Is the Market Theatre worth saving? The city council says yes – – but its grant this year was just over one percent of the amount given to the Civic. Ivor Powell reports
THE Johannesburg City Council is spending over R22-m on theatre this year — but the country’s best-known theatre complex, the Market, is getting only just over one percent of it.
The council recently voted R22-million as part of its ongoing support for the Civic Theatre, and only a one-off grant-in-aid of R250 000 to the Market, which is now in real danger of going under within the next few months.
The council has shelved a plan to give ongoing subsidisation to the Market.
“When we went to the city council we were promised R1-million as an interim measure, pending full subsidy applications,” John Kani, the co-artistic director of the Market Theatre, said this week. “That would have met the immediate need. The R250 000 they gave us just fell down the deep dark hole of our overdraft.”
The hole of the Market’s overdraft is not, comparatively speaking, particularly deep. It has a total debt of around R1- million — a fraction of the debt racked up by the Civic in the two years since its reopening. About half of the R22-m the council is giving to the Civic this year will go towards servicing the debt built up during its R132-m refurbishment.
“They owe us,” Kani says. “Johannesburg is acknowledged as one of the three capitals of world theatre, and that is only because of the Market. It has become a unique cultural asset to not only the city but the entire country. Of 21 Vita nominations in theatre last year, 17 were for plays performed at the Market.
“And not only that. Through projects like the Market Theatre Laboratory we serve the community in ways that nobody else does. We are nothing short of the soul of the community.”
The man who ought to be Kani’s main rival, the Civic Theatre’s Alan Joseph, agrees. A veteran of Market Theatre management, he supports the Market’s bid for subsidisation.
“There is no question that The Market should be subsidised by the city council,” Joseph says. “There has to be a Market Theatre. Not only because of its past and not only because of initiatives like the Laboratory. But because, although not enough people are seeing it, it is continuing consistently to put on work of the highest calibre.”
Johannesburg Director of Culture, Christopher Till — who sits, ex officio, on the Market Theatre Foundation’s management committee — also gives his unambiguous support.
He says the city council’s management committee has minuted its commitment to taking responsibility for the theatre’s survival. Among other reasons, the complex is a crucial part of the council’s proposed Newtown cultural development and therefore needs to be sustained.
But with the Market rejecting subsidy in the apartheid past, it has failed to make it on to the bureaucratic agendas of those agencies who might be expected to take it on board. The funding buck is still floating among municipal, regional and national arms of government, with none prepared to take any immediate, meaningful or concrete decisions.
The council has given other support to the Market. In 1976, the city council made the space for the venue available at a nominal rental. Since then it has supported the Market through a waiving of rentals; through assorted instances of assistance in kind (painting, refurbishing etc); by making additional space available for the expansion of the complex to embrace a precinct; and by means of various indirect donations over the years and, since 1990, direct handouts.
Nevertheless, when the city council was approached this year for subsidy — with the Market in the most serious financial crisis in its nearly 20 years of existence — the matter was shelved. Ongoing subsidy would have to be looked at in a long range way. In the short term, a quick-hit management study was undertaken to assess the infrastructural viability of the Market Theatre — and it was found lacking.
Says Till: “The management committee had to know whether subsidy would amount to pouring money into a bottomless pit — whether the Market people would be back in a couple of months’ time looking for more money.”
The city council advised the Market management to seek a one- off grant-in-aid as a short range measure. This it did, requesting R1-million (according to Market Theatre sources and R500 000 according to Till) to see it through the rough times afflicting all theatre managements.
Till says he is working to raise an additional R250 000, doubling the grant to the Market. That will bring it closer to three percent of the Civic’s budgeted subsidy for the coming year.
For Till much rests on the outcome of a conference he is running next month where arts funding issues will be debated. But the conference will not address the crux of the Market’s immediate problem: ironically, the council’s upgrading of the area around the Market precinct. With the area turned into a construction site for at least six months, not only will access be made difficult, but the Market’s parking area will be unusable.
Till says parking will be available on Jeppe and Bezuidenhout, two blocks away. But the municipality has allowed the neighbourhood to deteriorate so badly that only the brave and the well-armed would be advised to venture that far.
Till makes light of the difficulties. “I really don’t see how the users are going to suffer. We will be making parking available. The Flea Market will be given the same space that it has at present. We are doing everything possible to minimise the difficulties.”
Except consulting meaningfully, say those around the Market. While Till insists his department does not want to act “autocratically”, it was only after the users of the Market Theatre Precinct approached the council in June that the council acknowledged any awareness of the problems they might be creating.
There is a real danger that unless something is done in a hurry, not only the theatre but such initiatives as Newtown Galleries might not survive.
“Everything thus far has been given to us as a fait accompli,” Kani notes. “What we need now is a situation where we, the users of the area, become co-partners in the development of the area. We need to make the decisions in conjunction with the city council and be involved in directing that development.”
For those concerned with culture, at least, the alternatives could be too ghastly to contemplate.
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