Life in the Theatre: Autobiography, Politics, and Romance in "Master Harold"... and the Boys

Abstract

SAM: The secret is to make it look easy. Ballroom must look happy, Willie, not like hard work. It must . . . Ja! . . . it must look like romance. WILLIE: Now another one! What's romance? SAM: Love story with happy ending. (5) Standard accounts of Fugard's life and career generally consider Master Harold . . . and the boys (1982) to be the most autobiographical of all his plays, the one that reaches farthest back into the author's own past and that conforms most closely in the details of its central story to actual events and experiences in Fugard's life (Walder, Amato). In addition to noting its autobiographical origins, many critics have taken the play as confirmation of a major shift in Fugard's development as a dramatist: his turning away--beginning roughly in 1975 with Dimetos--from the social concerns that had animated his collaborative work with John Kani and Winston Ntshona during the previous decade and his re-engagement with a thematics of private life, often centered on the family and treated primarily in individualist and essentialist terms (Seidenspinner, Orkin). While there is abundant evidence to support beth of these contentions, emphasis on the personal and confessional aspects of Master Harold and on Fugard's withdrawal from involvement with township theatre has obscured other important aspects of the play and led to distorted understandings of its political significance as well as of its relationship to Fugard's previous work. In this essay I wish to propose an alternate genealogy for Master Harold, one that decenters the predominantly autobiographical and privatist emphasis of previous readings and that argues instead for a theatrical origin for the play. Moreover, rather than view it as a retreat from social into personal concerns, I see the play as Fugard's attempt to dramatize the connection of the two and as his effort to locate questions of power, privilege, autonomy, and transformation with reference both to South African history and to his own work in the theatre. To anyone familiar with Fugard's biography and Port Elizabeth background, the strongly confessional element in Master Harold has been evident since the play's first performance in 1982. Lest there be any doubt, however, the publication in 1983 of Fugard's Notebooks: 1960-1977 made clear how extensively the story of Hally and Sam in the play draws upon real people and events. In an entry from 1961, Fugard sets down a string of memories (25) prompted by his encounter, years after their friendship had ended, with Sam Semela, the Basuto servant who worked for Fugard's mother first at the Jubilee Hotel and later at the St. George's Park cafe, both in Port Elizabeth. Fugard's brief recollection of Semela mentions many of the events that form the basic narrative of the play: the friendship between boy and man, the memory of their kite-flying, the rainy afternoon discussions of Eastern philosophy or Plato and Socrates, Sam's proficiency as a ballroom dancer, and the shameful, culminating incident when, after a trivial quarrel between them, the thirteen-year-old Fugard spat in his friend's face. Don't suppose I will ever deal with the shame that overwhelmed me the second after I had done that, concludes the 1961 diarist (26). However shameful, perhaps the most surprising thing about this incident is that its young protagonist-turned-playwright should have waited over twenty years to exploit what seems like a ready-made dramatic plot, one particularly well suited for the tightly structured, limited-cast plays that he favored. In view of its autobiographically overdetermined origin (Fugard even considered subtitling the play A Personal Memoir), it is hardly surprising that critics have made little effort to search for other sources of Master Harold. This explanation may help to account for the curious neglect of a passage elsewhere in the Notebooks in which Fugard describes what can only be understood as his first attempt to stage the basic idea that he went on to develop later. …