Lantern's 'Master Harold' (second review)

Suspension of disbelief:
Raising Harold

ROBERT ZALLER

Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys takes place in a small café in the South African city of Port Elizabeth, but it might as well be Prospero’s Island, a place where an exiled magician tries to make the best of things but finds the natives incorrigible and the island itself no haven from a world that casts a fatal shadow on it. Fugard’s Prospero is Sam (Frank X), a middle-aged black waiter with the airs of a maitre d’, whom we meet with the busboy Willie (James Christopher Tolbert), preparing to open for the evening’s business. Sam is trying to teach the rudiments of ballroom dancing to Willie, whom he has excited with the prospect of the annual dance competition that appears to be the social highlight at least of Sam’s set. Willie is hopelessly awkward; Sam, himself effortlessly graceful, is endlessly patient.

In a world shaped by injustice, the only hope is the moment of grace, and this is what Sam is really trying to teach. The age of ballroom dancing is a thing of the past, but, as in the Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s— Fugard’s play takes place in 1950, on the eve of the apartheid laws that formally segregated the races in South Africa— it gives an oppressed population the chance to momentarily escape the dominant culture, though at the cost of simultaneously affirming it. The ironies of this situation are lost on Sam, not because he is insufficiently intelligent or aware to realize them, but because his whole identity is staked on repressing consciousness of them. In dance alone he is whole.

As a Caliban, simple Willie hasn’t much resistance to offer, and one can entertain reasonable hopes that under Sam’s tutelage he will stop alienating his dance partner by beating her. Rather, it’s the Miranda figure, the Master Harold of the play’s title, who complicates things.

The black man as surrogate father

Harold—Hally (Ahren Potratz)— is not, of course, a girl, nor is he Sam’s offspring, but rather the white son of the café’s owner and her dissolute husband. Hally is deeply ashamed of his father, and, in the innocence of youth, has taken Sam for a surrogate, learning from him under the guise of teaching him his own childish lessons. There is profit for Sam in this too, because it enables him not only to acquire the education that has been withheld from him as a black man, but to identify with the colonial ideology embedded in that education. Sam knows his place, of course, but he recreates the white man’s world within it as a privileged space in which he can enjoy the fantasy of human dignity.

The clumsy and naive Willie possesses this dignity as an innate quality, and it emerges in the play’s crisis. But Sam, as the more complex character, needs to construct it, to possess it as the deed of intelligence and imagination. In this he is bound to suffer, for the world he inhabits— the one that bears down mercilessly on his private island— will acknowledge neither capacity in a black man, and must destroy both wherever it finds them.

The agent of destruction is, of course, Hally, who is now at the moment of painful transition where he must pick up the hateful reins of power by disavowing the one filial relationship he has known. The moment must cost Sam his illusions, too— his paradisal island— and throw him back on the realization that, for Hally and his kind, it is Sam and his kind who are all Calibans, and forever. Sam’s gesture of renunciation is simultaneously one of abasement and aggression. It is so violent, however, that it can neither stand as his own nor the play’s last word, though it is unclear at the end whether Sam has not ultimately retreated to a deeper level of illusion in trying to recast his relationship with Hally on an adult plane. The last scene would seem to suggest that Sam has conveyed his own sense of grace at least to Willie, but it may well be the other way around.

As for Hally, the future seems even bleaker. He proceeds from child to master without ever having been a man.

A dramatically dubious premise

A fine cast led by Frank X, who is never less than excellent and here superb, makes the best case for “Master Harold’s” unresolved conflicts, which include its dramatically dubious premise. It is not only that Sam is utopian in his belief that an uncorrupted relationship is possible across the racial barrier. It takes a no less willing suspension of disbelief to imagine that even the most inattentive of white parents would permit such a relationship to develop between an only child and a black servant.

We know nothing, either, of Sam’s life apart from the café. Has he no family of his own, no companions apart from Willy? His investment in Hally suggests not only wistful aspiration but also inner emptiness. How, we want to ask him, can you stake so much on something so fundamentally hopeless? But Fugard never provides an answer, and since we are required to adopt Sam’s perspective for the play to work at all, we are left ourselves feeling duped at the end.

The promising young David O’Connor has directed this production with a deft hand, and Meghan Jones’ spare set is suitably understated. “Master Harold” was written in 1982, about a decade before apartheid’s collapse. We are now more than a decade beyond it, and, in a land ravaged by AIDS, poverty and endemic violence, Sam’s fantasy island seems more an untenable dream than ever.


To read another review of this play by Dan Rottenberg, click here.