Wow! eBook
The Train Driver and Other Plays
Author(s): Athol Fugard (Author), Marianne McDonald (Afterword)
- Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
- Publication Date: 22 Nov. 2012
- Language: English
- Print length: 240 pages
- ISBN-10: 155936386X
- ISBN-13: 9781559363860
Book Description
“For me [The Train Driver] is the biggest of them all. Everything I have written before has been a journey to this.”—Athol Fugard
The Train Driver is classic Athol Fugard, and considered by the author to be “the most important play he has written.” This seminal work, inspired by a true story of a mother who, with her three small children, committed suicide on the train tracks outside of Cape Town, South Africa, unfolds as the train driver, tortured by such an act of final despair, seeks to find his own truth with the help of a grave digger who buries “the ones without names.”
This volume includes Coming Home, Fugard’s first work addressing AIDS in South Africa, and Have You Seen Us?, his first play set in America about a South African transplant living in San Diego. Also included are pages from the author’s notebooks written in 2000, when he began writing The Train Driver, and an afterword by Marianne McDonald.
Editorial Reviews
Review
A deceptively simple but devastating critique of post-apartheid South Africa…The Train Driver is essential theatre viewing.
—South Africa Sunday Times
Ghosts fill Athol Fugard’s Coming Home, a haunting yet clear-eyed play of lost dreams…Other spirits hover, too, like the ghost of the ‘new’ South Africa set in stark contrast to its harsh, heartbreaking reality today.
—Variety
A dramatic, moving theater experience written for South Africa…It will save us from hopelessness.
—Sunday Independent
About the Author
Athol Fugard (1932-2025) worked in the theater as a playwright, director and actor for more than fifty years. His plays include Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena, “Master Harold”… and the boys, The Road to Mecca, My Children! My Africa!, Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act and Valley Song.
Marianne McDonald is a teacher, historian, playwright, and philanthropist. Her work as a scholar involves interpretation and preservation of Greek and Irish texts. Her plays draw inspiration from ancient Greek dramas. Her accolades are many, and include: induction into the Royal Irish Academy in 1994; and the Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Classics award from the University of California, San Diego, in 2013.
