Writer: Lulama Mali | Photographs: Supplied
Set in a humble Port Elizabeth tea room in 1950, “Master Harold”…and the Boys by Athol Fugard is a deceptively gentle unfolding of a far more brutal history. Within the casual conversation and rainy day mundanity lies a thundering reminder of the cruelty of apartheid, the dangers of white fragility, and the violence masked as civility that black South Africans have endured, often while serving tea with a smile.
This latest staging, directed by Warona Seane, breathes new life into the text through a trio of finely tuned performances. Sello Maake KaNcube is masterful as Sam, carrying both dignity and ache in equal measure. His restraint is searing, making every silence feel deliberate and every word weighted. Daniel Anderson delivers a layered portrayal of Hally, capturing the discomfort of a boy teetering between learned prejudice and the remnants of something more human. Lebohang Motaung, as Willie, brings an endearing mix of comic relief and vulnerability to the role. His character adds moments of levity to an otherwise tense narrative, while his reverence for Sam is clear in every gesture and response. Willie might follow rather than lead, but his deference is rooted not just in fear of the system, but in deep respect for Sam’s steadiness and guidance.
The play opens with Willie and Sam, two black men employed as both tea shop staff and domestic workers for a white family. Their relationship with Hally, the teenage son of their employer, sits at the heart of the piece. At first, the dynamic suggests a warmth. Hally is comfortable with Sam, whom he has leaned on during his father’s repeated failures. The pain of this dependency is clearest in a memory of a kite Sam made for the boy, lifting his spirits in the absence of paternal care. But Sam, ever mindful of the laws of the land, could not sit beside Hally to watch it fly. That bench, like so much else, was reserved for white people.
This seemingly small moment captures the essence of the play. Even acts of love and care are severed at the neck by white supremacy. Sam’s silent sacrifices, building kites and collecting a drunk Hally’s father from whites-only bars he cannot enter, paint a portrait of a man trying to restore the dignity of another while surrendering his own.
Fugard, a white playwright, draws on autobiographical fragments here. But there is always something grating in how such works strive to “match the evil” with crafted sorrow. That attempt at parity can never fully account for the systems of violence being represented. The trauma presented is not imaginative. It is lived, in Willie’s fearful “Master Hally,” in his crouching deference, in Sam’s careful calculations around a boy he thought he could call a friend.
Willie, often reduced to comedic or pitiful notes, is left without a dance partner for his ballroom competition. A seemingly harmless plot device, but it subtly reinforces a dehumanising trope. It suggests the presence of violence in his past that sits uncomfortably, even unnecessarily, within the script. One has to ask: why is it that black characters in white-authored stories are always gifted rage before they are given range?
The friendship between Sam and Hally is revealed to be illusory. Sam, despite his nurturing and patience, is swiftly reminded of his place when Hally defaults to the racism he was raised in. It is a betrayal that is neither shocking nor new. We have seen it time and time again, black adults raising white children with care and conviction, while their own children are left behind, nurtured by the crumbs of their labour.
The play’s emotional arc relies heavily on the idea of the black person as the moral compass and caretaker of the broken white child. Sam becomes that archetype, trying to hold Hally together as the cracks widen. And like a wife being scolded for being late, though she woke up early to cook, clean, and prepare her husband’s clothes, black South Africans have always been told they are too slow, too angry, too much, while carrying the burdens others refuse to acknowledge.
Even today, the echoes remain. White children raised with black nannies and housekeepers, often more present in their lives than their own parents, now respond to being called out for their inherited privilege by claiming to be “black inside.” They say this with full access to their white parents’ financial power and the benefit of our parents’ reverence, all while failing to acknowledge the imbalance at the heart of that upbringing. It is a dangerous performance of allyship, built on proximity and rarely solidarity.
“Master Harold”…and the Boys is important viewing, if only to witness how white fragility is often weaponised through performance. It is polished into profound revelations that still centre white guilt more than black truth. The pain is real. The writing is often tender. But the framing always returns to the idea of the exceptional black person who earns their humanity by keeping the white world comfortable.
This production is elevated by the sensitivity and nuance of its cast, and by a director who clearly understands that the unspoken is often where the sharpest truths lie.
It is a sobering and familiar refrain.
Weaponising fragility since time immemorial, one white tear drop at a time.
