Course Announcement
English 304
A History of Drama: Part II: Modernist Theatre
Please note the following amendment to the
 Student Manual
Student Manual
Course Materials
The course anthology, The Harcourt Brace Anthology of Drama, 3rd
ed. is out of print and has been replaced with two texts:
Worthen, W. B. ed. The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama. 5th ed.
Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007.
Wertenbaker, Timberlake. Our Country’s Good. Woodstock, IL:
Dramatic Publishing, 1998.
Page references to the course textbooks in the Student Manual and
Study Guide will not apply to the new anthology and play text. Please
use the Contents and Indexes of the texts to find the assigned readings
and plays. However, most of the assigned plays and readings remain
the same.
There are two exceptions, both in the Study Guide: Act III.
1. The play by Athol Fugard has been changed to “Master Harold”
… and the boys (p. 1436, The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 5th
ed.).
2. No Sugar by Jack Davis has been omitted.
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Assessment of Students’ Work
Please note the following amendment to the Student Manual, page 6.
In addition to the requirements stated, students must achieve a
minimum grade of 50% on the final examination to pass the course.
Scene Analysis
Please note the new page and line references for the assigned scenes
for analysis (The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 5th ed.):
A Doll House, page 566, line 283 to page 568, line 495.
Major Barbara, page 694, line 534 to page 696, line 692.
The Cherry Orchard, page 649, line 227 to page 650, line 359.
Scene Analysis Online Learning Object
You may access audio enactments of these scenes through the course
website – online resources:
http://www.athabascau.ca/courses/engl/304/resources.html
Please note the following amendment to the
 Study Guide
Study Guide
Act I
Reading Assignments, page 18 and page 40:
These essays are not in the fifth edition of the Wadsworth Anthology.
Act III
Objectives, page 93
Omit objective 7.
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Substitute the following objective for objective 13:
Investigate the anti-apartheid and anti-racial strategies in “Master
Harold” . . . and the Boys by Athol Fugard.
Readings, page 94
Timberlake Wertenbaker, Our County’s Good is now a separate text; it
is not included in the 5th edition of The Wadsworth Anthology.
Eliminate the reading by Jack Davis: No Sugar; it is not in The
Wadsworth Anthology.
Athol Fugard, Valley Song has been replaced by “Master Harold” …
and the Boys.
Colonialism and Neocolonialism in Australia (pp. 105-108)
Omit this section.
South African Resistance and Reconstruction
Athol Fugard – Valley Song (pp. 121-123)
Please substitute the following material on “Master Harold” … and
the Boys:
Athol Fugard -- “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys
Fugard is, without doubt, the most widely known South African
playwright. During the apartheid era, he worked with black actors to
produce plays that challenged the laws proscribing interracial
collaboration in the theatre and exported them to England and the
United States to bring an awareness of systemic racism which may be
present in any country. He was born in 1932 in Middleburg, Cape
Province, and when he was three, his family moved to Port Elizabeth
in Eastern Province. His Afrikaans-speaking mother supported the
family by running the Jubilee Hotel and the Saint George’s Park Tea
Room; his Anglo-Irish father was incapacitated by alcoholism and a
physical disability. Fugard studied at the University of Cape Town, but
dropped out after three years to work as a sailor, journalist and court
clerk. He became increasingly aware of the racial inequities that
pervaded his society. When he began writing plays, he was influenced
by the passionate, angry plays of British playwright, John Osborne,
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who was also sensitive to class inequities in British society. Fugard
worked with the black actor Zakes Mokae to write, direct, and perform
in four, two-actor plays: The Blood Knot (1963), People are Living
There (1969), Boesman and Lena (1969), Hello and Goodbye (1971).
With the Serpent Players in Port Elizabeth, a company that included
white, black, and Asian Africans, he developed plays through
improvisation. Two members of the company, Winston Ntshona and
John Kani, contributed significantly to the development of The Island
and Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972). With Statements after an Arrest
under the Immorality Act, an indictment of the law that prohibited
interracial marriages, they comprise the trilogy published under the
title Statements. Many of Fugard’s plays are autobiographical,
including “Master Harold” . . . and the boys (developed in the Market
Theatre, Johannesburg in 1982), but they consider a range of points of
view–from an aging artist in The Road to Mecca (1984), to young
students in My Children! My Africa! (1989). Typically in his plays, the
racist underpinnings of South African society undermine or destroy
interpersonal relationships. While the plays deplore the exploitation of
the black majority, they also point to the dehumanization of the white
minority that perpetuates an unjust system. Valley Song (1996) is
Fugard’s first post-apartheid play.
According to Loren Kruger,
“Fugard’s contribution is noteworthy not just because he has been the
most widely published and produced playwright from South Africa but
rather because he was the first to create on stage a fully colloquial South
African English, as opposed to the self-conscious literariness that affects
[other] writers . . . Shaped by the Afrikaans that many of his characters
would plausibly speak more readily than English ... Fugard’s mature
plays created a South African idiom that could be national, local, and
intimate all at once” (20).
Reading Assignment
Athol Fugard, “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys.
Study Questions
1. In what sense is Sam a surrogate father for Hally?
2. Why does Hally turn against Sam?
3. What are the consequences?
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4. What does the image of the dance signify?
5. What are the characteristics of a “Man of Magnitude”?
6. What are the chances of a “happy ending”?
“Master Harold”…and the Boys begins with the aspirations of two
black men to win a ballroom dance competition, although there are
indicators that because of Willie’s treatment of his partner, he is
unlikely to win. The entrance of Hally, whom they address as Master
—an indicator of their compromised relationship with him—disrupts
their practice, and it becomes increasingly obvious that despite his age,
he assumes a position of authority. Although he states that he believes
in social progress and the possibility of a social reformer who will
rectify injustices, Hally soon demonstrates his own inability to live up
to his ideals. His friendly camaraderie changes to threats and cruelty
when he learns that his father will be coming home from the hospital,
disrupting an already precarious home life. He takes out his frustration
on the black men, who cannot respond to him in kind. He displaces
Sam from his position as a nurturing, positive surrogate father, and
claims as his true father an ignorant bigot.
Fugard’s play also demonstrates an ironic role reversal. Although
Hally, from his privileged position as an educated white boy has been
“teaching” Sam, in the end it is Sam who instructs Hally on what it
means to be a man. Hally remains a boy in his words and actions, and
Sam demonstrates himself to be the “Master.” In effect, Sam is a “Man
of Magnitude” —a Christian humanist hero. There are also suggestions
in the play that he has Christ-like characteristics. His Christian
sympathies are evident in his suggestion that Jesus Christ be
considered a “Man of Magnitude”; like Christ, he has been whipped
and persecuted, and he has carried Hally’s father like a cross on his
back. He endures Hally’s spitting in his face and his betrayal of their
friendship and forgives him in an attempt save him from his own
demons. Echoing the words of Christ dying on the cross, Sam forgives
Hally after telling him that he doesn’t know what he has done.
Hally’s real father is, in effect, like a child: he compensates for his
insecurities in identifying with the superheroes in comic books, such
as Tarzan and Jungle Jim, who are white supermen, lording their
supremacy over a primitive jungle culture.
Willie’s views of himself and others have been shaped by the
Western stereotypes of popular culture, including the glamorous
Hollywood films of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. In the music of
Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan, however, he adopts attractive black
entertainers as his models, although in his own relationship with his
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dance partner, Hilda, he mimics the violent behaviour of the Brown
Bomber.
The image of ballroom dancing that introduces the play suggests
social harmony and freedom— a world without collisions—as long as
everyone agrees to dance to the same tune and in the same rhythm.
Hally’s attitude to Sam and Willie’s dancing is, however, negative and
patronizing. In his homework assignment, he intends to play up to the
racist assumptions of his teacher in pointing out that “in strict
anthropological terms the culture of the primitive black society
includes its dancing and singing” (1446). Despite his learned
prejudice, in the process of imaginatively creating the dance
competition with Sam and Willie, Hally experiences the exhilaration
of the movement and music and learns from Sam the human and social
implications of “dancing like champions.” Despite the problems
within, the play ends with Sam and Willie dancing, moving with a
practiced (survival) skill through the cluttered tearoom that represents
the complications of their society.
The kite is another obvious image of freedom. Sam makes the kite
in the servants’ quarters of the Jubilee Boarding House. In the Bible,
Jubilee refers to a holy time occurring every fifty years when slaves
were freed and land was returned to its original owners (Leviticus
25.8-12). Sam constructs the kite with skill and patience from two
pieces of wood in the shape of a cross. He carries it up a hill where a
“miracle happened.” These are also Biblical images associated with
freedom. Significantly, the play is set in 1950.
Self-test Review (p. 131)
Omit numbers 4 and 6 and substitute the following quote for number 4
There’s no collisions out there, Hally. Nobody trips or stumbles or
bumps into anybody else. That’s what that moment is all about. To be
one of those finalists on that dance floor is like … like being in a
dream about a world in which accidents don’t happen.
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