Athol Fugard is a political tragedian, a very rare kind of writer indeed. His characters—sometimes consciously, more often not—revolt against the social order, but they are neither beaten back by it nor do they defeat it. They destroy each other instead. The idea of personal growth, of change, of effective individual action is banished by the very nature of South Africa. Fugard does not cry for the beloved country—he describes with painful detail a nation in which daily activities are turned into recurrent horrors by constant oppression.

Fugard wrote Nongogo 20 years ago, but the play's themes remain current in his work. This is not a failure of the writer to evolve, but the continued presence of apartheid. It is one thing to tell a story of personal distruction. It is another to have to tell it over and over and over again, because the world...