South African playwrights do exist _ and so does a demand to see their work. The problem lies in getting the writers and their audiences together, argues Robert Greig
SOUTH African playwrights are the cinderellas of our theatre. Though theatre managements support the staging of South African plays, few can do anything to put South African dramatists _ and by extension our theatre _ on a stable footing.
At a time of unprecedented national pride and concern for the local, our theatre has turned to gigantism on the one hand and miniaturism on the other. Big-budget musicals about the United States in the Sixties absorb hefty portions of tax and ratepayers’ money; the budgets for the arts councils have been slashed; and the council directors are adopting a wait-and-see attitude. Writers and performers have turned to cabaret or one- person performance. Between the dinosaurs and the ants are few forms of flourishing theatrical life.
The old defence of “There are no writers” no longer applies: the writers and the audiences exist. Some 50 playwrights in South Africa have had work staged in the last five years, usually as a result of their own efforts, not the theatres’. The main obstacle is the absence of a clear, systematic approach by managements to getting writers and audiences together.
Any writer hoping to have his or her work staged today faces an extremely difficult task. South African choreographers, composers, novelists and artists are far better off.
Though at least 20 years have passed since South African theatre came out of the colonial closet, thanks to The Space, The Market and overseas demand, not one theatre has a single programme to support South African playwriting; no theatre management sets aside a specific portion of its budget for South African work; few managements have any systematic way of dealing with new manuscripts: they tend to be left to time, chance and whoever happens to be around; few managements have programmes for informal readings or showcases for new work; no budgetary provisions exist for assigning proceeds from exported productions to specifically funding South African works. The proceeds go into running expenses and a general pot.
Playwrights uniformly report that they believe their manuscripts are not read properly or read only after more than a year. They suspect, reasonably, that those who read new scripts have vested interests in not taking the risks, or making the investments of time and energy that new scripts represent.
It is questionable whether the first reading of a script should be done by a practising director or actor: major Western theatres use special readers. In other countries, TV is an opening for new playwrights: here writers are expected to write “on spec”. While actors, directors and crew have the security of being paid during rehearsing, writers who may spend up to a month preparing an episode of a serial are expected to bear the entire cost and risk.
The deterrents facing South African playwrights do not only apply to new writers. Paul Slabolepszy is probably one of the country’s most popular playwrights. He believes that more of his works have been performed at The Market than any other writer. When The Market hosted the United States president’s spouse, Hillary Clinton, the night before Nelson Mandela’s inauguration, the paeans of self-congratulation did not mention Slabolepszy, though his Pale Natives was playing there. In fact, The Market had been offered and had turned down Pale Natives. Slabolepszy and his cast raised the funds to pay the rents there.
Theoretically, winning playwrights’ awards increases the chances of production by reducing the risk to theatre managers: an award- winning play comes with publicity and some critical stamp of merit. In practice it is different. Anthony Akerman, who wrote Somewhere on the Border, won the South African Council of Performing Arts Councils (Sacpac) award last year for his work about Roy Campbell, Dark Outsider. Part of the prize was a commitment to performance by one of the arts councils who sponsored the prize.
So far, three arts councils have shilly-shallied about production. One commercial management has dilly-dallied. The play sat on desks of the country’s major, innovative theatre for months and nothing happened.
Competitions like the long-standing Amstel Playwright of the Year award and the, now discontinued, Sacpac Prize certainly uncover new talent and encourage it and have done so for years. But the short-circuit is in the link to theatres. Playwrights win awards, but plays are not seen.
Even when managements read new plays, they are dilatory about getting back to the writers and seldom go so far as to suggest revisions. Their answers tend to be off-the-cuff rather than considered, and are seldom committed to writing.
One writer reported that the comprehensive critical response he got from the artistic director of a Johannesburg theatre to his new script was: “Well, I didn’t like it very much.” Ironically, this was from an artistic director who is wont to complain that newspaper reviews are not “constructive”.
Again, theoretically, plays by established writers should pose less of a risk to managements. But they too find it difficult to break the barrriers of indifference and short-term commercialism of managements. John Slemon, general manager of Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre, is frank about the problem. He says the blocks to staging South African plays are “mainly lack of promising scripts” with financial risk the next important factor. He adds: “I believe managements and not audiences are to blame for not being adventurous.”
Slemon adds: “Perhaps only new work should be subsidised and classics. Certainly nobody should be subsidised to stage musicals.”
The lack of systematic programmes to train playwrights and have them working with casts in theatres is ostensibly the result of a lack of money. That is a problem; another problem, seldom mentioned, is commitment to making some budgetary provision for staging or reading new work. Without budgetary provisions, and the commitment they represent, staging new, written works becomes discretionary.
However, the lack of encouragement of playwrights has other, subtle causes. The first is that our theatre is dominated by actors and directors: it is essentially a performer’s theatre with its focus on good roles, proper sentiments and comfortable stories, rather than good plays. The second reason is that systematic investment in writing is a long-term process. Our theatre practitioners and managers are short-term thinkers: they lurch from success to success. Often their theatres live on the smell of an oil rag and this turns administrators into gamblers: they’ll throw their chips on one number, usually a musical, in the vain hope that it will bring in the bucks so they can do “the stuff that really matters”.
When The Market staged a Christmas pantomime last year, the opening audience was told by the chairman of the board of trustees, Graham Lindop, that the proceeds would help to finance a forthcoming season of Pieter Dirk-Uys’ and Paul Slabolepszy’s work. That was in December: nothing more has been heard.
Sometimes the gamble comes off. But it is not an approach which gives continuity to South African theatre and the writing on which it depends.
The fundamental problem is that our theatre managers do not have artistic policies and the financial policies to support them; they are fire-fighters and gamblers. Their argument is that they cannot afford them; the counter-argument is that they cannot afford to have them.
Systematically nurturing playwrights is something theatre managers and artistic directors have never done; for them it would be a laborious, foreign process.
Many come from educational and career backgrounds which make them distrust words, ideas and language: they are more comfortable with actions, roles _ and star turns. In addition, our theatre exists in a polylingual country: in some minds, the script is an alien Eurocentric device and the improvised performance somehow authentically African.
The losers are writers, audiences and our theatre. Increasingly established playwrights are losing confidence in existing theatres and their managers. Cold-shouldered, or squeezed out by short-termism, playwrights may eventually find that opening their own theatre is a sensible choice.