Then & Now
As you walk from Orange Street and under the pergola that leads you to the Labia Theatre in Cape Town, you get the distinct impression that time has been suspended. There’s an old-fashioned ticket booth on the far side of the foyer where you can buy a movie ticket for R60 before entering the cinema and having your ticket clipped. Yes, clipped! A coffee shop offers snacks, warm drinks and alcoholic beverages, while an oldschool sweet counter sells loose jellybeans by the cup, and popcorn in brown paper bags. Welcome to the oldest independent arthouse cinema in South Africa.
The Labia owes its unusual name to its Italian roots. The building was once a ballroom for the Italian embassy, which was next door. It was converted into a theatre for the performing arts in 1949 thanks to a cash injection from the Labias – an aristocratic Italian family. Count Natale Labia (he was later granted the title of prince) was a diplomat who was sent to South Africa in 1917. According to an article in The Guardian from a few years ago, he allegedly prospered under Mussolini’s regime and is said to have helped build the theatre out of gratitude to the South African government for not taking him into custody during World War II.
The theatre staged all sorts of performances until the 1970s, when a film distributor used the premises for a once-off avant-garde film festival. The festival was so popular among patrons that a decision was made to turn the Labia into a full-time cinema. It always felt like a place of minor rebellion: During the apartheid years, many censored films were
screened, like The War is Over, which told the story of the Spanish communist revolution. Current owner Ludi Kraus bought the premises in 1989 and began its current tradition of screening mainly art, cult and independent films, with a sprinkling of box office hits.
In 2014, the cinema really struggled. They were still projecting films on celluloid, but most distributors at that point had gone completely digital and the Labia didn’t have the correct equipment to keep up. (The last film to be projected there on celluloid was the British period piece Belle, starring half-South African Gugu Mbatha-Raw.)
Kraus set up a crowd-funding campaign and turned to his fellow Capetonians to help save the cinema. More than R150 000 was raised to upgrade the Labia’s projection infrastructure and spruce up the foyer. Capetonians aren’t the only ones who enjoy a night out at this iconic spot. Over the years, celebrities like Matt Damon, Salma Hayek, John Cleese and Colin Farrell have all been spotted at the Labia.
From ballroom to alternative cinema – it’s 70 years on and the Labia is still with us, proving that adapting to your surroundings doesn’t mean you have to lose your soul.
Sources: theguardian.com; thelabia.co.za