On a "wet and windy Port Elizabeth afternoon" in 1950, Athol Fugard — then a teenager — insulted his friend and "surrogate father", Sam Semela, a waiter at the St George’s Park Tearoom run by Fugard’s mother. Thirty years later, haunted by shame, the now famous playwright wrote his coming-of-age play about that day, ’Master Harold … and the boys’, which premiered in the US in 1982. While still living in Port Elizabeth, Fugard met John Kani and Winston Ntshona, sparking one of the best-known collaborations in South African theatre and resulting in two of this country’s most famous plays, Sizwe Bansi is dead and The island.