Looking forward to the future

Small, alert and beaming, Athol Fugard sits at a table in the Tricycle Theatre café. 'Now,' he says, 'what do you want to know?' Well, Athol, that's a good question. Where to start? Apartheid? Mandela? Mbeki?

In the last 30 years, Fugard has written about all of them, sometimes directly, sometimes implicitly. Under the apartheid regime he lost his passport, saw friends killed, others lost to Robben Island and still more flee into exile. In 1995, his 1977 play The Island, about Robben Island, was seen by an emotional Nelson Mandela and has since been hailed as one of the most important works to come out of South Africa (it's currently playing for the final time with its original cast at the Old Vic). And he is still writing as hard as ever, despite pushing 70.

So maybe his latest play is the best place to start. Sorrows And Rejoicings explores the memories of three different women who loved the same man: a white Afrikaner writer who went into exile and lost his ability to write. It's about difficult homecomings, love for the motherland, guilt, fury and, cautiously, about hope. Is it also about Fugard himself?

'The way it celebrates the South African landscape, the Afrikaans language, and the recognition for change in the new South Africa certainly expresses deep personal convictions,' says Fugard. 'And although I never went into exile I often seriously considered it. But the point is that the return of exiles is a very complex part of daily life in South Africa at the moment. Many who promoted change before they left are finding now that their involvement is not being recognised.'

In 1994, Fugard announced to a group of journalists that he had become a literary redundancy. (One wonders if the character Dawid in the play, who loses both his soul and his creativity when he leaves his country, is a projection of those former fears.) The system against which he had defined himself in opposition had been swiftly dismantled, and many openly wondered what the conscience of apartheid would find to write about next. Yet with a new South Africa came a new set of complications. The stark black and white that poleaxed its politics dissolved into myriad shades of grey. And Fugard found himself with a new set of creative challenges.

'There is a danger that, as the pendulum swings the other way, the role of white South Africans will be written out of the history of the new South Africa, in the same way the black involvement in the establishment of the country was written out by the whites,' he says. His pride and love for his country is clearly what continues to inspire him. Near the end of the play, Dawid's English wife tells his illegitimate, half-white daughter to reclaim the love her dead father had for his country. It's a half-veiled reminder to black and white South Africans that there are some things in its history that must be forgotten and many things that must be remembered if the country is to unite and move on.

Fugard feels as able to criticise the ANC as he did apartheid, railing against Mbeki's attitudes towards Aids and his support for Mugabe, but he has never perceived himself as a political writer. 'I don't wake up each day and say right, what issue needs attention today?' he says. 'Instead I smell out stories about real people, tell them and, invariably, those stories become about South Africa.'

But ask him whether he is optimistic about the future, the fact that the dawn that Mandela promised is still a long way off, and he is emphatic. 'We've got the most liberal constitution in the world, giant steps have been made in education and housing. And culture is thriving.'

But is that culture segregationist or integrationist? And does his optimism reflect the opinions of young black South Africans? 'I tell you, it is extraordinary to sit in restaurants and walk down streets and see the extent to which integration is happening,' he says. 'To have reached a point in my life where people don't see colour is the biggest blessing I could dream of.' And he leans back and beams.

Sorrows and Rejoicings : Tomorrow until April 20, Tricycle Theatre, 269 Kilburn High Road NW6, Mon to Sat 8pm, (Mar 25 7pm), Sat mats 4pm, April 17 2pm, £9 to £20.50, £5 concs, Tel: 020 7328 1000.

The Island now showing at The Old Vic until April 13, Mon-Sat 8pm, mats Sat 3pm £12.50-£30.