TO MARKET, TO MARKET
Carlos Amato lights 40 candles for the enfant terrible of SA theatre
WE’RE in a security-gate shop, somewhere out on the Far East Rand. A bedraggled excop, Dwayne, sits on a bedraggled couch. There’s a locker next to him, in which he has just found something horrifying, life-changing. He doesn’t know what to do. His girlfriend, Shanell, enters the room, and he hurriedly conceals it.
Actually, we’re in Newtown, at the Market Theatre. Dwayne is Paul Slabolepszy. Shanell is Charmaine Weir-Smith. Bobby Heaney and costar Renate Stuurman look on. They’re rehearsing Suddenly the
Storm, a new Slabolepszy play, directed by Heaney, which opens this week and marks two 40th anniversaries: of the Market Theatre and the 1976 Soweto uprising.
Stuurman’s character was born on June 16 1976, and the plot pivots on her search for long-buried answers. Suddenly the Storm is a darkly comic thriller-cum-love story, rendered in all the gritty textures of vintage Slab.
It’s his first new play at the Market in 18 years. He’s elated by the comeback, in harness with Heaney, his collaborator for decades. “The Market has always been my home. But for some reason, I just couldn’t get on.” Things changed when James Ngcobo, another old ally, took over as artistic director in 2013.
The scene is interrupted often as Heaney and cast grapple with blocking and timing, caucusing on each gesture, each glance. They bounce ideas with the intensity of mobsters planning a bank heist. Which newspaper is on the table? Will its date be visible? How wide are the gaps in the blind through which the couple will see a mysterious stranger (Stuurman) arriving? And how much did Shanell’s necklace cost her at Mr Price?
As they work, I smell the cordite of colliding imaginations. The lit fuse of the rehearsal is summoning some phantom compound from the bones of the building: the chemical residue of a thousand plays, a million cues, a billion ideas.
WRITING one article on the Market is a foolish project; the stories lived and told there could fill a library. A shelf-load of memories lurks in the head of one source alone: Mannie Manim, the Market’s irrepressible co-founder, lighting wizard and manager extraordinaire.
It all began with Manim and Barney Simon — the radical director-writer whose gruelling workshops yielded the Market’s seminal productions. In 1974, Manim had a lighting job at PACT, and Simon was freelance. The two began their revolt in the belly of the beast, staging illegal multiracial shows at small white theatres. It wasn’t viable: they had to break out, and the defunct Indian Fruit and Vegetable Market was their escape hatch.
Backed by private donors, they had no clue at the time that a bylaw would offer a loophole — later revealed to Manim by a sympathetic cop — in the ban on mixed casts and audiences: because the building had been a multiracial workplace for practical reasons, it could remain so.
And thus the Market Theatre was born — opening 40 years ago this month, at the same time as the start of the 1976 Soweto uprising.
On the eve of the first show in 1976 (Chekhov’s The Seagull), the Market seemed to be engulfed by revolution. “On June 16, there was an enormous noise of police helicopters flying overhead to Soweto,” recalls Manim.
“We thought, what are we doing? Are we going to have any effect? The rumour on the street was that an uprising had begun. And we were doing a Chekhov!”
The uprising was crushed, and the theatre was born. And in the 14 repressive years that followed, the Market staged imaginative uprisings.
A barrage of great plays dynamited the rockface of apartheid ideology: Matsemela Manaka’s eGoli; Woza Albert! by Mbongeni Ngema, Simon and Percy Mtwa; Fatima Dike’s The
Sacrifice of Kreli; Neil McCarthy’s
Born in the RSA; Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys; and
Simon’s Score Me the Ages, Cincinnati and Black Dog/Inj’emnyama.
“I don’t suppose we totally understood everything we were doing,” says Manim.
“We just knew what we were doing was vitally necessary, by striking out — trying to create a place of sanity and decency in an insane and indecent society.”
The censors were often distracted from political subversion by obscenity or blasphemy. “Nothing very political was ever banned — that’s the weird thing,” says Manim.
When innocuous musicals were shut down, Manim unleashed hotshot advocates to orate to the Appeals Board chairman on the literary merits of slang terms. Some hearings would happen on stage after a show, with the audience looking on. The censors liked to be seen as cultured and magnanimous, and minor cuts usually won a reprieve.
There were graver threats. In 1977, on the opening night of Strindberg’s Miss Julie (directed by Heaney), John Kani and Sandra Prinsloo smooched. “A hundred people walked out,” says Manim, “to resounding applause and catcalls from the rest of the audience. Then we started getting really heavy hate mail, especially to Sandra.”
Manim called the police at nearby John Vorster Square, who brought sniffer dogs to sweep the theatre before each show. An explicit bomb threat was sent, but after a search revealed nothing suspicious, the show went on. “I took the decision that we had to show these people we were not going to give in,” says Manim.
The need for police help triggered a chilling overture to
‘A CROWD WOULD SING WINNIE INTO HER CAR, AND SING HER OFF INTO THE NIGHT’
Manim. “In 1984, an officer said to me: ‘Listen, if you just let us know if there are any questionable characters at the theatre’ . . . and I’ve never gotten out of a room faster. I got a hell of a fright. It was like playing with the devil. I never went back there again. We were often wary of newcomers in our midst. The core group would say: ‘What do you think of so and so?’ We were right to be cautious.”
Informers may have lurked backstage; political fugitives definitely did. Grace Mokwena, the Market’s veteran front-ofhouse manager, says that when she joined the memberships team in the ’80s, the technical crews harboured draft dodgers and underground operatives. “One of them would tell me: ‘Grace, today I’m Bruce Kotze, not Bruce Sutherland. If anyone comes looking for me, I’m Bruce Kotze.’ ”
The ebullient Mokwena is soon to retire, and she misses the adrenaline of the cultural struggle. “It was chaos, but I loved it. Ray Phiri and Stimela playing at the Warehouse. The vibe at the Yard of Ale next door, where we’d go after work. Young Robert Whitehead, so handsome, walking around in a velvet suit with takkies — all the girls threw themselves at him because they didn’t know he was gay.”
Almost anything could happen. Manim recalls: “One night our front-of-house manager said to me: ‘Mannie, there’s a bloody riot happening!’ We’d let the theatre to a Jews for Jesus concert, and a group of Jewish youth had infiltrated the audience. Heavy dudes, really serious dudes. They jumped on stage, threw the mics down, started singing their own songs, and it was ugly. Mics were flying around, people got pushed around. So I called the cops and they parked a Casspir outside — bloody awful. They stopped the chaos and then tried to understand what was going on.”
Some nights, Winnie Mandela would hit the Market.
“She used to call me and say: ‘I’d love to come and see the show tonight,’ ” says Manim.
“She was living in Soweto against her banning order, and would meet the cast afterwards. By the time she was leaving, a crowd had gathered around her car — I don’t know how the word spread before cellphones.
“They would sing her into that car, and sing her off into the night.”
‘ONCE there is money, it changes things,” says Mokwena. “People who worked here back then didn’t work for money. Things were done from the heart. We were a developmental theatre.
“But since democracy, people waste time trying to qualify for the next tranche of government funding — obsessing about paperwork instead of caring about people.
“They miss out on so many levels. We did cutting-edge theatre — the kind that made me sit on the edge of my seat, want to jump on stage. Theatre for the people. It was powerful. We were known for it. “And now I don’t see anything like that. “Yes, we’ve had shows like The Suitcase that were always house full. But it’s not like before. People are wanting to make money, and I don’t think this space is meant for that. It’s for developing people and making them better. It’s not about contracts and positions. All those spirits do not agree with what this place was made for, by Barney and Mannie. Somewhere along the line we have to find out what we did wrong, what we have lost.”
Nostalgia may be clouding her vision of the Market now. Stellar productions are still staged there, such as the triumphant adaptation of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died
That Night and Neil Coppen’s uproarious adaptation of Animal Farm.
And if the Market has lost voltage, the cause is complex and partly beyond its control. South Africa remains balkanised into racial markets, and theatre, always a hard sell to the youth, has been outflanked by rival forms — from provocative local soaps and reality shows to live comedy and streaming TV.
It doesn’t help that political theatre in a democracy lacks the potency of resistance theatre. Not that there isn’t misrule to resist now — but the free press and anarchic social media debates have upstaged the stage as a site of subversion. And the Market’s partial reliance on state funding — the Department of Arts and Culture has just paid for refurbishments of two auditoriums — may be planting some tame, worthy flavours in the political works it presents. Shock is rare at the Market.
When I spoke to Ngcobo, he was in Cape Town, working on a show commissioned by the Office of the Presidency, to be staged at the President’s Dinner. He said his vision was forward-looking, despite all the revivals of struggle classics.
“We need to stop being sentimental, to move forward into a country in metamorphosis,” he said, citing Phillip Dikotla, Louis Viljoen and Abduragman Adams as young playwrights who are doing that. “I’ve commissioned our first play in SeTswana. SeSotho is next. We need visibility in other languages, including Afrikaans — we can’t just tell stories in English.”
Ngcobo is pushing the Market into dance and opera, booking plays from elsewhere in Africa, and reviving a partnership with London’s Royal Court Theatre.
“My mantra is that we’ve got to be brave as curators to attract new audiences.”
Last month, the Market recruited a new CEO in Ismail Mahomed, who steered the National Arts Festival back to vibrancy after a moribund spell. He will begin later this year, and says a thriving theatre industry is no place for purists.
“Audiences are complex creatures,” says Mahomed. “They want both relevance and escapism. The real challenge for arts managers at theatres and festivals across the country is how to strike the balance between serving funder stakeholder imperatives, being true to the integrity of the creative sector and sustaining audience interests in the arts.
“It takes extensive planning and strategic vision to build partnerships that can effectively serve a diverse spectrum of stakeholders.”
True enough. But Mahomed’s managerialist jargon would not thrill Barney Simon or Gibson Kente. The play’s the thing, not “serving a diverse spectrum of stakeholders”. And the Market’s founding impulse was not to serve, but to disturb. ‘Suddenly the Storm’ runs till July 3. Book at Computicket
INFORMERS MAY HAVE LURKED BACKSTAGE; FUGITIVES DEFINITELY DID