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Fugard masters the code - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Gerald Weales
The play is nearly structured so that the Hally-Sam-Willie scenes change texture with each phone call, first the threat and then the fact of his father's return from the hospital, a disruptive, demanding event that he dreads. "I love him, Sam," Hally says at the end of the play, and there is no reason we should disbelieve him (the stage direction indicates that the line is spoken with "Great pain" [58]), for the transformations we see in him as a result of the calls--the grown-up reasonableness of his directions to his mother, the fakily cheerful welcome-home to his father, the cruelty in his introduction of the cripple into Sam's ballroom-dancing metaphor--are evidence of the struggle between love for and revulsion toward his father.
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At the end, when he mistakes what being an adult means, demands that Sam address him as Master Harold, takes on his father's racist vulgarity, he is more obviously the child, but without the charm of the earlier scenes. "He's a little boy, Boet Sam," Willie says, trying to calm Sam after Hally has spit in his face. "Long trousers now, but he's still little boy" (57). Sam has said earlier that if Hally makes him say Master Harold, "I'll never call you anything else again" (54), but he does, just before Hally's final exit. Hally stops but he cannot bring himself to turn and face Sam. Sam's last words to Hally are "All you've got to do is stand up and walk away from it" (60), meaning the metaphorical "Whites Only" bench where Sam could not join him when they were flying the kite long ago. Perhaps Hally's "I don't know" allows a hint of possibility, but Hally cannot take that walk--not now, not here, not onstage. He's like a boy who has climbed too far out on a limb, is afraid to lose face by turning back, and so goes on until the bow breaks. And down will come baby and cradle and all.
