Coming Home Study Guide

Athol Fugard was born in 1932 in Middleburg, on the Eastern Cape of South Africa, to an Afrikaner mother and a father of French and Irish descent. His family soon moved to the prominent city of Port Elizabeth, and in his school years Fugard was discovered to be precocious. He enrolled in the University of Cape Town to study anthropology and philosophy but dropped out shortly before final examinations, making his way onto an Asian steamer ship where he would work for the next two years. He began writing in this period. In the mid-1950s, Fugard returned to South Africa married his wife, Sheila. In this time, he became keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid and began organizing multiracial theatre productions of his own plays. His anti-apartheid activities, including the writing of plays criticizing the system and refusing to perform in segregated theatres, earned him government scrutiny and surveillance. Many of his plays in the 1960s were banned within South Africa, and his passport was confiscated during this period in an attempt to silence his voice from resonating internationally. Fugard persisted undeterred, collaborating with the nascent all-Black acting troupe The Serpent Players on several notable productions in the 1970s. His international breakthrough came in the early 1980s, when his plays Master Harold …and the Boys and The Road to Mecca were staged to great acclaim at Yale. Since then, he has accumulated a towering reputation in world literature and theatre in a career that has straddled the downfall of apartheid. Fugard earned a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre in 2011. He remains active in his early 90s, with his most recent outing being the co-written play Concerning the Life of Babyboy Kleintjies in 2022.

Coming Home takes place in South Africa in the early-to-mid-2000s, a time when the county was reckoning with newfound struggles and disappointments. For decades, South Africa had been governed by a White minority who cruelly oppressed the Black majority under the apartheid system of segregation. In the early 1990s, this system was dismantled, causing widespread elation. Coming Home takes place after this elation had subsided and new challenges emerged. Veronica’s personal disillusionment with her failed career reflects the mood of disappointment felt nationwide at the time, as economic hardship remained just as prevalent as before apartheid’s fall, and the new government installed in place of the old system quickly became ineffective and riddled with corruption. Veronica’s contracting AIDS specifically reflects the dishonesty and ineptitude with which president Thabo Mbeki’s government in the late 1990s and early 2000s responded to the AIDS crisis in the country, denying its seriousness for far too long. Both Veronica’s unwanted pregnancy and her subsequent contracting of the disease are, as she explains in Coming Home, due to the government distributing ineffective condoms.

Though it can be read as a standalone play, Coming Home is actually a sequel to Fugard’s 1995 play Valley Song. Valley Song focuses on Veronica as a girl, before she has left home, dreaming of success in the big city. Most of Fugard’s works deal with South African life, and his acclaimed 1982 play Master Harold …and the Boys similarly deals with guilt and reconciliation, although with the nation’s racial dynamics more foregrounded than in Coming Home. J. M. Coetzee is another of South Africa’s foremost writers, and his 1999 novel Disgrace likewise handles the struggles of life in post-Apartheid South Africa. Fugard takes one of Coming Home’s epigraphs from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” the final segment of his career-culminating poem sequence Four Quartets. Four Quartets, written just before and during World War II, similarly deals with themes of geographical and spiritual homecoming and the individual’s quest for redemption and peace, though in a much more abstract, modernist style than Fugard’s. Thematically, Coming Home seems to draw on one of the 20th century’s most well-known plays, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which likewise deals with characters suffering from their attachment to unachievable dreams and slowly coming to reckon with reality.