Charl Blignaut
It’s something of an unusual relationship, but there you have it. Like it or not, the international actor, prince of protest theatre and executive director of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, John Kani, has throughout the past decade forged a very particular partnership with groundbreaking turn-of-the- century Swedish playwright August Strindberg.
It all started in 1985 when Kani was cast as the garden boy in the Cape Town production of Strindberg’s Miss Julie.
Playing opposite Sandra Prinsloo, Kani treated South African audiences to one of their very first mainstream theatrical tastes of a mixed- race affair. Before the madam and the gardener had even touched one another, half of the audience had walked out in a huff. Within a week Conservative Party leader Andries Treurnicht held up a photo of Kani and Prinsloo almost kissing and informed Parliament that this was the future face of South Africa under the “permissive” National Party’s transformation politics.
By the time Miss Julie transferred to the Market Theatre, Kani had to have his car checked for bombs before leaving the precinct every night.
No doubt Kani will be remembering these incidents when he takes the stage each night in his latest role – that of the fraught, ratty and impossible husband living on an island with his wife, played by Jana Cillier, in Strindberg’s Dance of Death.
Except that this time round, Strindberg will be helping save Kani’s bacon rather than frying it. The production is the latest phase in an ongoing exchange programme between the Market and the Stockholm Stadtsteater in Sweden, initiated in 1995 by the late Barney Simon.
Simon approached the Swedish donor agency Sida to help bail out a rapidly sinking Market Foundation at the height of the theatre’s biggest cashflow crisis in recent years.
The Swedes were only too happy to comply and have, by 1998, become the Market’s second- largest funder after the government, with close on half a million rand in Swedish money flowing into the precinct annually. Putting their money where their mouth is, the Stockholm Stadtsteater has also iniated an exchange of productions between the two theatres.
In 1996 Stockholm sent its extraordinary Twelfth Night to the Market. In 1997, the Market sent its groundbreaking Laboratory production Gomorrah to Sweden, along with the musical Jozi-Jozi Guide. Swedish audiences were enthralled.
So 1998 is Sweden’s turn to work at the Market. Apart from sending several lecturers across throughout the year, Stockholm Stadtsteater director Carl Kjellgren has also embarked on a pet project – showing a South African audience that there is also an underlying strain of comedy in Strindberg, the early expressionist and theatrical visionary.
At a time when the local stage is threatening to be engulfed in a renewed wave of imported texts, the Swedish/South African programme offers a compelling model for a far more integral theatrical interaction.