BURGLARY FIRES PLAYWRIGHT FUGARD !

South African playwright Athol Fugard has told the BBC how a series of violent burglaries at his home inspired him to write his latest work, Victory, about the troubled direction his home country is heading.
Victory, which premiered in the UK city of Bath, paints a bleak picture of modern South Africa. It centres on a violent burglary of an elderly white widower committed by two black teenagers, Freddie and Victoria.
Fugard told BBC World Service's The Ticket programme that he took the theme after his own home was burgled on four occasions in the last two years - the last of which involved someone he trusted.
"It gave a focus to a sense of betrayal I've had growing in me with time, as I looked at what South Africa was becoming and the direction it was heading in," he said.
"I compared it with what I had felt 12 years ago when, together with millions of South Africans of all races and creeds, we stood in long queues to cast our votes in the first ever democratic election.
"That was a moment of incredible euphoria, of hope, that South Africa would in fact - as it did - turn its back on the violence of its past and try to forge a new identity."

Fugard, who initially became famous through his works about South Africa under apartheid, has set a number of his recent plays in the same village as he reflects on how the country has changed since those first democratic elections in 1994.
He said that it showed how burglary, violent crime, drug abuse "and all the attendant horrors of what the world is made up of now" have reached even this remote place in the Karoo desert.
He added, however, there is a "slender note of affirmation" in the fate of the young woman, Victoria, at the centre of the play.

ATHOL FUGARD WORKS
No Good Friday
The Serpent Players
Blood Knot
Sizwe Bansi Is Dead
The Island
Statements After an Arrest Under The Immorality Act
Master Harold... and the Boys
Tsotsi

Victory - "She faces a very complex future - although she's very damaged," he said.
"But she might learn from that."
Fugard established his reputation when he worked extensively with two of South Africa's greatest actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona.
Together they wrote three groundbreaking plays, including The Island and Sizwe Banzi is Dead - performed and workshopped in black townships.
He said that taking these plays into the townships, and talking loudly on stage "about things that were only whispered about" was, for him, "an absolutely defining experience of the potency of theatre."
And he said that, though he is now 75 years old, he still writes "with the same joy and the same sense of celebration.
"Underlying even the bleak in my opus is celebration - the celebration of theatre," he added.
"I was talking to the director of the Bath production of Victory this morning - and I just felt so proud to be a member of the theatre community.
"This community stretches all the way back to Shakespeare, and even earlier. Ours is a very noble profession, even though in many cases we've been the outcasts of society."
BBC NEWS REPORT.