“To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant For South African readers, we surely must begin withAthol Fugard, the playwright who passed away early in the year. Fugard’s career effectively began with the Serpent Players, a group of African amateur actors in the Eastern Cape, but his output eventually encompassed dozens of dramas – several in collaboration with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona – that had an influence and meaning far beyond their roots in his opposition to apartheid.
A number of those works are now in the repertoires of theatre companies internationally, years after the realities of apartheid vanished. But at the end of 2025 came the news of the death of Britain’s most important contemporary playwright, Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born dramatist whose intellectually challenging works are among the most acclaimed plays of the past half-century. His most famous works include the Tony Award-winning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (a play that inverts Hamlet by focusing on two minor characters trying to make sense of the tragedies at the royal court of Denmark), Travesties, The Real Thing, The Coast of Utopia trilogy and, most recently, Leopoldstadt – a play that explored a newly discovered heritage as a descendant of four grandparents who perished in the Holocaust.
Stoppard said he became a playwright because he was undecided about so many things and constructing dialogue where characters take opposite points of view “is the best way to contradict yourself”. His ambivalence is likely to have stemmed from a childhood where his family had fled Czechoslovakia during World War 2, and then traversed Singapore and India, before settling in England. Stoppard co-authored the script for Shakespeare in Love, wrote the scripts for other films such as The Human Factor and Empire of the Sun, and was the script doctor for blockbusters including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.
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Beyond Fugard and Stoppard, redoubtable British director Joan Plowright also passed away this year. She had influenced the work of some of South Africa’s most influential director/playwrights, such as Barney Simon. Actress Diane Ladd, three-time Oscar nominee for performances in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Rambling Rose and Wild at Heart, also passed away this year.
A cousin of playwright Tennessee Williams and mother of actress Laura Dern, she was a regular on television shows like ER and performed on Broadway as well. Summing up a career, she said: “Many years ago, I used to say, I haven’t lived long enough to be great. Now I don’t say that.
I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.” The late filmmaker David Lynch was a writer/director whose films drew upon stylised dream states, lost innocence, eroticism and mysteries under placid, peaceful exteriors. His first film, Eraserhead, became a cult favourite and his next, The Elephant Man, garnered two Oscar nominations.
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