One of Shaw Festival's best: Master Harold is a strong telling of an unsettling story

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You could watch director Philip Akin's production of "Master Harold" … and the Boys without hearing a word of it and still be moved, unsettled and outraged by its portrait of life in South Africa in the infancy of apartheid.

Playwright Athol Fugard's 1982 drama is set in a restaurant in the Port Elizabeth of his youth. The year is 1950, when the country's legal system of racial segregation was still being set up and perhaps did not seem an inevitability.

Willie, a black waiter played by Allan Louis, is careful and tentative as he moves about this diner – a meticulous recreation by designer Peter Hartwell, from the cardboard Cadbury ads to the Count Basie-filled jukebox.

He begins the play down on his knees, washing the floor with a cloth, but even when standing, Willie keeps close to walls and surfaces as if permanently bracing for a blow or a fall. Taking a moment to practise his ballroom-dance steps, he cannot relax, and he twists and turns stiffly.

Hally, the white teenage son of the restaurant's owner, played by James Daly, inhabits this same space with a mix of carelessness and entitlement – jumping up to sit on the countertop that Willie has just cleaned, twirling a stool the waiter had purposefully placed on the ground below with his long, dangling legs. He leaves a trail of crumbs behind him that he knows others will stoop to pick up.

Throughout "Master Harold" … and the Boys, Hally and Willie exist as if in different worlds in the same room, upstairs and downstairs on a single floor.

It's Sam, another black waiter, who resists this constructed idea of separateness, and André Sills, the actor who plays him with passion, seems to battle apartheid with every step he takes and every move he makes. He is perpetually present and proud, goes about his work with dignity, and responds to Hally's provocations with patience, treating them as a manifestation of childishness rather than white supremacy.

But are they? It's the question at the centre of Fugard's play – whether Hally can be saved from the system starting to strangle this society.

There is dialogue, of course; this isn't dance – though Akin's production is so physically precise, it could be. Much of "Master Harold" … and the Boys is an after-school conversation between Sam and Hally, who have had a close relationship since the young man used to sneak into the servants' quarters as a boy.

Indeed, Sam is a kind of surrogate father to Hally, whose biological dad is a disabled alcoholic about to be released, uncured, from rehab.

Talking through his homework with Sam, as he has for years, Hally believes that he is helping educate a black man who wasn't able to go to school.

But in their discussions of history, religion and what makes a "man of magnitude," it's clear who is really teaching who – with Sam giving subtle lessons in empathy, humanity and how to be a man without putting other people down.

Fugard, the son of an English-speaking South African father and an Afrikaner mother, based "Master Harold" … and the Boys on his own childhood and his relationship with his family's two servants. The danger with the drama is to treat it as a memory play and thus put the focus too squarely on the young white protagonist and on the feelings of guilt infused into the script (and evident even in the convulsive punctuation of its title).

That apartheid was a tragedy for white South Africans as well as black South Africans is no doubt true, but to recreate the images and epithets of an unjust past on stage to primarily make that point, and in the present, is problematic to say the least.

Instead, Akin wisely zeroes in on Sam and Willie's journeys through this 90 minutes of drama, which plays out in real time. The director even has Hally deliver some of his speeches facing away from the audience at times to make sure we are paying as much attention to Sam and Willie's reactions; it's them, after all, for whom the slightest misstep could have permanent consequences.

Sills gives a performance overflowing with fatherly love, a wrenching portrait of a man fighting for the soul of a boy he views as a son – a boy who is learning outside of the home to view him as less than. Louis, meanwhile, is subtly exquisite as the onstage audience, gradually developing his character in complexity from his comic beginnings, poignantly demonstrating through actions rather than words at the end that progress and empathy may, indeed, be possible.

As "Master Harold," Daly gives a tremendous performance of pomposity and privilege, nailing everything from the tricky accent on down. He doesn't ever try to make his character likeable, which only makes the moments where you see the hurt under his precocious exterior that much more affecting. Here's a young actor seizing his moment to shine, but also blending in. It's hard to imagine a stronger production of this play.

"Master Harold" … and the Boys continues at the Shaw's Court House Theatre to Sept. 10. (shawfest.com)