South African Theatre: Origin and Practice

 The theatre scene is buzzing in South Africa, with more than 100 active spaces all over the country offering everything from indigenous drama, music, dance, cabaret and satire to West End and Broadway hits, classical opera, and ballet.

 

Venues range from the staid and monolithic homes of the former state-supported performing arts councils to purpose-built theatres, a converted fruit market, country barns, casinos, and urban holes in the wall; from a gracious Cape wine estate to a rural railway station.

Veteran South African actor Patrick Mynhardt in Tjeerio Jerepigo at the Baxter Theatre.

Add to that a multitude of festivals of various degrees of gravitas and any time of the year in South Africa offers an almost unlimited range of theatrical experiences.
The annual National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown which, in its 27 years has showcased the cream of the country’s emerging talent and creativity in both the performing and graphic arts, has spawned a variety of more or less eccentric smaller festivals all over the country, each with its very particular personality. But this artistic explosion is a relatively new phenomenon.

Theatre - How It Was

Apart from a couple of early productions, notably the ground-breaking musical King Kong in the late 1950s, theatre created in South Africa by South Africans really only began to make an impact on the stages either of their own country or of the rest of the world with the advent of Johannesburg’s innovative Market Theatre in the mid-1970s, just as the cultural, sporting and academic boycott was taking hold, cutting the country off from world developments and trends.
Ironically, the outpouring of local talent was a direct result of the cultural boycott. In the absence of work and influences from abroad, South African theatre makers were forced to draw on their own resources, and they did so with huge creativity and singular success.
Find out more about Johannesburg’s buzzing theatre scene.

Origins Of South African Theatre

 

Strictly speaking, the origins of South African theatre can be found in the rich and ancient oral tradition of indigenous South Africans - the folk tales around the fires, with their own drama, and an audience ranging from the very young to the very old.
Performances on stages came very much later. The formal South African theatre tradition dates only as far back as the 1830s, when Andrew Geddes Bains’s Kaatje Kekkelbek or Life among the Hottentots was performed in 1838 by the Graham’s Town Amateur Company.
The strong influence of Calvinism brought to the country by Huguenot settlers with their puritanical worldview meant that theatre was considered by many whites to be inherently wicked. However, in the early twentieth century it was missionaries who made an important contribution to a tradition of theatre when they used drama in education. Their themes were not only staged versions of biblical teachings but also didactic plays located in South Africa. At Marianhill in the 1920s Father Bernard Hess also encouraged the production of comedies and the dramatisation of Zulu narratives.
Theatre began to flourish in black townships where performance arts became increasingly popular in the 1920s and 1930s as a form of working class entertainment. In 1929 the Methethwe Lucky Stars was formed, basing its productions on themes of rural life and customs. In 1932, came the Bantu Dramatic Society, which aimed to encourage ‘Bantu Playwrights’ and to develop African dramatic and operatic art.
The 1930s and 1940s saw the blooming of the work of Herbert Dhlomo - teacher, journalist, and musician - the first South African playwright to make a significant attempt through drama to challenge colonial domination. His work The Girl Who Killed to Save was the first play by a black writer in English to be published. Indigenous theatre continued to develop in the 1940s and 1950s with the formation of organisations like the Orlando Boy’s Club Dramatic Society. In the townships, particularly in Johannesburg’s vital, violent, vibrant Sophiatown, with its mix of colours and cultures, of musicians and writers and gangsters, in the 1940s an eclectic performance culture was developing which drew upon American, English and African cultural traditions and involved comic sketches and acting as well as jazz, singing and dancing.
Decades later, Sophiatown’s life, and its destruction in pursuit of the cause of segregation would be commemorated in an eponymous musical production created by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, which won acclaim and awards locally and internationally. Another forced removal that would give birth to a bitter-sweet musical production was that of Cape Town’s ‘coloured’ suburb of District Six. Taliep Peterson, a former resident of District Six, together with Afrikaans cult singer David Kramer devised District Six - The Musical which opened in 1986 at Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre. In the late 1990s its successor, Peterson and Kramer’s Kat and the Kings, also set in District Six, would go onto a successful season in London’s West End and win the Laurence Olivier award for best new musical of 1999 while its cast collectively won the award for best performance.

Theatre As A Creative Outlet

During the mid-twentieth century years, theatre for white English-speaking South Africans consisted almost entirely of local (or sometimes imported) versions of plays being performed in England or America. The National Theatre, formed in 1947, did not allow for black creative participation and, although it performed some indigenous Afrikaans plays, only about five of more than forty plays performed in English were by South Africans. One of the few was Guy Butler, whose The Dam and The Dove Returns entered the company’s repertoire in the 1950s.
As the apartheid system assumed its stranglehold on South Africa in the 1950s, some of South Africa’s major writers, among them Lewis Nkosi, Nat Nakasa, and Bloke Modisane, all names integrally entwined with that of Sophiatown, were barred from white theatres and entertainment and their potential contribution to South African theatre was lost.
However, there were some attempts to provide outlets for emerging black talent. In the early 1950s, Ian Bernhardt, a member of an amateur white dramatic society, formed an all-black drama group called the Bareti Players, which drew on the tradition of theatre based on European models. He was also one of the founders of the Union of South African Artists, whose original aim was to protect black artists from exploitation. Union Artists also organised, in the early 1960s, the African Music and Drama Association, which met at Dorkay House, a dilapidated building on the fringes of Johannesburg’s central business district which, for a decade would be a cradle of creativity. Bernhardt also promoted the Township Jazz concerts that culminated in the production of King Kong.
Towards the end of the 1950s, a young Port Elizabeth playwright named Athol Fugard made his first impression on the Johannesburg stage with a play entitled No-Good Friday. It was created with a number of black intellectuals from Sophiatown, most of them members of Union Artists, and opened in 1958 at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, adjacent to Dorkay House.
In 1959, King Kong, a musical promoted by Union Artists, opened at the Witwatersrand University Great Hall in 1959 to multi-racial audiences. It was a sensation which, during a season in London, launched stars like Miriam Makeba and Todd Matshikiza into the international spotlight. Sponono, another musical using black actors, the result of collaboration between Alan Paton and Krishnah Shah, and also promoted by Union Artists, opened in 1961.

Tackling Apartheid Through Theatre

As the National Party government entrenched itself and its repressive system, theatre was increasingly used as a means of criticising the monolithic apartheid state. Plays by white playwrights like Lewis Sowden (The Kimberley Train), Basil Warner (Try for White), David Herbert (A Kakamas Greek), and Athol Fugard (The Blood Knot), tackled aspects of the apartheid system. But few of them were seen in the areas in which the victims of the system lived.
South Africa’s black “townships”, sprawling areas of insubstantial, “matchbox” houses created as sources of labour for the white cities to which they were linked, were devoid of all amenities apart from the odd sports stadium. Soweto, for instance, with a population of more than a million in the 1970s, had one nightclub, one hotel, one cinema and two outdoor arenas.
Those productions which did tour the townships or which emanated from them were performed in draughty communal or church halls where a heavy storm could bring a performance to a halt because the drumming of rain or hail on a flat corrugated iron roof effectively drowned the voices from the stage (and frequently brought a deluge down on the audience). Nonetheless, in the 1950s and 1960s, a vibrant township theatre movement began to evolve.
In Durban Ronnie Govender and Muthal Naidoo founded the Shah Theatre Academy in 1964. In the Transvaal (now Gauteng), Gibson Kente concluded that “black-produced black acted shows for black audiences were the only viable direction for black theatre to take”. This black theatre did not explore political themes but concentrated on love, adultery, alcoholism and crime.
Now a South African theatrical legend, Kente rapidly became the “most widely known and best-paid black stage producer in Southern Africa”, touring the country with a series of one night stands featuring young, newly trained actors, simple costumes, and a few crudely painted flats and backdrops packed into an old bus. Township audiences were treated to productions of Manana, The Jazz Prophet, Sikalo, Can You Take It, Laduma, and Mama and the Load. Kente also trained dancers who years later would participate in the burgeoning of dance in the country.
It was in one of those buses while touring with Mama and The Load in the 1970s that a pair of young actor/musicians called Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema whiled away the miles with a discussion about what might happen if Jesus Christ (known in Sotho as Morena) were to come back to earth in apartheid South Africa. The idle discussion led to one of South Africa’s most phenomenal international successes - the two-hander Woza Albert! created by Ngema and Mtwa in partnership with the Market Theatre’s artistic director, the late Barney Simon. Woza toured extensively, playing twenty-three seasons all over the world and picking up the Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival, the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award, the British Theatre Association Award and the Obie Award.
Ngema and Mtwa were not yet born when, in the late 1950s Athol Fugard, together with his wife, Sheila, began a small theatre group in Port Elizabeth called the Circle Players. He was to continue to work with theatre groups both in Port Elizabeth and in Johannesburg. Of particular importance to the history of South African theatre was his work in the 1960s with a Port Elizabeth group called the Serpent Players - among its members the young John Kani and Winston Ntshona with whom he created Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island which would go on to win international acclaim. In those years the prolific Fugard also wrote Hello and Goodbye and Boesman and Lena.
In black areas all over the country theatre groups came and went, many of them snuffed out by the political harassment and sometimes the indefinite detention of their participants. The Theatre Council of Natal (TECON), which was founded in 1969, died with the arrest of three key Black Consciousness leaders who were active in it. The People’s Experimental Theatre (PET) was formed in 1973, but disintegrated when several of its leaders were arrested and charged with treason.
Much work was banned either by ministerial decree or by township superintendents who refused to allow it to be performed. One of those to fall foul of the authorities was playwright Maishe Maponya, whose Bahumutsi Drama Group used the Moravian church hall in Diepkloof Soweto to bring his work to the township. His Gangsters, however, was considered by the Directorate of Publications to be so ‘inflammatory’ it could only be performed in ’small, intimate, four-wall theatres of the experimental or avante-garde type’. Since there were none of those in any township, he sought a home for the play in one of the smaller spaces at the Market.

The 1970s

The 1970s saw an intensification of worker and trade union struggle and the student uprising of 1976 which sowed the seeds of the revolution that would, after 14 years of bloodshed, growing oppression, and violence, result in the birth of democracy. As repression grew and the voices of political activists were increasingly silenced, theatre became an important means of voicing the protests that were banned from the streets and political platforms of the country.
Theatre emanated from the unions, from the Black Consciousness movement, from the collaborative efforts of Fugard, Kani and Ntshona, from Kente, and from a multitude of university and fringe groups. The Music Drama Arts and Literature Institute (MDALI), an offshoot of Union Artists and Phoenix Players, formed in 1972 sought to “promote self determination, self realisation and self support in theatre arts”.
The Shah Theatre Academy in Durban continued to stage plays up to the 1980s, the Imitha Players were founded in East London in 1970, and the Inkhwezi Players emerged in Grahamstown in 1974. Familiar texts and universal themes were adapted to reflect local conditions in a variety of ways.
In 1970, Welcome Msomi, collaborating with Elizabeth Sneddon, director of the Theatre Workshop Company in Durban, and Peter Scholz produced Umabatha, a Zulu version of Macbeth, which was performed both in South Africa and at the World Theatre Season in London in 1972. Dorkay House’s Phoenix Players, directed by Barney Simon, created Phiri, an African jazz musical which placed Ben Jonson’s Volpone in a township setting; Workshop 71 used Crossroads to present Everyman in township terms.
Most township playwrights wrote in English, interspersed with a variety of African languages and slang greeted with appreciative enthusiasm by black members of the audiences and, in the main, stony silence from the whites to most of whom black languages were entirely foreign.
An important theatre group to emerge in the 1970s was the non-racial Junction Avenue Theatre Company whose innovative, often anarchic workshopped productions carried titles like The Fantastical History of a Useless Man, Randlords and Rotgut, and Tooth and Nail.
While indigenous theatre was exploding, venues for its performance were not. The state subsidised Performing Arts Council’s were not interested in new South African work in English and certainly not interested in anything that challenged the political status quo. In 1976, for instance, the only local work to be seen on the stage of the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal (PACT) was coloured poet Adam Small’s Kanna Hy kô Huistoe.
The few commercial managements did nothing to encourage local work, preferring to stage revivals of the work of those who were no longer alive to protest and to glean what they could from overseas playwrights who were more interested in their bank balances than their principles.
New and innovative venues began to emerge and productions of controversial local work found their homes in various spaces at the University of the Witwatersrand, at The Space Theatre in Cape Town, The Stable Theatre in Durban, after 1976, the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, and, from 1977, The Baxter Theatre on the University of Cape Town campus.
The Space, founded in Cape Town by theatre photographer Brian Astbury and his actress wife Yvonne Bryceland, opened in May 1972 and established itself as a defiantly non-racial venue in a racially-divided country.
The first pioneering fringe theatre in the country, it mounted almost 300 productions starting with the premier of Athol Fugard’s Statements After an Arrest under the Immorality Act. It hosted the first productions out of Port Elizabeth of the Kani/Ntshona/Fugard collaborative The Island and Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and gave a voice to Donald Howarth’s Othello Slegs Blankes, Fatima Dike’s early plays, and many others. It also became home to a host of young actors who would become stars and stalwarts of the South African stage. Taken over by Moyra Fine and Rob Amato after Astbury and Bryceland left, it survived as The People’s Space for some two years before succumbing to overwhelming financial pressures.

The Market Theatre

The Market Theatre, was the brainchild of writer/director Barney Simon and producer/administrator Mannie Manim, both of whom had had wide experience of theatre before forming The Company - an independent company committed to non-racial theatre - in 1974. Looking for a home, they were led to the site of the former “Indian” fruit market in Johannesburg’s Newtown. The building was converted and turned into a complex consisting of four theatres and two galleries - one for graphic arts, one for photographs. Both the conversion and the subsequent running of the complex were funded entirely by donations from the private sector. It was not until the 1990s, with the demise of the apartheid regime, that the Market would receive state funding.
Like the Space, it defied the Group Areas Act, which restricted theatres in “white” areas to whites only - both as audience and as actors. From the start the trustees of the Market Theatre Trust opened the stages and the auditoria to all who wished to come there, regardless of race.
Although the Market Theatre was to host the work of a variety of international playwrights who were happy to have their plays presented there because of the commitment to non-racialism, it was its encouragement of local playwrights, local performers, and local work that would bring it its international reputation and a string of awards as the most exciting and entrepreneurial management in the country.
It was to the Market that Fugard would bring his A Lesson from Aloes, Master Harold ‘ and the Boys, The Road to Mecca, A Place with the Pigs, My Children! My Africa!, and Playland. At The Market Barney Simon and his actors would develop in workshop, Cincinatti - Scenes from City Life, Call Me Woman, Black Dog Inj’emnyana, Outers, Born in the RSA, and Woza Albert!
It was at the Market that Johannesburg theatregoers were introduced to the work of most of South Africa’s leading playwrights and directors, including Welcome Msomi, Zanemvula (Zakes) Mda, Pieter-Dirk Uys, Gibson Kente, Paul Slabolepszy, Mbongeni Ngema, Adam Small, P G du Plessis, Kessie Govender, Bartho Smit, Maishe Maponya, Percy Mtwa, Deon Opperman, Reza de Wet, Matsemela Manaka, and a myriad aspirants.
Closely linked to the Market was the Baxter Theatre Centre which opened in 1977 under the enthusiastic direction of Irishman John Slemon. It wasn’t long before Slemon, Manim and Simon were discussing collaboration and many of the Market’s successes, some of them directed by Simon, went on to play at the Baxter. In 2001 Manim took over as director of the Baxter.
The Baxter also built a relationship with a local township group, the Cape Flats Players, who mainly performed their own original work which would open at the Cape Town theatre and then play the Market.

Anger and anguish

Meanwhile, among communities, theatre was growing as a means of expressing frustration, anger and anguish. At the Space in 1978, and later at the Market, Imfunduso was produced by the women of Crossroads, the city’s sprawling informal settlement, to dramatise their predicament.
Prison was the subject of many of the plays of the seventies and eighties, among them, famously Kani, Ntshona and Fugard’s The Island (for which the actors received a Tony Award), Workshop 71’s workshopped Survival, Mbongeni Ngema’s Asinimali.
Other works explored the plight of domestic workers (Poppie Nongena), the trauma of black policement (Bopha!), the role of black women in a South Africa racked by violence (Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodwe - You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock) detention without trial (Four Paces by Two), security police infiltration (Born in the RSA).
The trade union movement, too, made use of theatre to publicise its problems. In 1979 the Junction Avenue Theatre Company was asked to produce a short play entitled Security, to raise money in support of a strike by the Food and Canning Workers Union.
The following year, during a strike at a foundry on the East Rand, a lawyer called in to help defend some of the arrested strikers, conceived a role-play situation to try to reconstruct events. This experiment evolved, with the help of a member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, into a production entitled Ilanga Lizophumela Abasebenzi (The Sun Will Rise for the Workers) performed both to workers in factories and to a wider audience at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Other productions followed, and during the period 1983 to 1987, thirteen plays were created, many of which played in several parts of the country, one of them also being performed in England.
Mbongeni Ngema, who shot to fame with Woza Albert!, immortalised the 1976 student uprising in 1987 with his hit musical Sarafina.
On 2 February 1990, a moment of pure theatre took place in South Africa’s Parliament when the country’s State President F W de Klerk announced the lifting of the thirty-year-old bans on the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, and the South African Communist Party.
Nine days later Nelson Mandela walked out of Cape Town’s Victor Verster Prison and the negotiations began that would lead to a democratic South Africa.

The present

With the country’s new freedom came a crisis of identity. No longer could the world be divided into the good (opponents of apartheid) and the bad (proponents of apartheid), clear lines began to blur and with the blurring came uncertainty. South Africa’s vibrant cultural life began to become less vibrant. Uncertain what to write, many of the country’s leading playwrights grew silent and new work was thin on the ground.
The rising crime rate in Johannesburg deterred theatregoers from attending inner-city theatres like the Market and the commercial managements moved to less threatening suburbia, sheltering in the unlikely environs of a gold-mine museum, a casino, and a shopping centre.
Many young actors and writers turned to television soap operas for their livelihood, and the future of South African theatre looked, in the words of one actor/director, “dire”.
But, with the new century under way, the pendulum is swinging back, and, in nurseries like the Market Theatre Laboratory, the Liberty Theatre on the Square’s Saturday Children’s Theatre Workshops, the Cape Town Theatre Lab, the Johannesburg Youth Theatre, new shoots of talent are burgeoning and blooming, nurtured by events like the Market’s Community and Young Writers’ Festivals.
Many aspirant playwrights and actors are turning back to theatre rather than to television and advertising, and themes are being explored that would have been unthinkable in the days when theatre was seen by many only as a medium for agitprop.
The ubiquitous workshop mode that characterised much of the work of the late twentieth century has given way to written scripts, and new names are being added to the role call of South African playwrights - Lesego Rampolokeng, Xoli Norman, Mondi Mayepu, Heinrich Reisenhofer and Oscar Petersen, Fiona Coyne, Mark Lottering, Nazli George, Craig Freimond, and Rajesh Gopie - creative, innovative and serious about theatre.
The plays are still frequently raw and angry and ragged, but now they encompass themes that would, in earlier years, have been considered irrelevant. Love, religion, family violence, homosexuality, drugs, are explored in works that engage and involve their audiences. Importantly too, works that in the 1970s were new, shiny and innovative have, thirty years on, become classics. A revival of Woza Albert! in 2001 evoked the same hilarity and recognition as the original, and this among people who would have no personal memory of its frame of reference.
As importantly, young people are beginning to come to the theatre as audiences. New venues, like Cape Town’s The Warehouse, encourage young audiences, with a range of fresh theatre that includes both original South African and innovative imported work. Also in Cape Town, the High Street Theatre presents a rich programme of mainly Afrikaans South African work, mixed with South African, mainly Afrikaans, cabaret entertainments, and Collaborations, co-produced by Artscape with the Cape Town Theatre Lab, gives new South African work a one-week season in the Arena theatre in the Artscape complex. Artscape also stages community-type festivals. Audiences, though, sadly still tend to reflect the demographics of the company on the stage.
Even in the once conservative Free State, the Performing Arts Council has transformed its activities to involve and develop exciting regional talent in all fields of performance.
And then, observes the Chairman of the Theatre Managements of South Africa, theatre veteran Des Lindberg, “perhaps the most exciting cultural explosion of all is from the communities themselves”. In the remote Northwest Province, for instance, a theatrical tradition has “flourished and grown and drawn audiences in a way which is the envy of other provinces”.
With the gradual introduction of theatre studies into the school syllabus, there is hope that the next generation will be enticed away from television and computer screens and back into theatre seats.
Source: SouthAfrica.info