Irene Stephanou’s heartwarming play about life in a Greek corner café opened in early October with a week of previews for community groups and charities. The little Laager Theatre in the Market Theatre complex buzzed with hugs and kisses while priests of the Greek Orthodox Church paraded in black robes, and food, of course, was in abundance.
Not your average night at the theatre, this was something different, a display of community solidarity, somewhat removed from the type of township theatre that tends to focus on youth issues and development. On the night I attended, a church group from Brixton had invited a home for the mentally disabled to share in the experience. In the heat, the venue was jam-packed, the well-heeled pressed against the underprivileged, who guffawed, sometimes inappropriately, at the shenanigans onstage.
Robert Whitehead, better known as Barker Haines in Isidingo, plays the Cypriot patriarch Stavros in Acropolis Café, set over a decade of transition from the mid-Eighties until the elections of 1994. Obviously, it’s a family drama. How could a work about immigrants not be awash with prattle, an over-caring mother, disobedient children, memories of Europe and a complex relationship with a black domestic worker trying to get her head around people from far away?
The fine detail of Acropolis Café is a result of the decades Stephanou spent behind the counter of her parents’ corner shop in her youth. When she got to drama school in the late 1980s, her lecturer Malcolm Purkey, now artistic director of the Market Theatre, told her that her experiences would some day make it onstage. ‘But I thought, I only want to tell the story when apartheid is well gone,” she says.
‘A big aspect of the play is white ethnicity, the social prejudice that happened between Greeks and Afrikaners. But, in terms of the larger picture, apartheid was the greatest horror, and that had to take centre stage.”
‘It’s the paraffin, the fucking paraffin!” exclaims playwright Renos Spanoudes who, just last weekend, saw a successful one-off reading of his latest work at the Actors Centre in Braamfontein. Award-winning Spanoudes wrote The Apple Tree, also a Greek family drama, in which the forbidden practice of reading fortunes from coffee grounds foretells a family’s loss.
As for the paraffin, Spanoudes also spent his youth working in his parents’ café and is steeped in experience common to his generation of Greeks. ‘That paraffin is associated with the masses. We provided the paraffin so they could cook on their primus stoves.
‘My dad used to open up the storeroom on a Sunday — something that was prohibited — to serve poor Margaret from the shebeen across the road. I thought, ‘Good, it’s against the government.’ But what I’m dealing with was whether my dad opened up merely to make another sale. It’s a paradox that will haunt one for the rest of one’s life.”
This level of probing can only lead to a good play. And as singer, DJ and impresario Harry Sideropolous opens his musical extravaganza Songs of the Mediterranean, it’s an appropriate time to ask: Why all this Greek culture on the mainstream, now?
‘I think we are all trying to find our identities,” Spanoudes says. ‘What sparked it was, perhaps, the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Suddenly, we all realised that we could be at the forefront, with elements that are universal. We are the Olympic Games, they are talking about us but we seem to be denying it here because we are part of that previously-advantaged group. Yet are we really? It’s a whole dilemma.”
In an endeavour to address the dilemma, or possibly sidestep it, Stephanou has written her café owner as a moderate man who is out of his depth in the complex world of apartheid social politics. ‘I wanted to show an immigrant who came here and who just believed in an ideal of ‘work hard and you’ll be fine’. He is someone who didn’t want to get involved in politics, yet, through one of the customers, he was forced to get involved.
‘This was my first exposure to the reality of South Africa, my first contact with naked violence, as a child. Over and over, there would be a huge Afrikaans man who would come into the shop. It was almost like a script, always the same. There would be an issue with the change. My father would believe that the customer was always right and would try to work it out. But it would end up as an ethnic attack: ‘You’re just a bloody Greek! You’ve come to this country to take our money!’ My father would just lose it — it was absolutely compelling.”
Through the pain and frustration of immigration, the jewels of faraway culture still shine. This weekend, at the Civic Theatre, Sideropolous presents his musical with dancers, four soloists, a choir and a 10-piece band. ‘I thought, I am going to do a show that celebrates those ethnic minority groups that contribute such a huge amount to the country’s gross domestic product,” Sideropolous says. ‘Immigrants have contributed a such huge amount culturally, they have created textures. I want to pay tribute to the forefathers who had the balls, 50, 60, 100 years ago, to leave their countries and come to South Africa. This is their music.”