The plays Athol Fugard co-created with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, including Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island, are among the finest of our time. His own solo work often strikes me as homiletic and heavy with symbolism and that is true of this piece in which Fugard seeks to exorcise his own remembered guilt. It reaches a terrific climax but the journey there is somewhat laborious.
The play, patently autobiographical, is set in 1950 in the kind of Port Elizabeth tea-room run by Fugard’s mother. Running 100 minutes without interval, it introduces us to three characters: Hally, the proprietor’s teenage son, and Sam and Willie, the black men who work for his family and whose dreams are centred on the upcoming ballroom dancing championships.
Although the two men seem to be Hally’s only friends, his tone towards them is insufferably patronising: he talks of “primitive” black culture, tells Sam he has never been a “slave” and informs him that “Tolstoy may have educated his peasants but I’ve educated you”.
Seeing the play for the first time since 1983, I was struck by Hally’s obnoxiousness and the divine patience of Sam and Willie: also by the way the writing is overfull of self- conscious set pieces based on the recollected past.
What moves one is the vision of ballroom dancing as a metaphor for worldly harmony, and what shocks is the episode in which Hally treats Sam as a target for his inbred racism. Both scenes emerge strongly in Roy Alexander Weise’s very well acted production. Anson Boon does nothing to soften Hally’s condescension while suggesting he is a gawky loner at heart. Lucian Msamati lends Sam a wonderful dignity and subtly indicates that his anger at Hally’s final insult is tinged with deep sorrow. Hammed Animashaun impressively shows the exploited Willie seeking on the dancefloor a grace he is denied in daily life.
The house rose to the actors at the end but I still found myself wishing that Fugard’s self-flagellating play told us less about Master Harold and more about the “boys”.
• At the National’s Lyttelton theatre, London, until 17 December.
