APARTHEID-ERA PLAY FEELS FRESH, RELEVANT
Just as Bertolt Brecht’s reputation as an epic dramatist emerged relatively unscathed from under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, so the best of Athol Fugard’s humane, beautifully constructed dramas have retained their wallop long after the apartheid system that inspired them has been dumped in the ashcan of history.
Take Master Harold … and the Boys, his largely autobiographical 1982 masterpiece, which Toronto’s Obsidian Theatre has just brought to the Segal (in association with Black Theatre Workshop) after a triumphant, awards-sweeping run at the Shaw Festival in 2016.
The play is specific enough to describe, with painful accuracy, the day-to-day reality for black people in 1950s South Africa.
But the way it captures the more insidious racism lurking behind well-meaning liberalism also feels as fresh and relevant as Jordan Peele’s horror satire Get Out.
Like that movie, Fugard’s play moves relentlessly from thoughtless remarks and on toward gloves-off, cards-on-the-table savagery.
The Master Harold of that awkwardly but aptly phrased title is Hally, an intelligent if gauche 17-year-old white schoolboy.
The Boys are Sam and Willie, the two middle-aged black servants who work at the rather dingy Port Elizabeth diner owned by Hally’s parents.
Throughout the beautifully paced 90 minutes playing time (there’s no interval), all taking place in the convincingly cramped confines of Peter Hartwell’s design, we learn that Sam has been a kind of mentor and father figure to Hally since he was born: Hally’s real father is a hopeless, crippled drunk. And yet, thanks to the rottenness of the apartheid state, there’s a sickness at the heart of Sam and Hally’s potentially healthy relationship.
Sam, along with his co-worker Willie, is kept in a state of near-infantilism so that we’re constantly thrown off balance as to who is the child, who the adult.
One minute Sam is dispensing fatherly wisdom to Hally, the next he’s lowering his eyes as if he were a schoolboy himself, wary of a “master” whose displeasure
might turn nasty. It’s an inordinately talky script, understandable given that Fugard was in fully fledged confessional mode, desperately seeking answers as to why he himself, the real-life Hally, once behaved in such a ghastly fashion toward a black servant. There are lots of grandly phrased arias in which ballroom dancing stands as a utopian symbol for “a world without collisions,” kiteflying is seen as a metaphor for transcending the filth of reality, and mathematics might calculate a “man of magnitude,” a future deliverer.
In a lesser writer, it might all have become a bit suffocating and overly worthy. But the cumulative effect of Fugard’s writing, coupled with three first-rate performances, is absolutely compelling.
Director Philip Akin keeps things moving with such precise and busy physicality that it becomes as much an action-driven as a rhetorical play.
James Daly boldly makes an unlovable little Caligula out of Hally, yet still manages to make us believe in his genuine hunger for a better world.
Allan Louis, fresh from playing Dracula at the Shaw Fest, is comically clenched and vulnerable as Willie.
And so full of understated yet commanding grace under fire is Sam, as superbly played by André Sills, that it’s easy to imagine him becoming one of those historychanging “men of magnitude” years after the events of the play: if not a Mandela, then maybe the ballroom equivalent of a Hugh Masekela, the great South African trumpeter and activist who died on the day I saw the production.