FIX your bayonets, send in the drummer boys and duck: the Gauteng Children’s Theatre Wars continue to rage. Over the past decade or so the genre has been ruled by two titans — sure, there’ll always be Janice Honeyman and the Civic, Annie Barnes’s Out-of-the-Box, Pact and others gripping your children’s attentions, but if you really want to see the trenches, you go to Joyce Levinsohn or Jill Girard.
Throughout a lucrative partnership in the late 1970s and 1980s, these two women put Johannesburg’s children’s theatre on the map with a company called Children’s Theatre Productions. Together they fought, they laughed, they directed. But nowadays when you talk independent — and cornering the market — you talk either Girard’s People’s Theatre or Levinsohn’s Johannesburg Youth Theatre. Two competing venues where once upon a time was one. What happened?
Finding out isn’t easy. It’s a sticky jungle, and those who know aren’t telling. I’m greeted by a cacophony of rumours and allegations. An actor here, a cleaner there. Someone says the clearest reason for the split involved financial skullduggery. Another adds that they never were compatible as directors. According to an ex-actor who worked for Levinsohn and Girard in the good old days, the directing process was like a tug-of-war. “Very volatile. Dr Doolittle’s Siamese-twin horse Pushme Pullyou couldn’t have done better.”
As I hack a path through the jungle, allegations abound. It’s seven years since the split and a simmering war continues. There’s a screech about copyright infringement, about ideas being stolen; a howl about productions overlapping. There’s another squawk about one director’s productions pre-empting the other’s.
So I turn to the directors for comment. Alas, neither is forthcoming. Why should they be? Together they once ruled the kingdom. Children from the far reaches of Gauteng flocked to the Intimate Theatre in Braamfontein to be transported by Willie Wonka and his Chocolate Factory, or to shout at horrible farmer McGregor in anger, only to reveal the rabbit’s whereabouts with the next scream. That’s children’s theatre — a riotous, interactive avalanche of Smarties.
But while on-stage right and wrong have very specific places and functions, in real life things are very different. Jill and Joyce still speak of each other in muted tones of bitterness, nostalgia, anger and regret. Says Jill: “Rather say we grew in different directions.” Says Joyce: “I’d like to remember the happy times.”
Both Jill and Joyce are salt-of-the-earth theatre people, and children are their business. Both are warned about the interview, and both come prepared: five kilometres apart and at different times of the day.
Both power-dress in red. Girard’s larger-than-life scarlet duffle-coat says: “Here I am and there’s more where this came from”, while Levinsohn has a more crisp, conservative cut to her coat which says: “If it’s scandal you’re after, it’s textbook you’ll get.”
Levinsohn was particularly reluctant to discuss the parting of the seas, referring to the split only as “emotional”, a word Girard also uses.
“It was like a divorce,” says Girard, “only worse. Very emotional. Literally cutting the set in half with a pair of nail-clippers.”
Just about every actor in Johannesburg has passed through the liquorice curtain: Jeremy Crutchley, Samantha Peo, Craig Urbani, AJ van der Merwe, Julie Wilson … And while some actors may bemoan the directing styles and long doughnut breaks, the show always goes on and the magic always happens.
Levinsohn plans to build her own theatre: Girard rushes between Johannesburg and Cape Town. Both are kicking, but in a market they’ve made their own through sheer determination and a whole lot of ego. Chutzpah? Definitely.
In a town where “adult” theatre attendances are consistently low, Levinsohn and Girard pack them in: two gutsy working women who never say die. A fairytale ending? Joyce and Jill back together at the top of the hill they practically created themselves? Get real. There’s no such thing as a fairy. Is there?
The People’s Theatre’s production of Aladdin is at the Intimate Theatre until August 3; the last performance of Peter Rabbit and Me, at the Johannesburg Youth Theatre, is on July 26