Athol Fugard’s notebooks are filled with handwriting, the seeds that have come to represent a body of work that won him the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2011. It’s a habit that developed in the 1960s, his way of recording anything significant that happened to him — "sensual fragments, incidents, quotations, speculations" — in black ink on white paper with a fountain pen.Fugard’s latest play, The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, which premiered in New York last year and opens in Cape Town on August 23, was born in similar fashion.Required to produce something for the off-Broadway Signature Theatre in New York, Fugard discovered a fairly well-worked-out first act of the play he had written in 2010 and stashed in his "bottom drawer". It was a simpler version of the current plot, a statement about the artist and the little boy who turned out to be his helper, detailing none of the issues that surface now. Fugard dug out the draft and started to live with it, realising ...
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