the wings
John Matshikiza, son of the composer of the music for the original King Kong, Todd Matshikiza, believes that 40 years on the time might be right for the show to find its feet once again and stand tall in the musical hall of fame
King Kong, the mother of all South African musicals, turned 40 on Tuesday this week.
It opened at the Great Hall of Witwatersrand University on February 2 1959, and went on to create a legend for itself around South Africa for more than a year after that. It even went overseas, exporting “township colour” into the drabness of post-war Europe.
King Kong had already become a landmark by the time the first-night curtain rose.
It was the first full-scale musical to be entirely created in South Africa, by South Africans.
It was an artistic collaboration between black people and white people on a scale that had never before been considered possible in the country. (And, in fact, none of its collaborators had previously been involved in an artistic project of this size.)
It was a story about black lives that gripped the imaginations of people of all races.
And because of the shock waves the process of its creation had been sending into the outside world, it had already drawn the aggressive curiosity of the notorious South African Police. To their amazement, the cops found they could harass individuals involved in it, especially with intimidating pass demands, but they could never pin on the enterprise any real infringement of the country’s myriad rules and regulations that could have put a stop to the whole thing.
It should have been impossible, but it happened.
Whether it was performed for mixed audiences (where that was possible) or for segregated audiences, the reception was phenomenal.
It immediately became the talk of the town in its home city, Johannesburg. It became a “must see” for all levels of society. Black gangsters, white mining magnates, the exalted and the lowly, all packed in and gaped at this astonishing spectacle.
Nelson Mandela, along with his young bride, Winnie Madikizela, was among the expectant crowd on the opening night. The infamous Treason Trials were about to resume at the Drill Hall in Pretoria, and Mandela had rushed down from preparations in the Jacaranda City to be there. At the interval, he congratulated composer Todd Matshikiza on weaving a subtle message of support for the Treason Trial leaders into the opening anthem, Sad Times, Bad Times (Ityala lalamadoda). The composer was pleased, if a little surprised, at this direct interpretation.
Whatever had gone subliminally into making the tapestry that was King Kong, its spectators read a thousand different messages into it. It spoke to everyone.
By the time it embarked on its tour of the country’s other major cities – Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and Durban – Pretoria having excused itself on the grounds that “Bantu things should be performed in Bantu areas” – it was national headline news, and the outside world was already taking an interest.
The stunned creators, performers, backers and hangers-on could not believe what was happening to them.
And yet two-and-a-half years later it was all over. The production ended its London run after nine months. It toured British cities for a few more months, and then, some time in 1962, the whole thing was disbanded. Half the cast flew home to South Africa. The others chose to take their chances and remain in London, or go on to Europe or the United States.
For most of them, whether back in South Africa or on the shores of Europe and America, their careers never achieved the same dazzling heights. There were exceptions, of course: Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Letta Mbulu and Caiphus Semenya all made serious international names for themselves.
But, in a way, they were also among the first to break the spell that had its brief hold on the show King Kong. It was a fatal irony that the show’s success played a major role in enabling them to make the mighty leap away from the confines of South Africa.
Already, by the time the show opened in London, Makeba and Masekela were no longer part of it. Without Makeba’s extraordinary, sensuous presence as the leading lady, Joyce, a critical part of the musical’s vitality, was already gone.
There has only been one attempt at a revival of King Kong in all the years since then. This took place at His Majesty’s Theatre in Johannesburg in 1979 – and was a disaster that didn’t get much further than its run of previews. It suffered from the wrong kind of tampering, an attempt to update it to fit with a late-1970s consciousness, both in music and in storyline. It enraged those who remembered the original show, and left younger generations at best indifferent.
There is still endless talk of resuscitating it, but will it happen?
King Kong, 40 years ago, somehow breathed a sense of immense hope into South Africans. The show’s triumph was achieved through the miraculous convergence of many unlikely combinations.
A lot of dark water has passed under the bridge since then, and perhaps the thought of reassembling those outrageously innocent and optimistic elements has been, subliminally, a task too daunting to contemplate. Or perhaps it has just never been the right time. Perhaps now, as we take our first steps into a new era, the moment is right.
Maybe we are ready to look honestly at the times we have come out of. And the event that was King Kong, the story, the music, and the characters, in life, on stage and behind the scenes, represents an extraordinary part of those times.
King Kong was born as a result of a not- always-easy collaboration between amateurs of the theatre (a lawyer, a journalist, an architect, a musician, a businessman and his wife) and a small handful of theatre profess-ionals.
Its final form was a compromise that no one was entirely happy with.
It emerged through a process of improvisation, negotiation and sheer blackmail, and then went through a further process of adaptation to suit the abilities of a cast who, for the most part, had no theatrical experience whatsoever. Woven between were hours and months of hard work late into the night, as lyrics were matched to music and bits of a story were painfully sculpted into a script.
Black people and white people hustled surreptitiously in and out of each other’s prescribed group areas long after official curfew hours, heads bowed under the weight of their crazy mission.
It was tense, but it was also thrilling for those involved in it.
It was perhaps not so thrilling for those who had to wait at home while all this took shape. The over-patient wives and husbands in Orlando and Dube, in Parktown and Houghton and Mayfair, sat it out as their errant spouses conceived this indescribable baby behind their backs. Some marriages survived, others crumbled.
But in the end, it was everyone’s triumph.
What was it that made this all so vital? The key things were the story that was the backbone of the play, and the music that carried the story.
Ezekiel “King Kong” Dlamini was a big gorilla of a guy who came up from rural Natal to Johannesburg sometime in the 1940s. He had been a misfit all his life, and his life in the City of Gold was no less alienated.
Boxing, which he entered almost as a joke, became the one area where he received some recognition. It made him part of humanity, in an upside down kind of way. He was physically suited to the violent sport, and although he brought no grace to the ring, his killer punch was enough to earn him some bucks, and a huge following in black Johannesburg.
Like the bullfighter in the Spanish opera Carmen, he was a sporting hero with a fatal flaw: jealousy for the one woman he was ever able to build a relationship with. He killed her one night in front of her new lover and a crowd of relatives in a Sophiatown night spot. He was arrested and tried, and finally drowned himself in the prison dam, rather than serve out his sentence.
On that story, against the backdrop of the racy, jazzy Fifties of Johannesburg, the musical was built.
There is no doubt that it is the music that made the show work. The story of the boxer “King Kong” could have been told in a million ways (and still can be). But Todd Matshikiza’s music gave it a special edge, a mood, that no other composer could equal. Why?
The man understood his central character, and, more importantly, understood the whole world that surrounded “King Kong”. He understood the whole black world of the townships that fed Johannesburg, and the histories of the people who filled those townships. He lived there! Being a “country boy” who was drawn to the City of Gold, there was much of “King Kong’s” background that was obvious to him.
Surviving the metropolis became part of his life, enduring the combined assaults of white authority and black gangsterism, and struggling to maintain a sense of the learned morality of his own culture.
As a working musician, Matshikiza knew first-hand the hard life of showbiz and the figures who preyed on it, in the very locations where “King Kong” Dlamini’s dramatic encounters took place. But more than that, he knew the man, “King Kong”, and his antagonists, first-hand.
Matshikiza had become, by one of many South African accidents, a journalist on the black magazine Drum. Later, as news editor on the Golden City Post, he found himself covering the murder trial of “King Kong”. In the course of these duties, he came face to face with the boxer-turned-killer on the steps of the court, and also came up against Kong’s gangster cronies and rivals in the black underworld. These guys, naturally, didn’t wish to have the details of their intrigues, as unfolded in court, exposed to the general public through the newspapers.
So they unceremoniously kidnapped the scribe, relieved him of his notebook, which they burned in front of him, and told him to keep his nose out of things he knew nothing about. Failure to comply meant he would be putting the well-being of his wife and children in serious jeopardy.
Matshikiza’s (white) editor could offer little comfort in the face of such realities. He laughed off the writer’s wide-eyed demand to be provided with a gun for his own protection, and told him to go and have a stiff drink and forget about the whole thing.
The musician-turned-scribe walk-ed out, and kept on walking. He resigned the assignment, and ultimately got right out of hard journalism.
A year later, he found himself back in the thick of the “King Kong” story – telling the tale through music. The music that emerged was a synthesis of dark and light moods that compellingly conveyed the landscape on which the drama of Ezekiel Dlamini’s life was played out.
There were the deceptively light webs of the love ballads, with their universal appeal: Strange Things Happen (when the lights are gone), Quickly in Love, Petal’s Song (“the earth turns over …”). There were the big, partying shebeen numbers (Back of the Moon, Kwela Kong); the songs that put you on the streets of an irrepressible Sophiatown or Alexandra (Marvelous Muscles, King Kong, The Wedding Song); the restless violence of the gangster’s threat (Damn Him!); and the stirring dignity of the choral-based Ityala lalamadoda and Hambani, Madoda (“In the Queue”), anthems that temporarily halted the exuberance that bounced around the stage, and addressed the plight of black people in South Africa.
That first production of King Kong had the benefit of a wonderful, passionate and compassionate director in Leon Gluckman – one of the few professionals involved, along with the composer and the choreographer. What it didn’t have was a skilled scriptwriter, so Gluckman and his team had to do the best they could with what they had.
The show was carried along by the music and lyrics, the staging, and the verve of the cast.
But as theatrical storytelling it was cumbersome: a group of gossipy narrators, led by Gwigwi Mrwebi, had the task of repeatedly jump-starting the story in between sequences. The dialogue and characterisation that should have been the lifeblood of the play left much to be desired.
The 1959 audience didn’t notice this slight problem. They were mesmerised by the unexpected spectacle before them, and stamped their approval night after night.
In 1999, audiences are not so easy to please. The world has moved on, artistically and technically as much as politically. The stakes are much higher all round.
If King Kong was able to make it to the West End of London in 1961, it had as much to do with the exoticism of an all-black cast jiving their hearts out in the middle of London as with any artistic merit.
It certainly did have artistic merit. But even that merit was compromised by the limitations of the times.
In its native South Africa, it suffered from the restrictions of censorship (and pre-emptive self- censorship) as well as from all the other limitations that “separate development” imposed on all the players.
In England, its African soul was sucked out of it in order to make it, ironically, more palatable to Western ears.
The end result was an unfinished musical, an incomplete masterpiece that is still waiting in the wings.
There has always been a clamour for the revival of King Kong. It is heartening that this musical should still be the subject of so much passion, and that its memory should still invoke such a sense of national pride in so many South Africans.
Hugh Masekela, who was 20 years old when the show got to London, still says that King Kong should rank with the other great musicals of its era: My Fair Lady, West Side Story and so on.
It will take a bit of effort to lick the old girl into that kind of shape, and make it as evergreen as all the others, but it’s not out of the question.
They used to say that life begins at 40. Let’s hope that this anniversary year for King Kong will be the one where it finally finds its feet, and is able to stand tall with its peers in the musical hall of fame.
It would be a great symbol in this millennial year of our transition: a link with majestic days of our past, and a precious heritage for our future.