29 Nov 2025 | News, Spotlight
Tom Stoppard’s path to literary success is a story that would be worthy of the stage. Born in Czechoslovakia (as it was then known) as Tomás Straüssler in 1937, he endured a turbulent childhood before rising to fame as one of the great playwrights of his time. Known for his intelligent wordplay and intellectual prowess, Stoppard’s career spanned more than 60 years, across stage, screen and radio.
As well as being a literary great, he was also a staunch advocate for free speech. Although he often suggested that his works were not politically motivated, much of his writing centred around themes of censorship and human rights.
Stoppard joined the advisory board of Index on Censorship in 1978 and made several contributions to the magazine in defence of free speech, declaring in one interview that “free expression was what made all the other freedoms possible, so it was everything.”
Stoppard first rose to fame in 1967 with his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a tragicomedy revolving around the actions of two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which brought overnight success after its London debut at the Old Vic. The play was responsible for the first of his five Tony award wins for Best Play, a record unmatched by any other playwright. Other works to earn this accolade include his 1974 comedy Travesties, 1982 drama The Real Thing and his 2002 drama The Coast of Utopia.
The 1990s signalled a decade of unparalleled success for Stoppard. His services to literature were acknowledged with a knighthood in 1997, and he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his 1998 film Shakespeare in Love.
Age proved no barrier to the writer, who continued his work well into his 80s with his last play Leopoldstadt, a drama centred around a Jewish family in Vienna, which earned him his final Tony award for Best Play in 2023.
His achievements are perhaps even more impressive considering the challenges he faced in early life. Soon after he was born, his family, who were non-practising Jews, were forced to flee Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis. After four years in Singapore, Stoppard once again found himself fleeing conflict. An invasion by Japan caused him to move to India with his mother and brother, while his father stayed behind and was killed at sea by a bomb dropped by Japanese forces. In 1946, Stoppard’s mother married a British army major who gave the family his name and moved them over to England.
These roots influenced his later role as an advocate for free speech. The authoritarian regime that engulfed his homeland of Czechoslovakia in the years between the Soviet Union invasion in 1968 until the fall of communism there in 1989 helped to shape his opposition to totalitarianism and media repression. After reading about Victor Fainberg’s experience of being detained in the USSR in an issue of Index on Censorship in 1975, Stoppard was inspired to write Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a drama set in a Soviet mental hospital. He dedicated the play to Fainberg and Vladimir Bukovsky, another incarcerated dissident, and an excerpt was published in the magazine in 1978.
Stoppard worked as a journalist prior to his transition to the world of theatre. His early career influenced some of his later causes. For example, he voiced his support for Hacked Off’s campaign for a free and accountable press due to his belief that “free expression in the context of British journalism seemed to me to be about as important a subject for any kind of writing, including plays, as you would find.”
In his final interview with Index in 2021, he warned against the modern culture of intolerance, identity politics and cancel culture, declaring that “the danger to society of actual censorship has probably never been greater”. A year later he wrote playfully but seriously on identity politics.
Such talents as Stoppard come few and far between, and his contributions to both literature and the fight for free speech will be sorely missed.
13 Jun 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News, Russia, Ukraine
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, brave journalists have travelled across the country gathering testimonies from civilians about war crimes committed by the Russian army.
It’s a crucial, difficult and sometimes deadly job – the tragic killing of journalist and writer Victoria Amelina is a stark reminder of this – but these accounts now form a vast database of evidence documenting the atrocities of war inflicted on Ukrainian citizens.
That’s why the recent play The Reckoning, co-written and directed by Dash Arts co-founder Josephine Burton, currently showing at the Arcola Theatre in London, is so powerful. The production is drawn from real testimonies of survivors of Russian oppression in Ukraine, collected by The Reckoning Project – an organisation recording, preserving and conserving witness statements from across the country.
The play follows the story of a journalist (played by Marianne Oldham) travelling around Ukraine to collect these testimonies. As part of her work, she meets “The Man from Stoyanka” (played by Tom Godwin), a security guard who chooses to stay rather than flee as Russian forces approach a village in Ukraine. He recounts to her his traumatic imprisonment by Russian soldiers, who ultimately decide to let him go.
As he shares his experience, the audience is confronted with the many ways in which war pushes people to their very limits: the inner strength we don’t know we have, the instinctive courage to help others, but also the enduring pain of trauma and guilt as ordinary people try to navigate a new and brutal reality.
The play owes much of its emotional resonance to two Ukrainian actors, Olga Safronova and Simeon Kyslyi, who embody the testimonies of innocent civilians while also sharing their own lived experiences of the war. Halfway through the show, to ease the heaviness of the topics covered on stage, they play a game together recalling the positive things happening in their lives. It is this blend of personal witness, light comedy and bittersweet nostalgia that underscores the horror of the crimes committed against Ukraine.
There are moments of relief. One of the most memorable is the making of a Ukrainian summer salad, which the audience watches being prepared and are then invited to eat together at the end of the play. The intimacy of the space, with the audience surrounding the stage on all sides, and the deliciously simple dish unite the viewers and actors. The smell of fresh dill was so evocative that it moved some audience members to tears.
At the end of each performance, Dash Arts invites different individuals and organisations to bring a speaker to the stage to reflect on the play. Last week, Index on Censorship’s editor-at-large, Martin Bright, paid tribute to an individual killed during the war: Victoria Roshchyna. Roshchyna was a fearless Ukrainian journalist with an essential voice who reported from the front lines. In August 2023, she was captured by Russian soldiers while travelling to eastern Ukraine. She died a year later, aged just 27, in Russian custody. A forensic exam showed multiple signs indicative of torture and inhuman treatment.
In her memory, Bright read out Roshchyna’s harrowing account originally written for Index in April 2022, describing an earlier kidnapping by Russian forces while she was en route to Mariupol.
Just as the actors had tried to find a glimmer of hope amidst the devastating stories of war, Bright too sought to shed a positive message following Roshchyna’s death.
“There’s not a lot of good in this [war],” said Bright. “Except I do hope that the publishing of Victoria’s words will retain something of the spirit of Ukraine for the future.”
It is the words of Roshchyna, Amelina, and all the civilians who have shared their stories that will keep the spirit of Ukraine alive for generations to come.
The Reckoning is now showing at the Arcola Theatre in London until 28 June 2025.
18 Mar 2025 | Africa, News, South Africa
Gavin Hood directed the 2006 Best Foreign Language Academy Award winning film Tsotsi, based on the acclaimed novel by South Africa’s greatest playwright, the late Athol Fugard. Hood only met Fugard once but the writer’s influence on him has been deep and profound. Index on Censorship asked Hood to offer his personal thoughts on the impact of the legendary artist on his own life and work.
“Decency. You know the word, Tsotsi? Decency? I had a little bit of it, so I was sick. And that big one tonight, with the tie… he had a lot. So, he’s dead.”
It’s 2004. Actor Mothusi Magano, playing self-loathing, guilt-ridden drunk Boston, spits the slurred words at Presley Chweneyagae, the lead in a film I’m directing based on Athol Fugard’s haunting, redemptive masterpiece, Tsotsi. Boston is sickened by his participation in the murder of a dignified older man, stabbed just an hour earlier for nothing more than a few notes in his wallet.
Chweneyagae, chillingly silent, rocks back and forth ever so slightly, an unstoppable rage building behind his hooded eyes. He suddenly launches a vicious attack on Boston, who, like Fugard, just won’t stop talking about human dignity and compassion, even in the face of brutality.
Tsotsi is Fugard’s only novel. He is celebrated around the world as South Africa’s greatest ever playwright – and that is how I first encountered him. It was 1977. I was 13 years old, and attending a privileged, all-white, private boys’ school, when my parents took me to see The Island at The Market Theatre in downtown Johannesburg.
Fugard wrote the explosive two-handed epic in collaboration with his Tony Award winning stars, the legendary South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Less than a year earlier, the two actors had been jailed for their performance in another Fugard play, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, which the apartheid authorities claimed contained “inflammable, abusive and vulgar subject matter”.
Bluntly, I had never seen Black actors performing in a theatre before. I think my mother, who was a high-school English, French and History teacher, had heard that The Island referenced Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, because I vaguely recall her outlining the plot of that play and saying she understood that The Island would also be about defying repressive authority.
Despite the heads up, I was hardly prepared for the raw, visceral power of a tale of human dignity and resistance by two prisoners rehearsing Antigone on a prison island that was clearly a stand in for Robben Island, where the world’s most famous political prisoner Nelson Mandela had been held since 1964.
Through the turbulent 1980s, I studied law at The University of the Witwatersrand. From the relative safety of my liberal white status, I worked at the Wits law clinic, briefly representing a few impoverished clients; I attended my fair share of student protests, got teargassed, and even got arrested once, just for an afternoon for attending a banned Winnie Mandela gathering on campus; I wrote a newspaper article questioning the neutrality of a newly appointed Chief Justice – which got me an unsettling call ominously declaring, “You must be careful what you write” – and I performed in a number of not too controversial theatre productions.
But through all those confounding formative years – marred by state violence I only ever experienced tangentially – I attended every Fugard play that came to The Market Theatre, from Hello and Goodbye to The Road to Mecca to Master Harold… and the Boys. I marvelled at how his intimate, tightly coiled works spoke so bravely and elegantly about the personal moral dilemmas, regrets, and reconciliations of ordinary, imperfect people living under a soul-crushing system. His art gnawed at my conscience while, at the same time, expressing an unyielding optimism and hope.
I completed my degree, worked briefly for a commercial law firm, left to pursue a career as a professional actor and then, in mid-1989, facing a rising risk of being called up to join a military camp to serve in the townships that were quite literally on fire, I secured a student visa to study screenwriting and directing at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and left South Africa for the USA.
Unbelievably, just a few months later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the “Rooi Gevaar” (the “Red Communist Danger”) British and American support for the apartheid regime evaporated and by 1994 I was back in the New South Africa, now led by President Mandela, working for the new Department of Health on HIV / AIDS educational dramas for television.
Fugard was still writing plays, and I was once again watching productions like Valley Song at theatres like The Baxter in Cape Town.
Fast forward to 2000 when, after some minor successes at festivals with a short film ironically starring Fugard’s long-time collaborator Winston Ntshona, and a low-budget first feature, I was asked by producer Peter Fudakowski if I might consider adapting Fugard’s novel, Tsotsi. “Have you read it?” he asked. “Years ago,” I said – which was true!
I read it again immediately. The book is very internally focused, with the emotional and moral conflicts of its title character mostly conveyed through moving inner monologues, which are notoriously difficult to translate into the visual medium of film.
I called Fudakowski back and reluctantly said a screen adaptation would likely require me to take some liberties with the plot and structure – and I was not at all sure how Fugard might feel about that.
Fudakowski called Fugard’s agent. Would he be willing to discuss the adaptation with Gavin and perhaps collaborate with him through the process?
“No,” came Fugard’s blunt reply through his agent a day later. “Athol is a playwright. He tried making a film once and he didn’t enjoy the process. He wishes you only the best and, when the film is complete, he’d love to see it – before it’s released. If he likes it, he’ll say so. If not, he will keep silent, and the critics will say whatever they say.”
I was shaken. It’s not unusual for those who love a book to loathe a film adaptation. Often rightly. What if Fugard hated the film? “What if the critics hate the film?” Fudakowski replied – and decided to hire me anyway.
Cut to five long years later and the film is finally complete. I have just dropped off a print (back then the cinemas still screened reels of film!) and I am sitting with my wife, Nerissa, in a coffee shop a block away from a small art house cinema in San Diego. We are waiting for a call from the projectionist to tell us that Fugard has arrived for a private screening.
The phone rings. He has arrived, with his poet and novelist wife, Sheila Meiring Fugard, and close friend Marianne McDonald, distinguished professor of theatre and classics at University of California, San Diego (UCSD). They are settling in. The screening will be over in approximately 90 minutes.
I push my coffee aside. My stomach acid is already surging, and my heart is pounding. Fugard’s agent has said Fugard has my cell number. If he likes the film, he will call me after the screening. If he doesn’t, I should please be discreet and allow him to leave without a meeting.
Okay. We wait. I don’t recall what Nerissa and I talked about to kill the time but finally my phone rings. “Unknown caller”. I answer – and a thick, sonorous South African accent fills my ear.
“Gavin, where are you? You must come for dinner! I know a great South African chef right here in San Diego. He will deliver to Marianne’s house. It’s not far. Lamb chops, boerewors, babotie, pap, chakalaka, whatever you like. We must talk. Where are you?”
“I’m a block away,” I say, still not sure if his enthusiasm means he liked the film.
“No man, come, get over here. I loved it! You made changes, I know. But thank you for staying true to the spirit of Tsotsi. That young actor, Presley, he’s extraordinary. They all are. The whole cast. Can you come for dinner?”
And so, I finally meet Athol Fugard.
Nerissa and I went for dinner at Marianne’s beautiful home – an old stone-walled monastery. I recall a huge spread on a very long kitchen table. And Fugard talking and talking and pacing around the room with a chop in one hand, never sitting down, asking a million questions about where we’d filmed and how we’d found such wonderful actors, and the challenges of novel writing, playwriting and screenwriting, and saying how the entire crew had done us all proud.
Yes, it is true that in adapting Tsotsi for the screen I took liberties to interpret emotional shifts through action and non-verbal cues. I also updated the time period from 1950s apartheid South Africa to what was then present day in the new South Africa. I did so to reflect the deep scars inflicted by the system through segregation, forced removals and so-called “Bantu education”, which will take decades to heal from. But the core story, the central themes of redemption and the uniquely original principal characters are all Fugard’s, not mine. It is his generous spirit, his cry for basic human decency and compassion toward our fellow human beings that infuses the film.
Athol, I am forever grateful for the privilege of bringing your beautiful novel to the screen. Thank you for your timeless inspiration – your courage in confronting injustice with moral clarity, and your unwavering human decency. Rest well, sir.
3 Mar 2023 | FEATURED: Francis Clarke, News, Ukraine
You are handed a piece of paper as you enter the room. Move around, come up close, move away, sit down, do what you want; it instructs. All it asks is you be present together (and, naturally in the modern age, turn off your mobile phone).
Eventually everybody pulls up a chair, but the conformity of the audience doesn’t extend to the performance. A mixture of song, dance, poetry and performance art, Bunker Cabaret is a creative explosion.
Performed at Somerset House in Central London by the Hooligan Art Community, Bunker Cabaret is billed as an “exploration of love versus totalitarianism, and the personal conflicts of making art in time of war.” Formed in Kyiv in 2019, two of its male actors, Sam Kyslyi and Danylo Shramenko, developed scenes in a bomb shelter in the city, which would become the inspiration for the show. Leaving Ukraine, they were joined later by other members including Mirra Zhuchkova, who earlier escaped to Germany.
Photo by Steve Tanner
Bunker Cabaret opens with Kyslyi stood on a bed of fairy lights, interspersing elegant dancing with shadow boxing. The fusing of beauty with brutality, which one would imagine was how the seeds of the show were sown, is evident.
The audience is dropped into an animated conversation between Kyslyi and Shramenko. Almost childlike, it’s a game of “guess this noise”, which seems innocent enough until the correct answers compose of weaponry and warcraft. The lived experience of being trapped in a war zone is conveyed by the ability to note the difference in sound between a MiG-29 and a MiG-31.
A series of monologues are performed, including from Zhuchkova. Hers are dreamlike, almost abstract (and nightmarish), perhaps reflecting the pain of being torn away from home, and the hope of one day returning. The sound of fireworks punctuates the end of her final speech, with a strong, unifying gesture for each person in the audience. Kyslyi’s monologues are more real and descriptive of his experience, often resulting into a burst of song at the end.
Loud traffic passes outside the large windows of the room, where people could easily peek inside. This seems like a conscious decision, and like the instructions given at the start, the audience and environment play a part of the performance just as much as the actors in the room.
Ukrainian artists have been targeted since the Russian occupation and assault began. The attacks on Kyiv killed Artem Datsyshyn, the principal dancer of the National Opera of Ukraine, and the famous actress Oksana Shvet. Musicians, painters and photographers are among those killed so far; an attempt to erase Ukraine’s cultural and artistic contributors.
Despite being under attack, closed Ukrainian cultural institutions have started to programme again. Several branches of the National Art Gallery in Lviv reopened, as well as The Theater on Podil in Kyiv. Still, the circumstances for art and artists in Ukraine remains challenging.
Bunker Cabaret is not a conventional performance, but neither are the circumstances that brought it to Somerset House. It’s a paean to the fortitude of art in the hardest of conditions.
Bunker Cabaret is currently on a UK tour. Dates and ticket details are here.
