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Fugard masters the code - Athol Fugard Issue
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993 by Gerald Weales
There is far too much explanation in "Master Harold" for my taste. "The face you should be spitting in is your father's," Sam explains to Hally, "but you used mine, because you think you're safe inside your fair skin . . . and this time I don't mean just or decent" (56). Although the line triggers Sam's momentary threat of violence, it can be played as part of his attempt to rescue Hally from what he is doing to himself, and his echo of Hally's multiple definitions of fair in the "nigger's arse" (55) exchange contributes to that reading.
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Yet it has the look of a significant line, the kind that George Kelly used to pull out of his text and print as an indicative epigraph to the published play. There is similar explanatory overkill in the scene in which Sam insists on the importance of ballroom dancing as an escape from an abrasive real world. There is great fun in Sam's metaphorical game and a serious point too. Sam uses it as bait to lure Hally back from his reaction to the first phone call, and when the boy takes Sam's image and runs with it, we see how the two of them work as a family unit. Still, there is a deal of explication muddying the dramatic waters. By contrast, the opening and closing dance sequences are so theatrically effective that they might serve as an illustration of Fugard's early remark, "Only a fraction of my truth is in the words" (Notebooks 171). At the beginning of the play, Sam is in his element as he tries to help awkward Willie master the quickstep, teasing him in the process and finally showing him how a classy dancer does it. At the end, Sam is beaten down by his final scene with Hally; and Willie, who is more sensitive than either Hally or Sam gives him credit for, coaxes Sam into dancing again, even sacrifices his bus fare to the jukebox; and the final image is of the two men dancing together to Sarah Vaughan's recording of "Little Man You've Had a Busy Day." When the play opened in Johannesburg, after its New York premiere, Joseph Lelyveld compared the two Sams--Zakes Mokae in New York and John Kani in Johannesburg. "Mr. Mokae's Sam was a large and complex presence on the stage, self-liberated and expansive. Mr. Kani's Sam is taut and inward, strained when he laughs and never, it seems, unmindful of the tense racial context." I will have to take Lelyveld's description of Kani on faith, but his account of Mokae's performance is accurate enough--and yet not complete. The slightly chubby Mokae, who danced with such grace at the beginning of the play, moved with the same precision at the end, but with leaden reluctance in his steps. "Little man you're crying," the song says, and Vaughan is singing for both Sam and Hally.
