Valley Song - Tapa blanda

A play which tells a gentle story of how the generations cope with the end of apartheid in South Africa. A young women wants to leave home to begin to lead her own life, but her grandfather takes this as an insult to his way of life and everything he has worked for.

Athol Fugard was born in Middelburg, South Africa in 1932 and grew up in Port Elizabeth, the setting for many of his plays. After spending two years at the University of Cape Town and working as a deck hand, Fugard took up acting and then started to write his own plays. He moved to Johannesburg in 1958, where he set up a multi-racial theatre, for which he wrote, directed and acted. His plays and attacks on apartheid have brought him into conflict with the South African government, and in 1962 he supported an international boycott against the practice of segregation of theatre audiences.Athol Fugard still lives in Port Elizabeth, and also has a home in New York. Many of his plays are published by Faber in its Contemporary Classics series.