Master Harold and the Boys: Round House Theatre Tackles Athol Fugard's Classic
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| Ro Boddie(Willie), Craig Wallace (Sam) and Nick Fruit (Hally) in Master Harold... And the Boys at Round House Theatre. Photo by Kaley Etzkorn. |
Athol Fugard is one of the most difficult modern playwrights. His shows are largely punctuated by blunt dialogue, devoid of noticeable metaphor, and rely on the creation of highly realistic scene scapes defined oftentimes by the most mundane. None of his works exemplifies this style more than his most famous work, Master Harold… And the Boys. This is what makes Master Harold such a challenging work. Round House Theatre’s new revival, which opened Monday in Bethesda, tries hard but doesn’t prove up to the challenge of this dense work.
A semi-autobiographical work, Master Harold chronicles a rainy afternoon spent between a white South African youth and the two black men who work his mother’s tea shop. Master Harold, affectionately known as Hally, searches for anything to distract him from the boring school work placed in front of him. Though Sam and Willie, who have looked after Hally most of the young man’s life, try they are unable to succeed. Hally’s mind goes elsewhere when his drunken, handicapped father comes back into the picture. Only then do the harsh realities of racial structures which existed during apartheid (and arguably do still today) bubble to the surface and threaten the relationships built among the three men on stage.
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