Gale Pipena Mal ගලේ පිපුණ මල්stage play|W.S Wijesinghe| Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek|Athol Fugard

Athol Fugard, Hon. FRSL, OIS (born 11 June 1932), is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright.[1] He is best known for his political plays opposing the system of apartheid and for the 2005 Oscar-winning film of his novel Tsotsi.

There is a good, rather grim, chance that The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek will be Athol Fugard’s last play; well into his eighties, Fugard has wryly admitted as much in recent interviews. If that does happen to be the case, then he has given an absolutely masterful farewell to the theater and to the lingering, toxic effects of apartheid, the constant focus of the South African playwright’s long career.

The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek tells the story of real-life artist Nukain Mabuza, a farm laborer who spent approximately fifteen years painting flowers onto rocks in the farmland he had been hired to maintain. Those paintings became somewhat notable during his lifetime, bringing tourists to the farm and attracting some (albeit small) attention from the art world.

The play is inspired by the rock garden created by artist Nukain Mabusa in Revolver Creek, a sleepy backwater in the eastern province of Mpumalanga. Between his duties as a farm laborer, Mabusa painted over a hundred rocks in colorful and complex patterns on land owned by his white employer. Sadly, much of the work is now lost to weather damage.

W. S. Wijesinghe has been translating stage plays since 1987, mainly from four languages into Sinhala. In the beginning of the discussion with him, he baffled me saying the translator is a 'revolutionary. Then his translations - an Italian play Lon Posso Pagare by Dario Foe; an Irish play 'The Playboy of the Western world' by M. Synge; a South African play 'Master Harold and the boys' by Athol Fugard - won awards for best translations. The English play 'Lee Harvey Oswald' is his maiden direction which won five awards in Drama Festival 2008.