On 21 June 1976, as a revolution raged in South Africa’s townships, a spark of a different nature was lit in a converted produce market in Newtown, Johannesburg, where an audience attended a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull.
The play was not the ideal choice for the opening production in the circumstances, as its director, Market Theatre co-founder, Barney Simon, was to admit later. The work that officially opened the main theatre in October that year — Peter Weiss’s anarchistic Marat/Sade — expressed the tone of the times far more appropriately.
In other ways, though, The Seagull was perfectly in line with the Market’s stated mission to ‘attempt a theatre that upholds the highest possible standards, that entertains and informs, that — extends and illuminates life experiences —”
In those early days, a constantly recurring name in Market Theatre programmes, whether as actor or backstage worker, was that of Vanessa Cooke — Nina in The Seagull, a catatonic patient in Marat/Sade.
Thirty years on Cooke is still to be found in the precinct; in the unadorned office of the Market Theatre Laboratory (the Lab), of which she is director, one of the ‘four and a half” permanent staff who work to realise Simon’s dream — to encourage young talent and provide space and time for the development of new ideas and new creativity.
Cooke is an integral part of the precinct — self-effacing, hard working and as dedicated as she was decades ago when she committed herself to working with Barney Simon to achieve an ideal.
Had it not been for Simon, Cooke’s considerable talent and creativity would have been lost to the South African stage. Growing up in the theatrical world, the daughter of director Roy Cooke, she was no stranger to the footlights, but ‘I was brought up on British theatre — it wasn’t talking about here and us — it was all imported sensibilities.”
After a particularly pointless piece of work Cooke decided to give it all up and study art and history of art, with the intention of getting a job in an art gallery. Then she met Simon who was working at Dorkay House, the insignificant building in Eloff Street Extension, from which much of the country’s most exciting theatre talent of the Sixties and Seventies was to emerge.
‘He was already talking about new, interesting theatre and I got terribly excited.” Their work together ‘completely changed the way I’d imagined my life to be”.
Soon afterwards, Simon met Mannie Manim, then working for and rapidly becoming disillusioned with the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal (Pact). Their collaboration saw the formation of The Company, a small group of dedicated performers that included Aletta Bezuidenhout, Janice Honeyman, Danny Keogh, John Oakley Smith — and Vanessa Cooke. After a nomadic start, the Company successfully tendered for the Market and a new era began for South African theatre.
‘Once the Market had become the place Barney wanted it to become — a place for everyone — I decided I’d stay with it. It was our own theatre — and that was my vision. It presaged what the country became. Barney was determined that people should mix and exchange views and that everybody should know what was going on.”
So, at a time when more and more voices were being silenced and news suppressed, on the stages of the Market the real story of a country in turmoil was being told — through works like Black Dog — Inj’emnyama (which is being revived to celebrate the anniversary), Asinamali, Bopha!, Born in the RSA, Woza Albert! and countless others.
The Lab, to which Cooke has largely devoted her skills since Simon’s sudden death in 1995, is, perhaps, the area of the Market’s work that best expresses the ideals of its founders. ‘I felt I had to keep it going in the spirit of what Barney wanted — the development of community theatre. Young people, many of them rural, who wouldn’t have had much access to theatre, are being trained and work is being developed.” It feeds into the Market at several levels, with many of its graduates returning to teach or to participate in productions.
But while the Lab has gone from strength to strength, all has not always been well at the Market itself. With the departure of Manim and, later, the death of Simon, coinciding as they did with the violence and uncertainty of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the theatre slumped. ‘This place was like a desert. There was a loss of heart, people didn’t want what they called protest theatre and writers weren’t sure what to write about.” Northern suburbs theatre-goers wrote off Newtown as a no-go area (although, they somehow managed to overcome their fears if names like William Kentridge were involved).
There was, says Cooke, ‘a terrible period between 1990 and 1994 when one didn’t know if it was going to work. There was a lot of uncertainty, our donors withdrew and there wasn’t much great new stuff coming out.”
As South Africa settled into its new democracy, though, the writing ‘started to happen”.
The newer work is tackling different issues — it’s becoming more personal, ‘more about people’s histories — either their personal lives or the history and myths of their community”.
The audiences are returning; some of the old buzz is back as different interests are catered for and different audiences mingle in the foyer. Thirty years on, the Market is still there, defying the predictions of its detractors and, once more, determined, in the words of its early trustees, ‘to be a place where discoveries are made —”
Pat Schwartz is the author of The Best of Company — The Story of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre published by AD Donker in 1988