By BRUCE DENNILL
Master Harold… And The Boys / Directed by Warona Seane / Theatre On The Square, Sandton, Johannesburg
Athol Fugard’s 1982 play, set in 1950, still lands rather too close to the bone in 2025. It’s a simple, clever concept – one white teenaged boy and a couple of middle-aged black men who work for the kid’s mother, brought together by circumstance and isolated by bad weather, have time to process their relationships to each other, family members, partners and a social system massively prejudiced in favour of only one group.
That’s the superficial structure, but Fugard layers every aspect of his creations, giving the young white man, Harold or Hally (Daniel Anderson) his own experience and understanding of suppression and unfair prejudice – at the hands of an abusive, unseen father – and showing that the relatively downtrodden Willie (Lebohang Motaung) is by no means innocent of behaving in unfair, violent ways and that the piece’s moral backbone, Sam (Sello Maake Kancube), though he is willing to go further than anyone else to do the right, complex thing, is still vulnerable to vacillations.
In a dialogue-dense play, all of this allows for missives and meanderings aplenty, and, with all the action happening in one room – the Port Elizabeth tea-room belonging to Harold’s mother – Fugard keeps the emotional energy fizzing and the dynamics gripping, swinging from moments of brutal cruelty (that Harold’s racism is partly down to the apartheid system under which he is being raised is no excuse), to patient mentoring (Sam taking the role of counsellor for both Harold and Willie) and sweet whimsy (Willie’s enduring focus on his dance moves ahead of an upcoming competition, part of a subtle performance by Motaung that gives the least prominent character in the play considerable extra heft). The story communicates the complexity of all people, in all situations, without forcing its audiences down judgment-tainted paths. Leaving the theatre, you won’t like or dislike anyone completely, and that outcome – like the realisation that society in general hasn’t changed as much as anyone would have hoped since 1950 – is realistic and relatable.
Wilhelm Disbergen’s set is wonderful, richly evoking the time and place in which the story is set, and technologically impressive in terms of the endless rain falling outside the tea room’s windows for nearly the entire duration of the show.
The cast don’t always quite connect – there are one or two stumbles over words and some segues between physical ways of expressing emotional arcs that are a touch awkward – leaving a feeling, sometimes, that the storytelling maxim “show, don’t tell” is slightly unbalanced in favour of the latter. Still, the overriding effect of the play is the beginning of – or deep diving into – conversations about the topics Fugard wove into his script. This is a level of trauma processing that still needs to happen for every person who sees this production, and Master Harold… And The Boys does a fine job of guiding its audience into that important headspace.
