition began, the area’s long-established neighbourhoods relocated block by block to the grim wasteland of the new South Western Townships, Soweto.

The pressures of survival under extreme conditions had been the motif of Fugard’s first ‘Township’ plays, No-Good Friday (1958) and Nongogo (1959). These were ‘workshop’ productions with amateur actors that used the lives of Sophiatown characters – a jazz musician, a gangster, an aspiring student, a shebeen queen – to reflect apartheid’s damage. The effect of its unsparing regime of humiliation, he suggested, was to abort hope and drive the persecuted to turn on those lower down the survival chain. The character of Fugard’s Tsotsi is a product of this implacable process.