The Train Driver Background

The Train Driver Background

Athol Fugard has spent much of his career chronicling the injustices of Apartheid South Africa. The Train Driver is Fugard's play, published in 2012, and tells the fact-based story of a young mother who committed suicide with her three children near train tracks in Cape town, South Africa.

The woman and her children are never able to be identified, but their deaths deeply affect a train engineer and a grave digger. Through their relationship, Fugard explores how Apartheid negatively impacted white and Black South African people.

The Sunday Independent, a world-renowned newspaper, called Fugard's play in their review "A dramatic, moving theater experience written for South Africa." They also said that the space would help to "save us from hopelessness" and encouraged their readers to view it. Other reviewers loved the play and cited it as being another meaningful way that people could come to terms with the Apartheid past.

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