'Master Harold' … and the Boys review – a waltz for worldly harmony

Lyttelton, London
Athol Fugard explores South Africa in 1950 through a white teenager and two black men who practise ballroom routines

The plays Athol Fugard co-created with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, including Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island, are among the finest of our time. His own solo work often strikes me as homiletic and heavy with symbolism and that is true of this piece in which Fugard seeks to exorcise his own remembered guilt. It reaches a terrific climax but the journey there is somewhat laborious.

The play, patently autobiographical, is set in 1950 in the kind of Port Elizabeth tea-room run by Fugard's mother. Running 100 minutes without interval, it introduces us to three characters: Hally, the proprietor's teenage son, and Sam and Willie, the black men who work for his family and whose dreams are centred on the upcoming ballroom dancing championships.