‘There are parts of the play that make me want to weep’
Ronnie Kasrils wears his heart on his sleeve. Last Friday night, he went to the opening of the play about his late wife Eleanor,
The Unlikely Secret Agent, at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg.
It’s the first run in Gauteng of the play, written and directed by Paul du Toit. It was first staged at The Drama Factory in Somerset West in June 2021, and then at Cape Town’s Artscape and Baxter theatres the following year.
Kasrils has seen The Unlikely Secret Agent about 10 times. I ask the former intelligence minister, ANC activist and MK underground leader what it is like, whether he has got used to its impact.
“It just blows me away every time,” he says in an interview this week. “Certain parts of the play grab me by the throat — it catches me so strongly; it moves me …”
International relations minister and former cabinet colleague Naledi Pandor sat next to him at the Joburg opening night.
“She saw how it shook me, how it moved me strongly, and she just held my hand.”
The play is set in Durban in 1963, when Eleanor was detained by the police’s Security Branch and Kasrils was on the run. “There are certain
parts of the play that make me want to weep,” he says. “It takes me back to a seminal part of our lives, of Eleanor’s and my lives.”
The idea of turning Kasrils’ book The Unlikely Secret Agent into a play came from the actor who plays Eleanor, Erika Breytenbach-marais.
“She read the book and fell in love with it,” he says.
Breytenbach-marais interested the award-winning Du Toit in Eleanor’s story and he wrote the play after intensive research.
“With them both around 45 years old, they needed to find out
about life in the sixties in Durban, the music, the movies, buses, cars, houses … and then the Security Branch and the politics of the time, the laws, including the 90-day Detention Act, which they wanted to understand.”
One of the characters in the play — all based on real people — is the notorious Security Branch cop, a Lieutenant Grobler, who in the 1960s broke up an ANC underground cell in Natal and later that decade a Swapo unit in Namibia.
He was particularly brutal towards Eleanor when she was detained in Durban, before being incarcerated at Fort Napier Hospital in Pietermaritzburg.
“I didn’t think Eleanor would manage to escape but she was smart and managed to … with the help of a black cleaner who unlocked the back door for five minutes early one morning.”
Grobler was clearly a troubled man. “In 1970, when we were in exile in London, I got a letter with a newspaper clipping in it that said Grobler had blown his brains out,” Kasrils says.
Du Toit rewrote the script several times before he was happy to rehearse and stage it. The threeweek run at The Drama Factory was cut short by a week because all the actors came down with Covid.
“Luckily very mild,” says Kasrils. He and his partner Amina Frense weren’t as fortunate but recovered well to see the play win numerous awards, including a Fleur Du Cap for best director in 2022.
The actors are heading to London’s Marylebone Theatre in August. Knowing Kasrils, he will make a plan to see it there, obviously to support the magnificent performers — but also to catch a match of his beloved football team Arsenal.