About the Play:

"Master Harold" ...and the Boys is one of Royal National Theatre of Britain's top 100 plays of the 20th century.

"Master Harold" ...and the Boys has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues and Male/Male Scenes (particularly suitable for those over 40 years old).

"Master Harold" ...and the Boys is a full-length drama by Athol Fugard. In South Africa during the apartheid era a young white man's relationship with his two older black servants changes as he matures. Originally banned in Athol Fugard's homeland, "Master Harold" ...and the Boys systematically depicts and denounces the psychological and governmental prejudices and divides that Apartheid visited upon generations.

"Master Harold" ...and the Boys is set in a South African tea shop in 1950. It centers on the relationship between the son of the white owner and two black servants who have served as his surrogate parents, and is at once a compelling drama of South African apartheid and a universal coming-of-age story. The white teen, who has grown up in the affectionate company of the two black waiters who work in his mother's tea room in Port Elizabeth, learns that his viciously racist alcoholic father is on his way home from the hospital. The bonds between them are stressed to breaking point when the teenage boy begins to abuse the servants. An ensuing rage unwittingly triggers his inevitable passage into the culture of hatred fostered by apartheid. Considered by many to be Athol Fugard's masterpiece, "Master Harold" ...and the Boys is now an acknowledged classic of the stage, whose themes of injustice, racism, friendship, and reconciliation traverse borders and time.

"Master Harold" ...and the Boys premiered in 1982 by the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. It opened on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in 1982. The role that won Zakes Mokae a Tony Award in 1982 brought Danny Glover back to the New York stage for the Roundabout Theatre's excellent revival of "Master Harold" ...and the Boys. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional and college theatre productions.

Cast: 3 male (1 white, 2 black)

What people say:

"One of those depth charge plays [that] has lasting relevance [and] can triumphantly survive any test of time...The story is simple, but the resonance that Fugard brings to it lets it reach beyond the narrative, to touch so many nerves connected to betrayal and guilt. An exhilarating play.... It is a triumph of playmaking, and unforgettable." — New York Post

"Fugard creates a blistering fusion of the personal and the political ." — The New York Times

"This revival brings out [the play's] considerable strengths." — New York Daily News

"One of Fugard's most universal works of theatre. It operates on two levels: as the story of a loving but lacerating relationship between a black man and a white boy; and ... as a powerful political statement about apartheid." — The New Yorker

"The greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world ." — Time Magazine

About the Playwright:

Athol Fugard (1932-2025) was an internationally acclaimed South African playwright whose work deals with the political and social upheaval of the apartheid system in South Africa. In a career that spanned 70 years, he wrote more than 30 plays that are regularly performed in theatres in South Africa, Great Britain, the United States and around the world. Several of his plays have been adapted for the screen and his novel Tsotsi was made into a film that won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2011 he received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre, while Time magazine described him in the 1985 as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world.