The Captain's Tiger - A Memoir for the Stage / Athol Fugard. (Paperback, 1st ed)

It's 1952 on an old cargo ship somewhere on the Red Sea. A young man is beginning a "great adventure": a trip away from home, a voyage around the world, a journey to manhood, and a writer's odyssey. This is the setting for Athol Fugard's dramatic examination of his life as an artist shaped both by the family that raised him and the horrors of Apartheid in his war torn South African homeland. Subtitled a "Memoir for the Stage, " the play is told both from the point of view of the twenty-year-old author who was the captain's tiger -- a glorified personal servant to the ship's captain -- and the author as his current-day self.

This is a fascinating voyage -- a writer's pilgrimage, a whole painful process we are privy to. We witness his coming of age through author monologues, re-creations of onboard conversations, letters written to his mother, imagined discourse, and dreams. Fugard has created a personal dramatic structure moving from present to past, from reality to reverie. One of the author's most imaginative works, Fugard has created a world with imagery that is visual, visceral, and poetic.