André Sills as Sam, Allan Louis as Willie and James Daly as Hally in “Master Harold” …and the Boys. Photo by David Cooper
When I saw the first New York production of Master Harold and the Boys in 1982, I felt troubled, if memory serves, by the off-handed and nasty racism of Harold and how his cruelty embodied the degrading apartheid conditions for blacks in South Africa. But playwright Athol Fugard’s genius in this play is to incisively demonstrate the impact of such social conditions on individuals, black or white, in their intimate one on one relationships. He explores the many shades of human bonding and how such bonding, when foolishly and deliberately abused, can never be mended. When kindness and understanding are repaid with a smug cruelty, when childish inexperience spits upon human values, we are forced to acknowledge that there is not much hope for our too often trivial species.
The cast of three in the Shaw Festival production of Master Harold includes Allan Louis as Willie, Andre Sills as Sam, and James Daly as Harold also called Hally. Each superbly realized performance helps to penetrate one’s habitual tolerance of racism as a fact of life to whatever degree such tolerance exists. Each performance compels one to see what we do not want to know about ourselves. Equally potent is how these three actors repeatedly help to unglue the protective masks we all wear in our relations with others. As watchers of this powerful production we become raw and feel vulnerable to the complex wounds of other lives as here portrayed. We become aware of the delicacy of one’s ties to others, aware how easily destroyed the nurturing good in human relationships can be. We also witness how unreachable people can be, unable as they are to value and feel gratitude for the kindness of others.
Director Philip Akin effectively keeps this intense production leaning toward subtlety and understatement where the impact Fugard’s carefully crafted masterwork thus gradually builds. We sense that things might here go bad, that an undercurrent of unspoken wrongs in human connections might erupt. We feel unsettled by the suggested and the unspoken in these interactions and, when these find cause to burst open, the impact is devastating. Fugard has written this play from his own life, from his own guilt, and compels us, with the aid of three richly brewed characterizations in this production, to witness the goings on from the depth of our own lives. Once seen this play hurts and cannot be escaped. We observe the pain of these people. We know somehow that we have been complicit in their pain. And yet not too much before us is cut and dry. And the production is full of affectionate vibes, charm, humour, and day to day living that we easily recognize to some degree as our own.
Two black men Sam and Willie, banter with mutual affection in a 1950 diner where they work. One has his troubles with a woman aka “bitch” and is cautioned, “You hit her too much.” Hally, white and in his late teens, enters with something of a chip on his shoulder. Although received with open arms, he starts to pull racial rank as a white and tells Willie, “Act your age.” He seems something of an innocent and the two men are patient as he feels his oats. Sam has an “intellectual” discussion with him and the three together share laughter and memories. It’s a warm shoot the shit atmosphere here, but…..
But what? When Hally asks condescendingly, “What does a black man know?” the undercurrent of racism surfaces and becomes overt. So do signs of teenage rebellion in Hally’s remark about his father: “He’s behaving like a child.” Also teenage frustration in his comment: “Life is just a tiny little mess…..a perpetual disappointment.”Hally is humourless, perhaps understandably whiney. He puts down the enthusiasm of Sam and Willie for an upcoming dance because, we sense, he is too uptight to let go. When the two men practice a dance, Hally orders them to get back to work and we note the snobbishness of the untested youth in him. After all, he intends to write about their dance competition in anthropological terms as a practice of “primitive black society.” And we wonder about academic study as a means of domination over things it cannot control.
Much goes on between individuals and much is implied in this 90 minute theatrical gem that simultaneously rips out one’s heart and punches one’s gut very hard. The connection of black and white is deeply touching but the play’s impact arises more from this connection’s fragility. A young white male who hasn’t grown up hasn’t the goods to understand the two black men who have been his guides into adulthood and who live in conditions of human degradation. He doesn’t comprehend the value they place on mutual caring and mutual respect. Sam explains that the “dance is beautiful because that is what we want life to be” but Hally is too young and too sheltered to understand that there is “too much bumpy in the world and people are getting bruised.” He is white, in a position of privilege, and he talks down on blacks in ways both blatant and subtle. The atmosphere is made of tension.
Still, Sam and Willie are forgiving with Hally who is having, as they explain, a “troubled youth” between his “fighting parents. But lines of tolerance are implicit in this relationship and become a decisive factor when Hally is “disrespectful” to his mother about his father. While Hally plays the role of good kid to his dad in the hospital and lies that dad’s coming home “is the best news in the world” he is nasty to his mother and to Sam and Willie too. He tells Sam to “shut up” about his homework. And when Sam chides, “It’s terrible for a son to mock his father,” Hally says, “Mind your fucking business and shut up.”
Hally ultimately abuses the only ones who care about him by playing the race card: “You’re a servant and don’t forget it.” He then gets more smug and orders, “Why don’t you call me Master Harold” because he is now teaching the two men “a lesson in respect.” When Hally crudely and deliberately refers to “a nigger’s ass” Sam tells him “You’re trying really hard to be ugly” but Hally hasn’t the experience of introspection to understand either others or himself. The two men may explain about Hally that “he’s a little white boy in long trousers now but still a little white boy” but as Willie observes, “It’s all bad in here now.” This and much else takes place in the play’s final twenty minutes, minutes that are close to the most unflinching, unrelenting, profoundly moving, and emotionally painful to watch that I have ever seen in theatre.