[Master Harold … and the Boys] is a molotov-cocktail kind of a play. At first, as it almost creakingly gets going, it seems a homemade, almost ramshackle kind of play, but when it explodes, like an unexpected thunderclap, it doesn't make the rafters ring, it eaves them blackened.

And this intensely, but subtly political play, leaves the audience drained by the barely simulated intensity of its experience. It is a play that grabs you to its own heart with bands of steel.

It is a political play about South Africa. It is about the South African policy of apartheid—racial segregation—but it is about much more. To Fugard—South Africa's best-known artist—life is not a simplistic matter of black and white.

Thus, in the most general terms, Master Harold is a tragicomedy concerned with growing up and living together….

Eventually, the play's texture becomes thrillingly complex. We...