{"id":1935,"date":"2019-11-18T17:06:09","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T17:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1935"},"modified":"2019-11-18T17:31:19","modified_gmt":"2019-11-18T17:31:19","slug":"propwatch-the-jukebox-in-master-harold-and-the-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2019\/11\/propwatch-the-jukebox-in-master-harold-and-the-boys.html","title":{"rendered":"Propwatch: the jukebox in \u2018Master Harold\u2019\u2026 and the boys"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A jukebox offers choice upon choice. Dozens of records, stacked and ready for selection. Nestling between the palm court quartet and the corporate playlist, jukeboxes soundtracked caf\u00e9 culture. Before the walkman, spotify and sodcasting, they let you decide your own mood music. Public yet personal, sweetly selfish \u2013 the jukebox flourished in the 1950s, the decade in which \u2018<\/a>Master Harold\u2019\u2026 and the boys<\/a> <\/em>is set. A box of delights, a cabinet of chrome and light and your favourite melodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Except. If you haven\u2019t got a coin for the jukebox, you\ndon\u2019t get to choose. If you\u2019re saving your only sixpence for bus fare on a\nrain-pelted day, the jukebox stays silent, the record unspun. In apartheid\nSouth Africa, pop-picking white customers get priority. Choice isn\u2019t always\nyours to exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Athol Fugard drew on his own South African childhood for \u2018Master Harold\u2019\u2026<\/a><\/em> <\/a>(1982). It\u2019s set in a Port Elizabeth tearoom, on an unbiddable afternoon which fractures the relationship between Hally, the white owners\u2019 teenaged son, and the black waiters Sam and Willy. For Fugard, itwas an excoriatingly personal piece. He too was called Hally as a boy; his mother ran a boarding house and then a tea room. The black servants who indulged him, who made him a kite, were real figures. So too the play\u2019s climactic humiliation: \u2018I spat in the face of a black man,\u2019 Fugard wrote in 1975. \u2018I cannot talk about it to this day.\u2019 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Sam Semala was sacked by Fugard\u2019s mother, he became a dance teacher. In the play, Sam helps his colleague Willie hone his skills for a ballroom championship. In apartheid South Africa in 1950, it might seem deluded to even dream about a world of grace and romance, to even imagine that life is an equal contest where talent can shine: yet Sam and Willie protect tiny pockets of time in which the hope can settle. It\u2019s like, says Sam, \u2018being in a dream about a world in which accidents don\u2019t happen.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the play\u2019s opening dialogue, Willie sings an acapella version of Count Basie\u2019s \u2018You\u2019re the cream in my coffee\u2019. At its close, the jukebox stirs to life, releasing Sarah Vaughan\u2019s \u2018Little man (you\u2019ve had a busy day)\u2019<\/a> in all its sorrowful empathy. There\u2019s an irony in the jukebox offering South African audiences the work of African American musicians who routinely encountered racism and segregation in the States; Vaughan was even pelted with overripe fruit in a Chicago club. The word \u2018jukebox\u2019 itself comes from African American slang for a brothel or roadhouse. Yet America also represents a kind of imaginative possibility \u2013 Fugard\u2019s play premiered in New Haven after having been briefly banned in South Africa (it was produced in Johannesburg the following year).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The black American artists\u2019 music stubbornly gives voice to individual love and pain. For Sam and Willie, too, these songs carve a fragile private space out of a hostile public one. At the National Theatre, director Roy Alexander Weise and his team \u2013 notably Rajha Shakiry (designer), Paule Constable (lighting) and Shelley Maxwell, the peerless movement director from Equus<\/a><\/em> \u2013 give perilous weight to these moments where the dream holds. The tearoom is not the most fashionable \u2013 its mural faded, its confectionery slumbering in the glass counter, its modest jukebox not the flashiest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet human will can briefly achieve miracles. Lucian Msamati<\/a>, who plays Sam, is a heroically authoritative actor, and his every movement is choreography \u2013 not a flicker wasted. Watchful, he defines stillness; in movement he adjusts a chair, places a tablecloth, with thrilling precision. And when he dances, he\u2019s as elegant and economical as Astaire \u2013 foot angled, hand flicking, soft-shoeing it between the tables. The smile may be an accessory, but you believe it while you see it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unsayable things are said during this play. Unspeakable\nthings are done. Unbearable things are, somehow, borne. The tearoom, far from\nbeing a refuge from the viciously unjust society beyond, seems to be engulfed\nby those cruelties. Maybe there\u2019s no way back. And maybe there\u2019s something gloriously\nresolute in Willie sacrificing his bus-ride sixpence to fire up the jukebox,\nmake its lights shine at long last, and joining Sam in an incongruous two-step\n(especially incongruous because Hammed Animashaun towers head, shoulders and\nthen some above Msamati). Let\u2019s face the music and dance won\u2019t reform a\nstructurally racist society. But holding the dream of a better world has its\nown dignity. That\u2019s a choice worth making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo of Hammed Animashaun and Lucian Msamati, by Helen Murray<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A jukebox offers choice upon choice. Dozens of records, stacked and ready for selection. Nestling between the palm court quartet and the corporate playlist, jukeboxes soundtracked caf\u00e9 culture. Before the walkman, spotify and sodcasting, they let you decide your own mood music. Public yet personal, sweetly selfish \u2013 the jukebox flourished in the 1950s, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1936,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[737,742,735,736,65,322,321,740,739,741,34],"class_list":{"0":"post-1935","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-athol-fugard","9":"tag-hammed-animashaun","10":"tag-jukebox","11":"tag-lucian-msamati","12":"tag-national-theatre","13":"tag-props","14":"tag-propwatch","15":"tag-rajha-shakiry","16":"tag-roy-alexander-weise","17":"tag-shelley-maxwell","18":"tag-theatre","19":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1935"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1939,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1935\/revisions\/1939"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}