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The Island & ‘Master Harold' …and the Boys
The Island at Remy Bumppo Theatre Company. By Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Dir. James Bohnen. With LaShawn Banks, Kamal Angelo Bolden.
‘Master Harold’ …and the Boys at TimeLine Theatre Company. By Athol Fugard. Dir. Jonathan Wilson. With Alfred H. Wilson, Nate Burger, Daniel Bryant.
Twenty years ago, the living playwright most performed in the U.S. was the white South African Fugard. While he’s undeniably a gifted, powerful dramatist, his enormous popularity here had other causes as well: Not only did the anti-apartheid playwright carry a political charge relating to comfortably distant injustices, but his plays, with their small casts and spare staging, also matched the economic requirements of our nonprofits. In the years since majority rule came to South Africa, Fugard’s profile has dimmed somewhat. Newer work is said to lack his earlier urgency, while some have criticized the plays that made his reputation for appropriating black struggles.
The serendipitous mini festival taking place this spring on Chicago’s stages (in addition to these productions, the Court mounts 1972’s Sizwe Banzi Is Dead in May) offers a welcome chance to assess the playwright’s legacy.
Its enduring potency shines through in Remy Bumppo’s searing version of The Island. This 1972 work, developed with the black actors Kani and Ntshona, depicts a pair of convicts on South Africa’s notorious Robben Island, the prison that held Mandela for 18 years. We are introduced to cellmates John (Banks) and Winston (Bolden) in a masterful, drawn-out mime sequence: Each repeatedly shovels sand into a wheelbarrow, then fills up the hole the other has made.
In the interstices between such backbreaking, meaningless labor, they rehearse Antigone for a prison revue. John plays Creon, and Winston, in a rope wig and tin-cup brassiere, the tragic Greek sister. The minimalist staging underscores the scenario’s focus on the liberating, if limited, power of the imagination. Even if Sophocles’ play cannot alter the imbalance in the men’s sentences (John has three months left, Winston is there for life), it allows them an indelible call for justice. Banks is canny and commanding as John, while Bolden, charmingly buffoonish last fall in Chad Deity, lends the recalcitrant Winston a great comic dignity.
‘Master Harold’…and the Boys, acclaimed at its 1982 debut as its author’s masterwork, may show more signs of age. To be sure, this autobiographical study of a white boy whose close relationship with his family’s black servants is decisively altered one rainy afternoon painstakingly builds to its climactic confrontation. The moment when the boy Hally (Burger) renounces the paternal love of the servant Sam (Wilson) in the ugliest of terms still stuns like a blow to the face. But Fugard’s stagecraft seems almost too polished, transforming the real lives of its characters into an illustrative anecdote about apartheid.
Burger begins the production already racked with nervous energy; he never really establishes the rapport with Sam and Willie (Bryant) that the piece demands. Wilson and Bryant have some fine scenes alone, turning set designer Timothy Mann’s nicely drab café into a dance hall with the help of a mop, just as John and Winston make a prison their stage.
