Tackling apartheid

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.