While all this activity was taking place at the Market Theatre in Newtown, Johannesburg, Gibson Kente was released from prison, and he once again began touring throughout the country, with new township musicals. His latest works, as mentioned above, were decidedly less political than the trio of plays that he produced in the mid-1970’s. However, they still often led to run-ins with the authorities, both on account of the content of the plays and the fact that they were performed by an all-black cast, in a country where black people’s every move was restricted. One play, in particular, that caused quite a bit of trouble was the popular Mama and the Load (1979), which again depicted the hardships of township life, while also carrying a strong, almost proselytising, Christian message, where the church served as the final refuge of the community. On one occasion, Kente attempted to take this production into the homeland, Bophuthatswana, but the cast members were refused entry by the police (and were even incarcerated for a short while). This led to a “heated argument” on the tour bus about the relationship between politics and Christianity, which played such an important role in this work.149 “All sort of ideas were tossed around”, Schwartz writes, including “the question of what would happen if Jesus Christ, known in Sesotho as Morena, were to come back to earth in apartheid South Africa”.150 Two cast members, who immediately became gripped by this specific question and its imaginative possibilities, were the young actor-musicians, Percy Mtwa, from Benoni on the Witwatersrand, and Mbongeni Ngema, from Umkumbane in Durban. For the next few months, as the tour went on, they continued to discuss this ‘Second Coming of Christ’, and, over time, decided to resign from Mama and the Load, so as to develop their own full-length play that would explore this idea. As Schwartz writes: “The scenario was irresistible, the opportunities for drama, humour, and pathos unlimited, and Mtwa and Ngema were ripe for a new project”.151
After settling in Soweto, Johannesburg, Mtwa and Ngema founded a new theatre company called the Earth Players, of which they were only two members, and commenced with the preparations for their envisioned play. They began studying the Gospel narratives and attended
148 See Benson, Athol Fugard and Barney Simon, 108; Kruger, The Drama of South Africa, 30-31, 166; and
Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 37.
149 Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon, ‘Original Introduction, as Published in the First Edition,’
in Mtwa, Ngema and Simon, Woza Albert!, viii.
150 Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 99; Hauptfleish, ‘Introduction,’ in Woza Albert, 17. 151 Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 99
one church service after another, especially in the many African-initiated churches that were spread all over places like Soweto.152 They also studied the writings of theatre theorists, such as Stanislavski, Jerzy Grotowski, and Peter Brook. From Stanislavski and Grotowski, they learned how to train their minds, bodies, and voices, so as to become, or to be “transformed” into, as Grotowski would say, the characters they needed to portray, without having to rely on, for example, props, costumes, lightning, or other theatre trappings.153 Peter Brook helped them to understand that the theatre could both be a “holy place”, a sanctuary, where the “invisible is made visible”, as well as a place of transformation and even “revolution”.154 As part of their research for the play, Mtwa and Ngema also spent many hours on the streets of Soweto, trying to understand the deeper complexities of the day-to-day lives of black South Africans in the townships, so that they could faithfully mirror and re-present these realities in their stage production.
When Mtwa and Ngema had come up with a number of rough sketches from which a play could be developed, they decided to approach Barney Simon at the Market Theatre to hear if he would be interested in working with them. At first, Simon was a bit uncomfortable about this request. The Black Consciousness Movement was gaining momentum at the time, and Simon felt that it would perhaps be better if the duo rather collaborated with a black playwright
152 See Mtwa, Ngema and Simon, ‘Original Introduction,’ viii.
153 See Mtwa, Ngema and Simon, ‘Original Introduction,’ viii; Fuchs, Playing the Market, 114. Hauptfleish,
‘Introduction,’ 17-18. Konstantin Stanislavski, as mentioned in the previous chapters, developed a number of techniques and exercises (as part of his acting system) which helped the actor become ‘disponible’ to the ‘role’ he or she has been given by the playwright. The Stanislavskian method was, in many ways, further developed by the 20th century Polish theatre director and theorist, Jerzy Grotowski, who studied in Moscow under Yuri
Zavadsky (one of Stanislavski’s mentees). In his seminal work, Towards a Poor Theatre (London: Routledge, 2002 [1968]), Grotowski argued for a form of theatre which only relied on the actor’s body and voice (without making use of any other theatrical trappings), and privileged the “actor-spectator relationship of perpetual, direct, ‘live’ communion” (19). Like Stanislavski, Grotowski developed an extensive system of exercises (with regards to the “mental-physical-emotional processes” of acting), and especially focused on the ritual aspects of performance (see 133-224). For an introduction to Grotowski thought and method, see James Slowiak and Jairo Cuesta, Jerzy Grotowski (London: Routledge, 2007). Mtwa had the following to say about Grotowski: “I met Andy Mabizela who was an actor who then became a stage manager. I borrowed the book [Towards a Poor
Theatre] and studied it with Mbongeni. This book taught us how theatre can be simple. How it can exist without
technological aids and huge sets. Grotowski was talking about the preparation of the actor, the training of the actors and exercises for actors. He also has exercises that are designed to remove physiological barriers, to remove obstacles, so that the soul, the spirit, is free to play. It is that book, in fact, that inspired the inception, the conception, of ‘Woza Albert!’…. I tell you, we studied that book until it was in tatters. Percy Mtwa, ‘We were like with Morena himself on that stage with Barney,’ in The World in an Orange eds. Abrahams and Fox, 195, 197-198.
154 Mtwa, ‘We were like with Morena himself on that stage with Barney,’ 203. Peter Brook is one of the most
celebrated theatre theorists, directors, and especially then interpreters of Shakespeare of the previous century and influenced a generation of theatre makers with his publication, The Empty Space: A Book about the Theatre (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996 [1968]). In this seminal work, he explores, inter alia, what he calls “Holy Theatre” or “The Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible”, where the hidden realities of the drama of existence are made visible in and through the “happening” of the theatre (see 49-77). He also explores what he calls “Rough Theatre”, which is concerned with people’s lived realities, and often has a strong political (and even revolutionary) focus (see 78-119). For Brook both these ‘modes’ of theatre can and should come together in what he calls “Immediate Theatre” (120-175).
or director.155 Mtwa and Ngema, who had spent much time at the Market Theatre and had seen many of Simon’s works up until that point, were, however, adamant that they wanted to work with him.156 A meeting was thus set up and after they performed some of their ideas to Simon, he could not but say ‘Yes’.157 “Percy and Mbongeni”, Simon would later write, “were amongst the most extraordinary performers I had ever witnessed”.158
There was, however, also another small problem with regards to Simon’s involvement. As he was of Jewish descent, he did not actually know too much about Christianity. While at school, he later wrote, he would usually “be sent out to play in the garden when the New Testament” was read, which meant that his knowledge of the Gospels was “hazy”, to say the very least.159 One day, however, earlier in their rehearsal period, Simon fell sick and had to stay in bed for a day or two, which gave him enough time to become acquainted with this biblical narrative on which Mtwa and Ngema’s play was to be based. In Simon’s own words:
One day I had ’flu and stayed in bed while Percy and Mbongeni stayed in the township… I invited the artist Bill Ainslie [a devout Christian who initially planned on becoming a priest before taking up art] to come over and he sat by my bedside and taught me the Gospel. We worked through the story, section for section, and evolved a structure of parallels between His story and ours.160
As a theatre-maker, as well as a political activist, Barney Simon was deeply moved and inspired by this first, surprising encounter with the ‘drama of the Christ-event’ (and, as he said, the parallels between “His story and ours”), and when he returned to the Market Theatre after two days of being sick, he told Mtwa and Ngema – as Ngema himself recalls – that the play they
155 See Benson, Athol Fugard and Barney Simon, 118-119. Mtwa, ‘We were like with Morena himself on that
stage with Barney,’ 195-6; Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 100.
156 Mbogeni Ngema later had the following to say about them choosing to work with a white playwright/director:
“I just said, if someone is good, they’re good, that’s it. If we are fighting racism we can’t be fighting ourselves along the colour lines. I defended Barney to the last because I believed in him. The white/black thing was never an issue for me. Even when I [today] direct I sometimes hear his voice. It’s like somewhere he’s around with me. Somewhere he’s a guiding angel for me as a director”. See Mbongeni Ngema, ‘Working with Barney was a Revelation that Became Consistent with My Work up till This Day,’ in The World in an Orange, 189-193.
157 See Benson, Athol Fugard and Barney Simon, 118-119. Mtwa, ‘We were like with Morena himself on that
stage with Barney,’ 195-6; Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 100. Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer sat in on this first meeting, and later described the occasion as follows in an obituary for Barney Simon: “I remember, decades ago, Barney Simon came by and asked if I would like to come with him to meet two young men who were keen to devise a play. They were Percy Mtwa and Mbogeni Ngema, and they had the germ of an idea in two out-of-works chatting in a graveyard where the great African National Congress leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Chief Albert Luthuli was buried”. Nadine Gordimer, ‘Obituary: Barney Simon,’ in The
Independent (July 4, 1995). For Ngema’s recollection of this first meeting, see Ngema, ‘Working with Barney,’
190.
158 Quoted in Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 100. 159 Quoted in Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 100. 160 Quoted in Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 100.
were working on should be “exactly like the New Testament”.161 Simon indeed recognised that the Gospel narrative not only lent itself to being performed on the theatre stage, but also, as Mtwa and Ngema had realised, while working with Gibson Kente on Mama and the Load, was highly relevant to the realities of apartheid South Africa (which made it rather bizarre that the government were using Christianity to justify their policies; something which is highlighted and explored in Woza Albert! itself, as will be seen below).162 In the next few months, while working on the play, it was of utmost importance for Simon that they continually revisit the biblical text itself, in their attempt to re-imagine how, on the one hand, the Christ-story would play out today, and, on the other hand, how black and white South Africans, respectively, would respond to Jesus’ words and deeds.163 By a fascinating turn of events, it thus happened that in the middle of one of the darkest hours in South African history, two black township actors and a white theatre director and playwright, who self-identified as a secular Jew, became completely consumed with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Besides constantly revisiting the Christ-narrative, as recorded in the Gospels, Simon also encouraged Mtwa and Ngema to continue spending as much time as possible on the streets of Soweto and other parts of Johannesburg, the context in which this ‘second coming’ of Christ would take place, so that they could indeed accurately re-present the drama playing out in South Africa, on the theatre stage. For Simon, as always, the central task of the theatre was to hold a “mirror to society”,164 and he thus urged Mtwa and Ngema to “speak the truth” about what they saw and experienced,165 so that the horrid realities of apartheid (whether it be “the racial divide”, or “racist stereotyping”, or “labour issues”, or the “splitting up of families, or “forced removals”, or “poverty and homelessness”, or “police brutality”, or “political imprisonment”),166 would be revealed for all to see. Woza Albert!, Simon maintained, should “reflect South Africa as people in the streets”; it should give “identity to what surrounds us”.167 Dixon Malele, who worked as stage manager at the Market Theatre during this time, recalls: “Barney really wanted to expose the horrors of the grand regime at that time. Theatre was like a platform for him to do that. He didn’t pull his punches”.168 Simon would thus send Mtwa and Ngema, in Ngema’s own words, “to go and watch people, to see people, and bring those people
161 See Ngema, ‘Working with Barney,’ 189.
162 See the sub-section titled ‘Apartheid and Religion’ in Hauptfleish, ‘Introduction,’ 10ff. 163 See Dixon Malele, ‘He was Sort of a Mother, You Know,’ in The World in an Orange, 205. 164 Benson, Athol Fugard and Barney Simon, 138.
165 Malele, ‘He Was Sort of a Mother, You Know,’ 206. 166 Hauptfleish, ‘Introduction,’ 34.
167 See Abrahams and Fox, eds., The World in an Orange, 182. 168 Malele, ‘He was Sort of a Mother, You Know,’ 206.
to the theatre, to the rehearsal room”.169 All of the different characters and scenarios in Woza
Albert! would thus be based on, and reflect, real-life people and situations, with the action on the stage mirroring and pointing back towards the drama taking place outside of the theatre complex – and this is what made the play so relevant and striking when it was finally performed.170 As Nadine Gordimer later wrote: Woza Albert! “showed the world outside what the statute-book version of apartheid was really like in terms of black people’s account of their own lives”.171
By deeply immersing themselves in the story of Christ, as recorded in the Bible, and by continuing to study the real-life realities of ordinary black South Africans, to such an extent that the bodies later turned “into mirrors” which reflected everything they saw and experienced in the townships and in the greater Johannesburg area,172 Mtwa and Ngema –with the help, encouragement, and creative input of Barney Simon – ultimately finished the play, after more than a year’s non-stop work, and performed it for the very first time on the 25th of March 1981
in front of fifty people in the Laager Room of the Market Theatre. The reason for this relatively small audience was, in Mannie Manim’s words, “to draw less attention from the censure type people”.173 Soon, however, the word began to spread about Woza Albert! and reviews began to appear in the newspapers, which prompted Manim and Simon to move the play to the Market Theatre’s main auditorium, where it would be performed in front of thousands of black and white South Africans over the next few months, becoming “the biggest box office drawcard in the history of the Market Theatre”.174 From the very first performance, as Temple Hauptfleish writes, “the response by the public and the critics alike was almost uniformly ecstatic”, with everyone agreeing that this “inspired and inspiring play” hailed “a new phase in South African theatre”.175 While exposing and strongly speaking out against the horrendous realities of apartheid, with an intensity which rivalled that of any political or protest theatre in history, it offered a defiant and joyous message of hope that proclaimed, to the oppressors and oppressed alike, that hate, darkness, and death will not prevail, but will ultimately be overcome by love, light, and life.176
169 Ngema, ‘Working with Barney,’ 190. 170 See Fuchs, Playing the Market, 118. 171 Gordimer, ‘Obituary: Barney Simon’. 172 Kruger, The Drama of South Africa, 175. 173 Manim, ‘Overseas,’ 78.
174 Schwartz, The Best of the Company, 100. 175 Hauptfleish, ‘Introduction,’ 21.
After the highly-successful opening in Johannesburg, the production visited many more cities and towns throughout South Africa, playing mostly in township venues, and it also embarked on an extensive international tour to the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and Australia, which the South African government, under great pressure from these countries, allowed.177 Woza Albert! also made a big impression on overseas audiences, and Mtwa and Ngema’s “unparalleled talent for mimicry” won over “just about everyone who came to see” the play.178 Alan Wright, the theatre critic from The Scotsman, who had covered every production at the famous Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, since its inception in the 1960’s, said, for example, that Woza Albert! was one of “the most remarkable” production he had ever seen, a sentiment that was also echoed by many other critics, including The Telegraph’s John Barber, during the play’s West End run in 1983.179 “Directly or indirectly”, Schwartz writes, Woza
Albert! would thus “change a lot of lives and profoundly influence the direction of black South African theatre, spawning dozens of derivate and more or less successful spinoffs”.180 It became a “bridge for indigenous theatre from the township to the world”, and, as John Kani writes, it encouraged black artists all over “to dream”, in a country where dreaming was completely out of the questions for black South Africans, as the character Willie remarked in Athol Fugard’s No-good Friday.181 Above all, however, Woza Albert!, with its depiction of the inhumane struggles of the “African Everyman” and its brazen suggestion of where Jesus Christ’s solidarity would lie in this horrid situation, offered a staunch challenge to the apartheid