In Memory of Truth: Master Harold...and the Boys (Review)
There are evenings in the theatre when the curtain falls and you sit frozen in your seat, not because you don't want to leave, but because you're not entirely sure your legs will carry you. Last night at Theatre on the Square was one of those evenings. Warona Seane's revival of Athol Fugard's Master Harold...and the Boys didn't just perform for us - it excavated something raw and necessary from the depths of our collective memory, leaving me breathless and, yes, weeping.
The timing feels both tragic and essential. Fugard passed away this March, and this production arrives as both memorial and manifesto, a reminder that his words haven't finished their work in the world. Under Seane's direction, what could have been a dutiful tribute becomes something far more urgent: a living, breathing testament to why some stories refuse to be buried with their authors.
The genius of Fugard's writing has always been its refusal to wield the atrocities of Apartheid like a blunt instrument. Instead, he hands us a scalpel, precise and devastating, cutting through to the tender places where politics and humanity intersect. In the St George's tea room, circa 1950s Port Elizabeth, we don't witness grand political gestures or sweeping historical moments. We simply watch three people navigate a rainy afternoon, and somehow this becomes everything we need to understand about power, love, and the terrible arithmetic of oppression.
Wilhelm Disbergen's set design deserves its own standing ovation. Those lacy white tablecloths and the old rotary phone aren't mere period details - they're archaeological artifacts of a world built on the illusion of civility. The tea room's prim propriety becomes a stage where the most intimate betrayals play out, where the personal and political collapse into each other with shattering inevitability. It's the kind of design that makes you forget you're watching theatre until suddenly you remember, with a jolt, that these walls are temporary and these wounds are not.
But it's the performances that transform this afternoon into something transcendent. Sello Maake kaNcube's Sam is a masterclass in restraint and revelation. He moves through the space carrying decades of accumulated wisdom and hurt, his every gesture calibrated to survive in a world that has made survival an art form. Watching him navigate his relationship with Hally - offering guidance while tiptoeing around the landmines of their racial reality - is like watching someone perform surgery on his own heart. The tenderness he shows this boy who will inevitably wound him speaks to something deeper than forgiveness; it speaks to a love that exists despite everything the world has done to make it impossible.
Lebohang Motaung's Willie provides the perfect counterweight to Sam's careful diplomacy. Where Sam measures his words like medicine, Willie wears his emotions closer to the surface, and their chemistry crackles with the familiarity of two people who have learned to read each other's silences. Together, they create a friendship that feels lived-in, worn smooth by years of shared understanding and mutual protection.
Daniel Anderson faces perhaps his most challenging role yet as Hally - the character who must embody both innocence and complicity, who must be worthy of our sympathy even as he perpetrates the very cruelties that make him pitiable. Anderson navigates this impossible terrain with remarkable nuance, showing us a boy caught between the love he feels for Sam and the poison he's been taught to call normal. It's a performance that refuses easy answers, demanding that we sit with the uncomfortable reality that monsters are often made, not born.
The production's use of rain as both literal and metaphorical container deserves special mention. That steady patter becomes the soundtrack to confession, the rhythm that underlies revelation. We settle into this weather-bound afternoon alongside the characters, and somehow that shared intimacy makes their story feel less like history and more like family truth - the kind of painful honesty that only emerges when the outside world temporarily disappears.
What struck me most powerfully about this production is how it resists the temptation to turn its characters into symbols. Sam isn't simply Noble Suffering, Willie isn't just Comic Relief, and Hally refuses to be reduced to either Innocent Victim or Irredeemable Oppressor. They remain stubbornly, gloriously human - flawed and seeking, damaged and dreaming. In their faces, I saw echoes of people I've known, voices I've heard, stories that continue to unfold in different forms across our still-divided landscape.
As I finally stood to leave, still shaky from the evening's emotional excavation, I found myself thinking about legacy - not just Fugard's, but all of ours. This play reminds us that our dark past isn't simply something to overcome or forget; it's a repository of hard-won wisdom about how quickly love can curdle into cruelty, how systems of oppression seep into the most intimate relationships, and how healing requires us to look directly at the wounds we'd rather ignore.
Master Harold...and the Boys runs through June 28th, and if you have any capacity for being changed by theatre, you owe it to yourself to witness this remarkable production. Some stories demand to be heard; this one demands to be felt.