["'Master Harold' … and the Boys"] has been almost universally hailed as a masterpiece, perhaps in part because its subject is a meritorious one—the turpitude of South Africa's continued policy of apartheid and, on a deeper level, the heartbreak implicit in every failure of respect and affection that takes place between human beings of whatever color, gender, age, and social position. To my mind, the play has a tendentious neatness of design that we often see and distrust in an overly literary short story. Mr. Fugard's Harold is a schoolboy who, like young Stephen Dedalus, is going to grow up to be a writer; at present, he is a miserable loner with a drunken father, an inattentive mother, and but two friends in the world—the black "boys" of the title, who make up the staff of his mother's not very properous-seeming tearoom. The play is short, and...