“If I wasn’t an actor, I think I’d have gone mad. You have to have extra voltage, some extra temperament to reach certain heights. Art is a little bit larger than life—it’s an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.”
Laurence Olivier, quoted in Foster Hirsch, Laurence Olivier
In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a regnional webcast of Athol Fugard’s ”Master Harold”…and the Boys. Here’s an excerpt.
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Athol Fugard, South Africa’s greatest playwright, is no longer produced in the U.S. as often as he used to be. The reason for this, however, is a happy one: Now that apartheid, the subject matter of most of his plays, is a thing of the past, they have inevitably lost some of their immediacy. Today they are period pieces—but the best of them are also great plays, dramatically vital time capsules that re-enact a hideous episode in history, and they continue to work superlatively well onstage.
What I’ve been wondering about ever since Syracuse Stage announced that it was reviving “‘Master Harold’ . . . and the Boys,” the 1982 play that made Mr. Fugard famous, is the impression that would now be made by a work about apartheid by a white author. The notion that people of color should be telling their own stories has lately hardened into something not far from an orthodoxy, and “‘Master Harold’”—which is set in 1950 and tells the story of the deteriorating relationship between Hally (Nick Apostolina), a white teenager, and Sam and Willie ( L. Peter Callender and Phumzile Sojola ), two 40ish Black servants who helped to raise him and whom he regards as friends—doesn’t fit into that framework. But “‘Master Harold,’” lest we forget, is Mr. Fugard’s story, too, a semi-autobiographical dramatization of a shameful episode from his own youth, and he tells it so powerfully that you’ll feel at evening’s end that you’ve had a privileged glimpse into another, sadder world….
A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.
Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:
After a few months off, the critics are back! We talk about the reopening of live theatre, discuss which plays are coming back (and which not), and make predictions about what Broadway audiences will look like and expect. Other talking points: the Pulitzer for Drama, collaborations among regional companies last year, and the lasting impact of digital theatre….
To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.
In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.
“Instruments of the Orchestra,” the 1946 film in which Malcolm Sargent narrated and led the London Symphony in Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
