Synonyms

Apartheid versus postapartheid; Barney Simon as director, writer, and animator; Integration versus segregation; Jewish versus other ethnicities; Johannesburg versus suburbs versus Soweto; LGBTQ+ Johannesburg

Introduction/Definition

Barney Simon (1936–1995) is best known as the founding director of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, perhaps the most prominent antiapartheid cultural institution of its time, but he began working in theatres at home and briefly overseas in the 1950s, and writing for publication as well as for the stage in the 1960s and 1970s, before the Market opened in 1976. In addition to leading the theatre as artistic director in tandem with Mannie Manim as manager, Simon also played the role of animator of collectively created workshop plays that dramatized contemporary life in Johannesburg led by South Africans of diverse backgrounds, and addressed gender as well as racial identities.

Early Collaborations

Growing up with Yiddish-speaking parents in Kensington, a near-east district of Johannesburg, Simon joined intersecting generations of cosmopolitan Jewish artists in the city including writers such as Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) and Lionel Abrahams (1930–2004), photographer David Goldblatt (1930–2018), and theatre impresarios such as Leon Gluckman (1922–1978) who directed King Kong (1959), and Taubie Kushlik (1910–1991), for whom Simon worked backstage when he was still in high school (Stephanou and Henriques 2006: 3), as well as later theatre makers such as Malcolm Purkey (1950–), who directed the Market Theatre from 2004 to 2013. Like the others mentioned here, Simon did not give special preferences to Jewish themes, but elements of his upbringing found their way into his work. Most poignantly, his rehearsals in 1976 of the South African premiere of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, the first production on the Market’s mainstage, and the cries of the asylum inmates in particular, were inspired by his recollection of his mother wailing in the synagogue in response to a visiting rabbi’s account in Yiddish of the slaughter of Jews who had remained in Lithuania during World War II (quoted: Stephanou and Henriques 2006: 4). Writer Matthew Krouse, quoted in the same volume (2006: 229–231), suggests also that secular Yiddish culture of the early twentieth century also influenced Simon’s theatre and politics.

Although Simon’s first published story portrays a pigeon breeder in a London suburb, perhaps inspired by his stay in that city (1953–1955) when he worked backstage at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal Stratford East, which favored collective adaptations of plays classic and contemporary, his theatre work in Johannesburg in the 1960s drew from his interaction with Athol Fugard whose play Hello and Goodbye he directed in 1965, and his observation of African-American and Puerto Rican theatre and activism in the USA (1968–1970). This experience in turn influenced his work with black South Africans in several groups in Johannesburg such as Phoenix Players for whom he adapted and directed Ben Jonson’s Volpone as Phiri (1972), and in theatre applied to health education in the Transkei and KwaZulu, where he worked on role-play with nurses and rural patients (1972–1975) (Kruger 2019: 171, 218). In Johannesburg, Manim, who was working for the state subsidized Performing Council of the Transvaal (PACT) gave Simon access to the Arena, PACT’s experimental theatre housed first in inner-city Doornforntein and later in a former school in the northern district of Rosebank, and to PACT actors whose work with him on modern classics such as Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck and Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the elms in Afrikaans translation led in 1975 to the formation of the Company that moved to the Market in 1976.

Writing and Directing the Inner City

Simon’s interest in the contradictions of apartheid Johannesburg prompted him to write dramatic monologues which focused, as indicated by the title Jo’burg, sis! [yuck] (Simon 1974), on ambivalent responses to the upstart city. Staged at the Arena under the more inviting title “Hey, Listen!” they featured speakers on edge in the inner city, especially in high-rise Hillbrow, whose reputation as a cosmopolitan haven from the political and sexual restraints of apartheid overshadowed its more diverse actual population. Hillbrow housed more working-class people than swinging singles, despite the nightlife venues that mimicked Manhattan, as highlighted by photojournalists (Clay and Griffiths 1982) Simon’s characters, while mostly white, are marginalized in other ways. Bobby Ferreira, the middle-aged gay protagonist of “Jo’burg, sis!” created by Afrikaans actor Marius Weyers at the Arena and reprised at the Market, was more vulnerable than Weyers’s better-known macho biker Jakes in Siener [Seer] in die Suburbs (Du Plessis 1971), but Ferreira’s upbringing in suburban Kempton Park near the Johannesburg airport resembles the blue-collar near-south setting for Du Plessis’s play, whose population included settlers from Portugal via Mozambique, to which Ferreira may belong. Dressed in a “brightly checked sports jacket and a cravat” (Simon 1986: 110) and surrounded by furniture in his small Hillbrow flat, Weyers played Ferreira as a nervy queer talking to a younger man whom he had picked up in a pub. The monologue begins with peevish remarks about strangers: “Jo’burg, sis! Honestly you know, you can’t walk down the street without someone biting you” (111), whether “kaffir beggars” or “bladdy policemen” (113), and ends with Ferreira failing to persuade his companion to stay the night: “But look, hey, why don’t you try to come back? Just knock three times so I’ll know it’s you” (116). The audience is left with the sense that Ferreira, while he evidently finds Hillbrow alienating, could not stomach living anywhere else. Although his sexual orientation remained unmentionable in a regime that criminalized homosexual conduct (Gevisser 1995), he inhabited one of the few places where men might lead gay lives in the 1970s, two decades before Gays and Lesbians of the Witwatersrand (GLOW; founded 1988) could assemble the first LGBTQ+ rights parade in South Africa on these streets in 1990.

Although the other two monologues performed under the title “Hey Listen” are not set in specific locations, the published volume includes two pieces set in Hillbrow, written for actors in Simon’s company. The “monologue for Vanessa” [Cooke], who collaborated with Simon until his death in 1995 and went on to work at the Market Theatre Laboratory, would have offered the petite, versatile actress a matter-of-fact city worker as a foil to the ditzy Miss South Africa has-been she played in the “Hey Listen” series. This text is striking not only because it is the only one in the book with a named black character but also because its speaker’s language is plain and its delivery neutral, whether she is talking about her office job as “alright” (Simon 1974:141), or pondering the plight of black miners shot by police during a labor dispute: “I read that they were angry because they did not get raises when other men did” (140). This liberal sympathy may not be unusual, but her observations about the janitor in the speaker’s low-rent Hillbrow building tell a more disturbing story. While she acknowledges that Phineas “earns a very small salary” (140), which might explain his habit of selling the building’s coal “so that there is often not enough for the boiler” (139), she describes a man who flouts community norms as well as apartheid law. He steals tenants’ clothes and liquor, including the speaker’s gin, and also uses her flat for trysts: “Once I came home early and met him leaving the flat with a woman” (141). Unlike characters in the Market’s later and more emphatically antiapartheid testimonial plays, such as Born in the RSA (Simon and Market Theatre cast 1986), this man is not a hero or a victim of the struggle against apartheid. Nor can he be seen as an avatar of a postracial community. While the whimsical Cincinatti (1977) portrayed a multiracial band of bohemians – despite misspelling the name of the city in its aspiration to American cool – and later appeared in a textbook (Simon and Market Theatre cast 1984), Phineas’s behavior and the speaker’s nervous response to him in “Monologue for Vanessa” strayed too far from antiapartheid moral outrage to favor staging in the 1970s. His amorality instead anticipates the outlaw entrepreneurs trolling Hillbrow in the lawless 1990s [see Johannesburg entry].

Simon, the Market Theatre, and Johannesburg

The avowedly antiapartheid plays that Simon shaped at the Market in the 1970s and 1980s focus on the turbulence on Johannesburg and Soweto streets, but their significance was amplified by the theatre’s role in the city. Housed in an Edwardian building that once held an Indian fruit market in Newtown, the inner district that in the nineteenth century had been an Indian “camp,” the theatre occupies the border between the central business district and Fordsburg, a mixed neighborhood from the 1890s whose black and brown residents were expelled in the 1960s [see Essop entry]. Barney Simon’s vision of the theatre as a “meeting place for all South Africans […] as enriching and relevant as the market it replaced” (Graver and Kruger 1989: 273) acknowledged this dispossession but did not directly contest the acquiescence of Johannesburg’s capitalist elite to the planned violence of the apartheid state. Sponsored by private corporations, the Market stood awkwardly between the historical displacement of black business and residence, and the aspiration to become “an oasis in a society of total chaos […] where people could talk together and we could put on theatre that … said things about South Africa” (Schwartz 1988: 37). However well intentioned, this emphasis on a building where “black people can watch theatre in a decent way,” in Manim’s words (quoted: Graver and Kruger 1989: 274) did not change the laws that made “decent theatre” in the townships precarious if not impossible.

In the “edgy city” Johannesburg (Kruger 2013), the edge that had historically marked the line between the permanent white city and supposedly impermanent black settlements began to blur already in the 1980s. As the Market was seeking to integrate theatre audiences, working people of color who had been expelled from the city were stealthily moving back, contributing to the “greying of Johannesburg” (Pickard-Cambridge 1989). Although Johannesburg’s centennial year 1986 saw a new stock exchange building in nearby Diagonal Street overshadowing the spine of Indian trade, and the Newtown Cultural Precinct, which included a flea market, a gallery, and boutiques and restaurants around the Market, Black organizations such as FUBA [see Sepamla entry] and the Afrika Cultural Centre moved in close by but boycotted the centennial even as they received funding from the same liberal patrons as the Market. On the uncertain terrain between liberal progress and state repression, the Market highlighted apartheid deformation of urban space and the difficult attempt to reform institutional as well as artistic practice.

Despite these contradictions, the Market’s impact under Simon’s direction in the decade and a half between the Soweto uprising and the democratic election in 1994 is indisputable in large part because it provided space in stage and house for South Africans of all backgrounds. While the first season featured international drama such as Chekhov’s The Seagull, which opened just after the June uprising in Soweto, and Brecht’s Mother Courage on the mainstage in 1977, the Market hosted plays by black South Africans such as The Hungry Earth (Maponya 1995 [1978]) and Egoli (Manaka 1980 [1979]), which offered alternating harsh and lyrical testimony to apartheid brutality, in particular dangerous work in the gold mines… The combination of witnessing and spectacle in these and other testimonial pieces that would shape the Market representation of South Africa at home and abroad took its most vivid form in collectively workshopped plays in which cast members created characters based on their own or their communities’ experience in Johannesburg, Soweto, and adjoining towns and townships.

The workshops and their diverse casts thus extended the theatre’s frame of reference beyond the inner city, especially Hillbrow, to include the vast expanse of suburbs and townships and to acknowledge the sharp conflicts over rights to the city. Black Dog/inj’emnyama (Simon and Market Theatre cast 1997 [1984]) returns to the Soweto uprising of 1976 but, in addition to black characters close to the action in Orlando West, where Hector Peterson was shot, or Diepkloof Hall, where meetings took place, the play includes testimony from brown characters such as Benny who has ties to Fordsburg, or whites such as Rita who hails from Afrikaner Pretoria and her grandparents’ farm in Namibia, before coming to teach in Johannesburg, where she is caught up in the eddies of an uprising that she did not understand. The stage design does not attempt to reproduce these locations but used a chain-link fence to show the separation between the characters (1997: xxviii).

Born in the RSA (Simon and Market Theatre cast 1986), which was created in response to the state of emergency in 1985 and republished posthumously in a longer version (Simon and Market Theatre cast 1997), continued the investigation of personal and public responses to extreme state violence that involved the arrest of children as well as the torture of adults. The title alludes to Bruce Springsteen’s album Born in the USA (1984) only in so far as it insists on the power of solidarity, but more relevant to the local scene, the play challenged the masculine bias of testimonial theatre by foregrounding women and by staging the gendered dimension of both state and domestic violence. On a stage empty but for chairs, microphones, and newspapers, against a backdrop of images from the day-to-day struggle in the city and beyond, this “docudrama” (Simon and Market Theatre cast 1997: 91) used the format of courtroom testimony stripped of a naturalistic set that might hem it in, but as in Black Dog, place names from Diepkloof in Soweto to Forest Town in Johannesburg locate black and white characters and contextualize encounters between them. The house of Afrikaans human rights lawyer Mia in Forest Town, represented only by chairs, serves as a gathering point for characters seeking her help, while apolitical Nicky’s visit to a beauty salon in the Carlton Center marks her dissociation from the emergency in Soweto streets, and ignorance of her husband Glen’s double role as a graduate student at Wits University and an undercover police agent reporting to superiors at John Vorster Square. By linking political activists with those in retreat from politics, the docudrama plots the interplay between commitment and betrayal, agency and quietism, while at the same time stressing that the state did not allow blacks to evade politics. The performance in 1986 avoided mimicking violence documented in the text, even in scenes describing torture (photo: Kruger 2019: 139), but even matter-of-fact reports brought the impossible situation vividly to mind, as when the usually quiet Zach, a black musician seeking Mia’s help to find his detained nephew, expresses his anger at police cruelty to children in a terse but terrifying fantasy of smashing up white children in the Rosebank Convent schoolyard as he walks by, reminding audiences at the Market that the white city could not remain sealed off from the turmoil in the townships.

In the interregnum between Mandela’s release in 1990 and the municipal elections in 1996, and beyond the end of the century, township turbulence invaded Johannesburg with a vengeance. Administrators who knew that they would be voted out by 1996 ignored the unregulated movement of capital and people that had begun already in the 1980s. As murder and other violent crimes soared to rates four times that of the United States, edginess deepened into visions of apocalypse (Kruger 2013: 150–158). Despite this decline, efforts to reinvest in the city occupied the empty space between apartheid and postapartheid governance. The Central Johannesburg Partnership (CJP; 1991–2002) attempted to rebuild links between absentee landlords and their inner-city properties and Johannesburg boosters such as Christopher Till, who as Johannesburg Director of Culture (1991–1996) expanded the Newtown Cultural Precinct to include the Dance Factory and other arts venues. Even as the affluent sought to protect their assets behind high walls and militarized security in the suburbs, previously marginalized groups claimed the inner city. Black and white members of GLOW were emboldened by the resuregence of hitherto suppressed opposition groups to convene the first LGBTQ+ Pride Parade in 1990, and black migrants local and increasingly international moved into Hillbrow over the next decades.

In the year before the public demonstration of LGBTQ+ rights to the city, the Market staged Score me the ages (Simon and Market Theatre cast 1997 [1989]). Workshopped from GLOW member and assistant director Matthew Krouse’s script “Forgotten, forbidden,” which he acknowledged was “terrible” (Stephanou and Henriques 2006: 227), the play’s title in performance echoed a pick-up line – roughly: “what’s the time?” (Simon and Market Theatre cast 1997: xxv) – and dramatized encounters between so-called “rent boys” and their clients in inner city Braamfontein. Although Krouse retrospectively found this version “stereotyped,” he acknowledged “learning so much” from the experience (Stephanou and Henriques 2006: 228). Score me the ages also paved the way for other plays to explore the impact of the uncertain condition of transitional Johannesburg on gender roles. Although written and directed by Susan Pam-Grant and opening in the Black Sun nightclub, Curl up and dye (Pam-Grant 1993 [1989]), which deals with drama between white and black clients and hairstylists in a fading salon in Joubert Park, found a home at the Market in 1991 and was followed by other city plays directed by Simon, such as Paul Slabolepszy’s Mooi Street Moves (Slabolepszy 1994 [1992], which depicts a harsher encounter between a white rural naif and a black dude who, despite his streetwise persona, is killed for not paying rent to one of the dubious fixers who ran so-called hijacked buildings in the inner city in the 1990s. Even though these plays were each written by a single author, Simon brought them to the Market to engage audiences with the changing city, including those who were reluctant to visit the theatre in this period.

Although his last major project before his death in 1995, adapting and staging Can Themba’s story “The Suit” (Themba 1985 [1963]) in 1993, looked back to the Sophiatown era of the 1950s, Simon conveyed precisely the tension between high melodrama and sharp irony that animated Themba and his subjects – self-aware, and sometimes self-destructive ghetto denizens. The original story is simple – and peculiar. Philemon discovers his wife Tilly with another man who escapes, leaving behind his suit. To punish Tilly, Philemon insists that she treat the suit as an honored guest, but his elaborations on this torment – culminating in a party in which she has to perform this charade for guests – hasten her death. The story’s debt to melodrama is clear, but closer reading reveals the complex combination of the penny-dreadful, the profound torment of Dostoyevsky and the naturalistic depiction of the daily trials of urban blacks. Under Simon’s direction, the shifting third person narration juxtaposed with dialogue added by coadaptor Mothobi Mutloatse, Simon, and the cast, highlighted the interventions of friends and comments of passersby on the battle between husband and wife. The performance suggested the allure but also the limits of ghetto melodrama, while reminding the 1993 audience of the wretched urban conditions that prompted this story. In Simon’s vision of The Suit, the past offers neither an explanation for the present nor a refuge from it. Instead, he used the cruel ending of this Sophiatown story to sharpen the corrosive edge of the interregnum, tracing the effects of violence on post-antiapartheid Johannesburg, post-antiapartheid because it had escaped the forms and gestures of antiapartheid theatre but could yet imagine a postapartheid society. Although recent revivals of this unpublished adaptation, for instance, to commemorate the Market’s fortieth anniversary in 2016, tend to follow the tone of nostalgic revivals of Sophiatown, indulging in retro-tourism, Simon’s original 1993 production still testifies to his clear-eyed view of the challenges of the edgy city and his abiding love for Johannesburg.

Cross-References