I know I’m going to lose friends over this one. But then again, that’s only because some of my friends have lost me.
I am at a loss, for example, to understand what is going on at Johannesburg’s elaborately over-named African Bank Moyo Restaurant Market Theatre.
It would be nice to be able to suggest that the place is merely down in the doldrums. But ‘the doldrums” suggests that there is a post-doldrum condition to look forward to — ‘Hey, ho, fair weather up ahead, lads.”
Down here in Newtown, the doldrums have become a permanent and, at the same time, highly celebrated condition of life.
What went wrong? How is it going to be put right? Why not just give the whole thing up, since it has been irrevocably and unsuccessfully face-lifted, boob-implanted, nip-tucked and violated, and generally messed up over the past few years? Why not turn it into an upmarket casino or a glitzy funeral parlour or something? It might serve a more useful purpose, and be more appropriate to its current setting, than it is now.
‘Sour grapes,” they say. ‘That John Matshikiza is just a bitter and twisted character from exile who fluffed his artistic calling and is now shouting into the wind.” Which might be true.
So, declaration of interest (my lawyer said I’d better do that): I was employed twice by the Market Theatre (as it used to be known) without much success. The thing was already a mess — all spiky, pre-revolutionary attitude and neo-liberal self-righteousness. So who the hell was I? Nothing actually got done artistically. Which I thought a theatre was supposed to be about. But anyway.
The then Market Theatre, as I was told by the privileged few who had been there since the beginning (or thereabouts and who never stopped telling me how long they had been there, as if it was an honourable exile of another kind, so there), was the living embodiment of the bloodiest scenes from the soap opera version of Les Miserables, and people like me who had not been there in the thick of the action were mere bystanders.
Struggle theatre, as exemplified by the Market Theatre, brought apart-heid down, and everything else was mere effete, pseudo-artistic posturing.
OK. I accept that (with bad grace, it must be admitted).
But the past is over. (Or is it?) So what’s happening at the Market Theatre now?
Well, I’ll tell you what’s happening now. Two white-run, black-fronted organisations, the Johannesburg Development Authority (JDA to you) and a slick outfit called Blue IQ, who nobody knows about, have moved into the Newtown precinct and given new meaning to everything that is going on there.
‘All is fine,” they say. And some of the country’s finest revolutionary brains are cheering in the background: ‘All is fine, all is fine! A Marketa Theatre bloody Moyo Restaurant-capitalista-owned-by-full-of-white-Afrikaans-boys-who-know-a-nothing-about-Africa-and-stuff-continua! Amandla! The people [sic] is free!”
(Like I said, I knew I was going to lose friends over this. But having gone this far, let’s see how far we can go.)
According to the press briefing to which a small, carefully hand-picked bunch of hacks was invited last week, the African Bank Moyo Restaurant Market Theatre is, like the SABC, about to undergo yet another fundamental change, in keeping with the unending series of changes that mark our transition to full participatory democracy and representivity.
The Market, having been pretty representative for a very long time, is now finding itself strapped for ideas. (You will remember that it pleaded that it was strapped for cash for a long time, which is why it stopped producing interesting work, which is why both the Department of Arts and Culture and the so-called African Bank stepped in and provided it with the roughly R8-million a year that the complex has been munching gratefully for the past few years, with no discernible artistic result.)
Why has the theatre been strapped for ideas? It sits in the heart of Johannesburg’s seething, if problematic, inner city. It has three auditoria, and should benefit from the overspill from the creative input of the challenging Market Laboratory across the way, which has produced some of the most interesting theatrical innovations of the past 20 years or so.
And yet the Market Theatre itself has been reduced to producing nothing much more than warmed-over versions of Chicken à la King (for example, is Nothing But the Truth really nothing but the truth?) with the African flavour these days provided exclusively by those cute white boys with Moroccan underpants from Moyo of Melrose Arch.
‘In Moyo We Trust”, says the new currency issued by the long-suffering board of trustees of the long-suffering, underachieving national heritage site that is the former Market Theatre. They put it like this:
‘Moyo, the modern sophisticated African restaurant at Melrose Arch, demonstrated confidence in the Newtown area and Market Theatre precinct by successfully launching Moyo @ The Market.”
Excuse me. There already was an African-themed restaurant in existence right inside the same Market Theatre foyer. It was (and I think still is, if it still exists) called Gramadoelas. How can two so-called African restaurants run by two competing sets of reasonably pretty Dutch girls in the foyer of the same theatre make a significant difference to the artistic life of the whole African continent?
The trustees of the African Bank Moyo Restaurant Market Theatre assure us that the venue will henceforth be at the forefront of creating ‘an authentic South African cultural experience”.
With authenticity like this, I might as well contemplate going back into exile.
So we wait and see, like the moegoes that we are. Or the moegoes that we are continually being told we are.