The Captain's Tiger

Subtitled a "Memoir for the Stage," the play is told both from the point of view of the twenty-year-old author who was the captain’s tiger—a glorified personal servant to the ship’s captain—and the author as his current-day self. This is a fascinating voyage, a writer’s pilgrimage, a whole painful process we are privy to. We witness his coming of age through author monologues, recreations of onboard conversations, letters written to his mother, imagined discourse and dreams. Fugard has created a personal dramatic structure moving from present to past, from reality to reverie. One of the author’s most imaginative works, Fugard has created a world with imagery that is visual, visceral and poetic.