Vanessa Cooke, director of the newly relocated Market Theatre Laboratory in Johannesburg, talks to GLYNIS O’HARA
Over 150 000 primary school children nationwide have seen Broken Dreams, a play workshopped and written by Zakes Mda to help them ward off and deal with child abuse and prevent the spread of TB and AIDS.
The play toured over 130 schools in 1995 and this year in Gauteng, the Free State and the Cape, and over 170 000 will have seen it by year’s end, says Martin Jennings of pharmaceutical company Glaxo, which commissioned the Market Theatre for the work. Next year, it’s being taken to Mpumalanga. He would not, however, say how much the process had cost them, not wanting to be drawn into comparisons with “that other play”.
“In the research,” says Vanessa Cooke, co-director of the Market Theatre Laboratory, “it became clear the major problem was child abuse.” Mda’s script “was very clever because it got the children involved in the action and emphasised the need for them to assert their rights. It also got them talking about their experiences. The actors couldn’t do it for too long because they got so upset. We had to have social workers present at the performances — we insisted on it.”
Cooke must be one of the unsung heroes of the Market Theatre Foundation. Tough and gentle at the same time, she’s co- director of the Lab with John Kani as well as president of the Performing Arts Workers Equity (Pawe), the actor’s union.
She clearly dislikes interviews, delivering only the bare necessities in answer to questions, unless they’re about work. The Market Theatre’s somewhat apologetic PR section (“She’s an extremely humble person”) just managed to scrape up a press biography — all 36 words of it.
She’s been busy overseeing the Lab’s move from a sidestreet near the Market to the precinct itself, to the recently vacated Newtown Galleries, which before that was a theatre space called The Warehouse. It’s been redesigned, by Alison Chitty and David Montgomery of Britain’s National Theatre in conjunction with field workers and overseen by local Catherine Henegan.
“The implications are that we’ll be able to use the space to generate income as well, hiring it out for functions. We’ll also be attracting more people to the theatre, although we’ve had Theatresports on Sundays for ages and it’s done very well. We’re first trying out a Lab student production that went down to Grahamstown called Bunju and did very well there. It’s about young people’s aspirations and what happens to them in the real world. Everyone wants a BMW and a house and some people choose unconventional ways to get them”.
“Unconventional” is an understatement, as we saw on opening night. “Violent” is the word we’re looking for. But it’s a lovely play, full of warmth and humour in township life up to the Nineties. It’s dark too, but a really refreshing engagement with where we are now.
The Lab concentrates on four areas; training actors, a fieldwork programme, resident projects and school networks.
“We train actors who can’t afford varsity or technikon or who have no qualifications. We have a two-year course.” Some of the people who’ve completed the course are Sam Mofokeng, who recently appeared in British director’s film Jump the Gun; Kenneth Nkosi, most recently seen in Afrodizzia at the Civic; Rosetta Zwane, who’s in Broken Dreams; and Bongani Motsepe, who’s stage manager at the Market.
“Then there’s a field work programme that helps groups trying to develop and establish their own theatre — it’s developed over time and we’ve started an annual festival showcasing the work.” Thousands of people (“it was packed”) went to this year’s festival at the end of May, held in the old Lab HQ and in a hired tent outside.
The Lab also runs what it calls “resident projects”, in which a person gets two months to work on a play with actors — Sue-Pam Grant’s Take the Floor, Fatima Dike’s workshopped So What’s New; and the Handspring Puppet Company/ Lab workshopped Starbrites, were all highly successful works to emerge from the process.
“And we do a school network programme, that we take out to rural areas with six actors. It’s not easy to raise funding for it. We’re doing Julius Caesar now, for the third year running. Before that it was Romeo and Juliet.
Cooke, 48, known to everybody in Gauteng for her acting at the Market Theatre since its inception in 1976 (she was one of the founder members with Barney Simon) was recently seen on stage at the Civic in Cocteau’s Indiscretions, “my first play for two years, although I do Theatre-sports all the time, and it’s very good practice”.
The winner of two Vita awards for best actress, a Dalro for best supporting actress, and an Amstel for best script (co- writer of The Native Who Caused All The Trouble) she did not train as an actress, doing a BA in English and History at Wits instead. “My dad was in theatre though, originally in set design, then he ran the Alexander Theatre for years before moving on to Capab as head of production.
“I had been in plays since I was little and I was in the varsity drama society. I did a play called Fanny at the Alex in 1967 and I was terrible. I gave up acting at 22. Then someone told me there was a small part going in The Death of Bessie Smith (Edward Albee) at Dorkay House with Barney Simon’s Phoenix Players. And that was it really. I joined what we then called The Company and the Market was launched in 1976.
“With the Company we all split what we made. In the Market we all earned the same in the beginning, which was very little. We never got paid for rehearsals but later it became more established and things changed. It’s never been a lot, though.”
She lives in Berea, sharing her house with two people, one a stage manager and the other a human resources director (“a proper job”). “We’ve been there since 1988.”
Is she never tempted, like Dorothy-Ann Gould and Fiona Ramsay before her, to go to England and try her luck?
“No, there’s a lot to do here. I suppose if I was acting full-time I might. I did have a chance before and didn’t do it. It was when I was doing Dimetos with Athol Fugard (1975) and it was due to go to Edinburgh and London. But at the same time, the Market was starting up and I stayed. So I think I made my choice then actually.”
Does she see a bright future in South Africa? “I think we’ve got a chance. It’ll be slow, not overnight, but there’re very exciting stories to be told. I’m going to be doing my own script soon.”
What about the future of the Precinct? “It seems it’s up to business and council to finish what Christopher Till (former cultural director for Johannesburg) tried to do, which is make the whole Newtown area a cultural area. Business owns so much property here and they obviously want it to work. The Stock Exchange is nearby, the Woolworths flagship is going up in town. Urban renewal has to happen — it can’t just all go down the drain.”