"Master Harold"...and the Boys

"MASTER HAROLD"...and the boys
Penguin Books edition
Written by	Athol Fugard
Characters	Hally Sam Willie
Date premiered	1982
Place premiered	Yale Repertory Theatre New Haven, Connecticut
Original language	English
Subject	A student moves from childhood innocence to poisonous bigotry.
Genre	Drama
Setting	St. Georges Park Tea Room, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. 1950.

"MASTER HAROLD"...and the boys is a play by Athol Fugard. Set in 1950, it was first produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in March 1982 and made its premiere on Broadway on 4 May at the Lyceum Theatre, where it ran for 344 performances. The play takes place in South Africa during apartheid era, and depicts how institutionalized racism, bigotry or hatred can become absorbed by those who live under it.

The play was initially banned from production in South Africa. It was the first of Fugard's plays to premiere outside of South Africa.

The play recounts the long, rainy afternoon that Hally ("Master Harold") spends with Sam and Willie, two middle-aged African servants of his parent's household. Sam and Willie have cared for seventeen year old Hally his whole life.

At the start of the play Sam and Willie are practicing ballroom steps in preparation for a major competition. Sam is quickly revealed as being the more worldly of the two. When Willie, in broken English, describes his ballroom partner and girlfriend as lacking enthusiasm, Sam correctly diagnoses the problem: Willie beats her if she doesn't know the steps.

Hally then arrives home from school. Sam is the unacknowledged yet de facto mentor to the boy since childhood, and has always treated Hally as his nephew/ward. Sam hopes to skillfully guide Hally through the difficult passage from childhood into manhood. And hopefully thereby, takes up those values and viewpoints of an adult; and a man, that Sam, has over the years lain down; and, that all men try to leave as their legacy of shepherding an adolescent boy into manhood. Willie, for his part, has always played the "loyal black"; who has always called the white Afrikaner boy (now young man) "Master Harold"; As if, as a man of fifty, he was addressing a superior; even when Hally was six.

The conversation between the three moves from Hally's school-work, to an intellectual discussion on "A Man of Magnitude", to flashbacks of Hally, Sam and Willie when they lived in a Boarding House. Hally warmly remembers the simple act of flying a kite Sam had made for him out of junk; we later learn that Sam made it to cheer Hally up after he was embarrassed greatly by his father's public and continuing drunkenness. Conversation then turns to Hally's 500-word English composition. The play reaches an emotional apex as the beauty of the ballroom dancing floor ("a world without collisions") is used as a transcendent metaphor for life.