Barney Simon, the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, grew up in Troyeville, a modest working-class suburb that was a stone-throw away from the Johannesburg inner city. As a child, he spent hours on end at the Regal Cinema in nearby Bezuidenhout Valley, or Bez Valley as it was known, where the Jewish Workers Club, in its attempt to provide “conviviality, companionship, and cultural reassurance for immigrant workers”, regularly staged Yiddish
107 See Jan Herman’s article ‘Writing on the Wall: Athol Fugard Sees a Way Past Apartheid, in Playland,’
published in the Los Angeles Times, January, 27, 1994. See also Alan Shelley’s remarks on the biblical and Christian imagery in Fugard’s work in his book Athol Fugard: His Plays, People and Politics (Islington: Oberon Books, 2009), 66ff.
108 For some insight into John Kani’s Christian convictions, and the way it informs and underlies his life (also
then as actor), see his interview with Rolf Solberg in Alternative Theatre in South Africa, 234.
theatre productions.110 These productions, which came to play an all-important role in the Jewish community’s social and, importantly, political life,111 made a big impression on the young Simon, and before long he became completely “stage-struck”, to quote Patt Schwartz.112 After matriculating from Jeppe Boys’ High School in the early fifties, he initially began studying Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand, while also being part of an amateur acting group called the Dramateurs; however, like Athol Fugard, he eventually decided to drop out of the course to pursue his real passion, which was the theatre. This led to him going to London, where he landed a job as a stagehand at Joan Littlewood’s socialistic fringe theatre company, the Theatre Workshop, based at the derelict Theatre Royal in Stratford East. Littlewood believed that “the theatre should face up to the problems of its time”, and that it could not “ignore the poverty and human suffering which increases every day”.113 The
Theatre Workshop’s productions, besides being collaborative and experimental, were thus decidedly political and aimed at representing and addressing the lived-realities of those who were socially and economically marginalised.114 Inspired by Littlewood’s vision, Simon decided to move back to South Africa to try and do similar work in his own context. “South Africa”, he would later write, “was where I needed to be”.115
Upon his return to South Africa, Barney Simon immediately found his way to Dorkay House and the nearby Bantu Men’s Social Club, where the very first play he saw was Athol Fugard’s No-good Friday, which, as noted above, focused on the Christ-figure Willie’s “Friday night martyrdom”.116 Of it he said: “it changed my life”.117 He went on to introduce himself to Fugard, after a performance of his next play, Nongogo, and their initial conversation was nothing short
110 See Taffy Adler’s article ‘The Johannesburg Jewish Worker’s Club, 1928-1948,’ The Journal of Southern
African Studies 6, no. 1, ‘Special Issue on Urban Social History’ (October, 1979): 70-92, in which he explores the
important role this social group played in the cultural (and also later political) life of the thousands of Jewish immigrants who settled in Johannesburg in the 1920’s, after escaping the oppressive conditions in countries such as Lithuania, Poland, and Latvia.
111 See Adler, ‘The Johannesburg Jewish Worker’s Club, 1928-1948,’ 80.
112 Schwartz, The Best of the Company: The Story of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, 15.
113 These words are from a theatre manifesto that Littlewood and other drafted in 1936. In this manifesto, they go
on to say that the theatre has always fulfilled this role in society; that it has always been political and concerned with the realities of ordinary people. They write: “To those who say that such affairs are not the concern of the theatre or that the theatre should confine itself to treading in the paths of ‘beauty’ and ‘dignity’, we would say: “Read Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Calderón, Moliere, Lope-de-Vega, Schiller and the rest”. This manifesto can be found in Howard Goorney and Ewan MacColl, eds., Agit-Prop to
Theatre Workshop: Political Playscripts, 1930-50 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), ix.
114 See Nadine Holdsworth, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 20-1;
and D. Keith Peacock, Changing Performance: Culture and Performance in the British Theatre since 1945 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 79-118.
115 Quoted in Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 15. 116 Wertheim, The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard, 9.
of “electric”.118 Fugard subsequently invited Simon to become part of his African Theatre Workshop and to sit in “as a third eye” in the development of The Blood Knot at the newly- built Rehearsal Room theatre.119 He later also asked Simon to help with the actual staging of the play, where his experience as a stagehand in London proved to be very useful.120 This involvement with The Blood Knot not only allowed Simon to work with and learn from Fugard, who was beginning to find his voice as a writer and director, but also to become acquainted with and befriend different members of the alternative and politically-minded theatre community at Dorkay House, many of whom came from and were involved in townships across the city. When Fugard thus decided to leave Johannesburg after The Blood Knot was first staged, Simon was well-positioned to step into his shoes and continue the work that he had begun.
With Fugard back in Port Elizabeth, Simon began working with a group of township actors at Dorkay House, who called themselves the Phoenix Players. He also later established his own theatre company called Mirror One. He chose this name as he believed, like Hans Urs von Balthasar, that the theatre serves as “a reflecting surface” in which we “find an image” of society at large and of ourselves, which helps us to better understand, and form ethical judgments about, the drama of existence and our role therein.121 The plays Simon staged at the Rehearsal Room, while working as a copy editor during the day, were mostly works by other local and international playwrights that were relevant to, and which challenged, the socio- political reality in the country. These productions included, for example, Cayenne Pepper by Diobaldi (which explores the dreadful realities of prison life), The Death of Bessie Smith by Edward Albee (which focuses on the death of the famous black blues singer, Bessie Smith, who was refused treatment at a ‘whites-only’ hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, after a car accident), as well as a musical called Phiri (an adaptation of Ben Johnson’s classic satire of greed and betrayal, Volpone, set in Soweto).122 Simon was also asked to produce and direct
118 Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 15. See Fugard’s recollection of this first meeting in his tribute to Simon
included in Abrahams and Fox, The World in an Orange, 21-3. Fugard writes: “[There] were the three of us [himself, his wife, Sheila, and Barney Simon] sitting on the floor of a Johannesburg flat [after a performance of Nongogo] talking excitedly about the theatre begging to be born in South Africa – a theatre that would be free and fearless… [Simon] immediately realised that his vision of a new South African theatre … coincided with ours”.
119 Abrahams and Fox, The World in an Orange, 16.
120 Fugard writes: “Barney was simply magnificent … He was ushering the audience in and scrambling around
for extra chairs and benches when our seventy-seater theatre ended up accommodating one hundred and twenty bodies. He was going to the aid of fainting ladies and elderly gentlemen when the heat and lack of fresh air overcome them… That experience revealed to me the essential Barney – a soul of extraordinary generosity and talent”. See Abrahams and Fox, The World in an Orange, 21.
121 Quoted in Abrahams and Fox, The World in an Orange, 16. See also ‘This Compost Heap of a Country: An
Interview with Barney Simon,’ in Theatre and Change in South Africa, eds. Davis and Fuchs, 225.
many of Athol Fugard’s new plays, as they appeared. For Simon, who was fully committed to non-racialism, it was of the utmost importance that these productions had mixed-race casts and were played in front of mixed-race audiences. With the introduction of a number of new laws, such as the 1965 Publication and Entertainment Act, which aimed at segregating “any place of entertainment”, it was, however, becoming difficult, if not impossible, to do so.123 Productions were presented at unusual hours, and people were usually only invited by word-of-mouth. The police, however, found out about these ‘illegal’ performances and put a stop to them. The political subject matter of the plays was obviously also highly problematic, and many works, whether by Fugard or other local or international playwright, were censored or banned.124 Over time, the situation reached breaking point, and the authorities ultimately decided to close down Dorkay House, bringing an end to an institution that was the heartbeat of Johannesburg’s alternative artistic community in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
With the dissolution of Dorkay House, Barney Simon and his collaborators, such as David Phetoe, Corney Mabaso, Zakes Mofekeng, and Fats Dibeco, defiantly decided to take the productions that they were developing ‘to the streets’. They began presenting spur-of-the- moment performances in parks, store-fronts, private homes, community centres, and church halls, especially in the townships.125 Simon would also regularly rent the dining-rooms of student communes in Parktown and turn them into make-shift theatres.126 He later recalled: “We just made theatre … it was quite agile, a sort of guerrilla theatre, as you might say”.127 There is even an anecdote of them performing some of their productions in someone’s back yard, so that political prisoners, who were currently under house arrest next door, could watch from across the fence.128 Most of the plays that were staged around this time still came from
123 Kavanah, The Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa, 51.
124 For more on the South African government’s censorship of books, artworks, motion pictures, plays and live
performances (and its consequences, also then for the authors and artists involved) during apartheid, see Peter D. MacDonald’s study The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). It’s also worthwhile to revisit Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer’s 1972 essay, ‘Apartheid and Censorship’, which was republished in Index on Censorship 23, no.3 (July/August, 1994): 151-2. In this essay Gordimer remarks: “Control of information is merely one of the functions of censorship; its ultimate purpose as a political weapon of apartheid is to bring about a situation where there is ‘no communication’ between South Africa and the world of ideas that might cause us to question our way of life here, and ‘no communication’ within our society between the sections of a people carved up into categories of colour and language… [A] whole generation of South Africans is growing up with areas of the world of ideas closed to them, and without any insight into the lives and aspirations of their fellow countrymen, black or white as the case may be, living on the other side of that net of legislation through which we may all only peer at each other dumbly”.
125 Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 16.
126 See ‘Introduction,’ in Barney Simon, Born in the RSA: Four Workshopped Plays (Johannesburg:
Witwatersrand University Press, 1997), xiii.
127 Davis and Fuchs, eds., ‘This Compost Heap of a Country: An Interview with Barney Simon,’ Theatre and
Change in South Africa, 225.
outside South Africa, so as to bypass government censors,129 but were chosen and adapted, so that they would speak to the current situation in the country. They, for example, performed works by Brecht, Becket, Camus, and Peter Weiss. As was the case with the Serpent Players in Port Elizabeth, Sophocles’ Antigone also became an important part of their repertoire. Simon would later write that Antigone is a “play for our time”, as it deals with an unjust political system, which, in the words of the character Antigone, “offends the laws of God and Heaven”.130
By the early 1970’s, Simon begun presenting theatre workshops in mission hospitals in Zululand and the Transkei, two ‘Bantustans’ or black ‘homelands’, equipping black nurses to use drama and song in health education and community development.131 Around this time, he also met, befriended, and founded a new theatre company with, another gifted theatre maker, Mannie Manim. Manim, who interestingly worked as a stage-hand on Athol Fugard’s production, No-good Friday, at the Bantu Men’s Social Society, when he was only fifteen years old,132 was the head of drama at the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal (PACT) and managed the experimental Arena Theatre in Doornfontein in Pretoria. Convinced of the evil of apartheid, and strongly influenced by the words and works of someone such as Fugard,133 he initially attempted to challenge the political status quo from ‘within’ by, for example, finding ways to stage multi-racial productions in front of multi-racial audiences at the Arena Theatre,
129 The South African government allowed many of these playwrights’ work to be performed, as they believed
that their plays represented ‘Western’ culture and could therefore “fit into their European aspirations”. Quite ironically, the “officially anti-communist South Africa was looking to [someone such as] Brecht to guide its way into the exclusive club of Western civilization”. It is not known “if the cultural institutions in charge were aware of the subversive impact of Brecht’s words … or if they solely oversaw the political position of Brecht”. See Lars Germann, Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Threepenny Opera’ and ‘Love, Crime and Johannesburg’ by the Junction Avenue
Theatre Company: A Comparison (Munich: Grin Verlag, 2008), 5-6; and also, Loren Kruger’s Post-imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially
the chapter ‘The Dis-illusion of Apartheid: Brecht and South Africa,’ 215-280.
130 See Fuchs, Playing the Market, 45. Antigone (and the other two plays in Sophocles’ Theban Cycle), resonated
in a profound sense with the oppressed in South Africa, and many renditions of these works were staged during the apartheid years (by, for example, the Serpent Players and Barney Simon’s theatre companies). A performance of Antigone was even presented by political prisons on Robben Island. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela wrote the following about this production: “I had read some of the classic Greek plays in prison and found them enormously elevating. What I took out of them was that characters were measured by facing up to difficult situations… When Antigone was chosen as the play [for our amateur drama society’s yearly offering at Christmas] I volunteered my services and was asked to play Creon. It was Antigone who symbolised our struggle; she was, in her own way, a freedom fighter, for she defied the law on the grounds that it was unjust”. See Nelson Mandela,
Long Walk to Freedom (London: Little Brown and Company, 1994), 541. In 1973, Athol Fugard, together with
John Kani and Winston Ntshona, created a play called The Island which told this tale of Robben Island inmates staging a production of ‘The Trial and Punishment of Antigone’.
131 Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 16. See also the chapter ‘Barney’s work in Health Education’ in Benson,
Athol Fugard and Barney Simon, 85-8.
132 See Mannie Manim, ‘Thoughts on Theatre in South Africa,’ in Journeys of Discovery. National Arts Festival
Winter School. A Collection of Lectures, ed. Rosalie Breitenbach (Grahamstown: The 1820 Foundation, 1988), 1.
which had also been attempted at Dorkay House.134 Faced with increasing opposition within the organisation, however, he eventually decided that it would be better to resign altogether, and, upon doing so, he immediately joined Simon in establishing what they called The Company. This would become a theatre group of like-minded writers, directors, and actors, who would explicitly use the stage as a ‘cultural weapon’ against the powers that be of the apartheid state.
At its inceptions, Simon and Manim’s The Company functioned in much the same way as Simon’s previous endeavour, Mirror One, had done. Productions were staged in the most unconventional of spaces and at the most unconventional of hours, and the multi-racial audience were mostly notified of performances by word-of-mouth. It was, once more, a form of ‘guerrilla theatre’ at its very best. While their approach was effective and drew much attention, they nonetheless realised that, in the long term, they would need a more permanent venue to rehearse and perform in. As they started looking for such a venue, and as they explored options such as “a brewery, several nightclubs, old barns, an abandoned cinema and [even] a synagogue”,135 Manim received a tip-off that the old Indian Fruit Market, in an area called Newtown, was soon to be demolished by the Johannesburg municipality. He and Simon immediately enquired about the possibility of converting this beautiful old domed-building, which resembled “Shakespeare’s Globe”,136 into a theatre, which the municipality miraculously agreed upon. Much to their own surprise, and that of the municipality, they also soon discovered that, as the newly-planned theatre stood in an industrial area and previously served as an market-place, where white clients could buy fruit and vegetables from Indian vendors, it was somehow zoned for multi-racial use, which would make it one of only two theatres in the
134 Manim would later recall: We staged production “late at night… [we just] phoned people and said, ‘Tell your
friends to come, you’ll get in, no booking. You’ve just got to come, and we’ll do the show… We [also] started a system of the first dress rehearsals being open to people of all races… [These] dress rehearsals became more and more popular… I don’t know whether Pretoria really knew what was going on, because we used to say, ‘No, no, no, we’re setting up and we need to do quite a lot of rehearsals’. So, there were all kinds of schemes going on.” See Mannie Manim’s essay, ‘Overseas They were Saying this Guy is Really Something,’ in The World in an
Orange, eds. Abrahams and Fox, eds., 45-51 (here 46).
135 Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 19.
136 Manim described his first visit to the old market as follows: “I came down with a carload of dark-suited, blue-
tied city planners. We had to sit on one another’s laps… We walked in at the end of the trading day and all these guys were transformed into thespians. They all started jumping onto the raised dais in the middle where the boxes