‘Scene 1: Cigars, newspaper, bottle of red wine with cork, corkscrew, 2 wine glasses, tray with gherkins, tomatoes, bread, butter, cheese, sausage and mustard. Doorbell.’
2 ‘Biedermann props’, n.d., manuscript, private collection. In 1948, South Africa elected D. F. Malan’s National Party on a platform promising complete racial segregation while preserving the black labour upon which white society depended. This marked the beginning of formal apartheid, a system that would endure until 1994. That same year, a fifteen-year-old Swiss boy called Mario Schiess arrived in Pretoria.
Born in Biel, Switzerland, on 8 September 1933, Schiess had accepted an invitation from his maternal aunt and her husband, Inge and Richard Fuld, to spend a year with them in South Africa. Back in Switzerland, his father, Werner, worked as a civil servant while his mother, Eli, was a trained nurse originally from Germany. The couple’s material circumstances were difficult, in part because Eli struggled with mental health issues and Werner devoted his financial resources to seeking treatment for her. This environment was particularly hard on their two sons: Schiess would later recall that his mother sometimes made them perform obsessive compulsions on her behalf, such as avoiding a particular street because someone who lived there had died from cancer, or walking seven times up and down a flight of stairs.
Life in Pretoria offered Schiess a welcome respite and material comforts he had never known. He had only ever eaten chicken once before, yet it was on the Fulds’ table every week. He had never set foot in a motorcar, but his aunt and uncle owned two. Onkel Richard was a Holocaust survivor whose father had been killed in a concentration camp. Having fled Germany during the war, he never wanted to have children of his own, declaring that ‘he would never bring another Jew into this world’.
3 Michèle Schiess, electronic correspondence, 10 July 2024. But Onkel Richard welcomed his nephew as his own and Schiess decided to stay. Both of his parents passed away in Switzerland before he finished high school at Pretoria Boys High. When Schiess returned to visit the country of his birth, nineteen years after his arrival in Pretoria, he was accompanied by his South African-born wife, Margaret, and carrying photographs of his children in his suitcase.
For all her challenging personal circumstances, Eli Schiess had given her eldest son an enduring love for the performing arts. He was eight years old when she first took him to the Städtebund-Theater in Biel, a politically left-leaning space where Jewish and leftist exiles from Nazi Germany gathered. The first performance he saw was
Troubadour, a German translation of Verdi’s
Il Trovatore staged in 1942. The experience left an indelible mark on him. ‘So it happened that I skipped the whole series of usual professions from train driver to pilot and always only wanted to be an actor’, Schiess writes in a biographical sketch found among his papers.
4 ‘So geschah es dass ich die ganze Reihe der üblichen Berufe vom Zugführer zum Piloten übersprang und immer nur Schauspieler werden wollte’. Mario Schiess, ‘Kurze Biographie’, n.d., manuscript, private collection. But Onkel Richard, a businessman, encouraged him to pursue what he regarded as a more stable profession instead, warning him: ‘Nobody can make a living being an actor.’
5 Margaret Schiess and Michèle Schiess, interview with Jasper Walgrave, 9 July 2022.The year before his death in 1998, Schiess penned his memoirs in a handwritten exercise book he titled ‘Chronicle of a Passion’. In its pages he confesses: ‘If I couldn’t do theatre I didn’t mind very much what I did instead and that was how I became a quantity surveyor.’
6 Mario Schiess, ‘Chronicle of a Passion’, 1997, manuscript, private collection, 8–9. After graduating in 1956 from the University of Pretoria, he joined a firm where he quickly became a partner, remaining with Prentice, Shaw and Schiess for the next thirty-three years. Schiess and Margaret would eventually have five children together. Having chosen financial stability over a career in professional theatre made him, in his own words, one of the ‘people who, in spite of their passion for the theatre, refuse to renounce the fundamental human destiny of having a family’.
7 Mario Schiess, ‘Open letter to Margaret Inglis’, n.d., manuscript, private collection.Yet, unable and unwilling to renounce the theatre entirely, Schiess turned to amateur dramatics. As a university student, he had taken private acting lessons with Leontine Sagan, the Budapest-born director and actress who had trained with renowned Austrian-born Berlin director Max Reinhardt. Raised partly in South Africa, Sagan returned periodically and made a significant impact on the national theatre scene.
8 For more information about Sagan’s career, see Lights & Shadows: The Autobiography of Leontine Sagan, ed. Loren Kruger (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 1996). Schiess spent three years with Sagan, acting in plays ranging from Goldoni to Coward to Ionesco to Maeterlinck. Parallel to his formal studies at the university, Schiess had also undertaken a self-study of theatre, reading a vast amount of theoretical literature by writers like Martin Esslin and Konstantin Stanislavski, and by playwrights that included Beckett and Dürrenmatt. Later, he began to direct as well, trying his hand first at Ionesco’s
The Bald Soprano, and then Genet’s
The Maids.Having acclimatised fully to life in South Africa, Schiess nevertheless focused his energies on modern European theatre.
9 Michèle Schiess, author interview, 9 June 2024; Mario Schiess, ‘Meeting Dürrenmatt’, n.d., manuscript, private collection. This he was able to keep abreast of thanks to relatives who provided a steady stream of magazine and newspaper clippings from German and Swiss publications. They also sent him the new plays penned by two promising playwrights writing in the German language – Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
Documents in Schiess’s private papers provide glimpses of a highly articulate thinker and writer who led an active life in amateur theatre up until his death. Schiess negotiated personally with dramatic rights organizations in London to obtain performing permissions, entered one local competitive amateur play festival after the other, and put himself forward as a director to organizations and companies with whom he did not yet have a relationship. He wrote a great many essays and letters, many of which were published in the local press or in literary magazines. The topics he explored included the nature of amateur theatre, the work of his favourite playwrights, and the twin roles of religion and politics in drama.
10 See, for example, Schiess, ‘Open Letter to Margaret Inglis’; see also Mario Schiess, ‘Why the Nihilistic Play?’, n.d., manuscript, private collection; see also Mario Schiess, ‘Religion and Politics in Drama’, n.d., manuscript, private collection. Sometimes he addressed the political situation in South Africa directly, such as when he spoke out against the playwrights’ boycott.
11 Schiess, ‘Dear Forty-eight’. In later years Schiess went on to write and direct his own politically outspoken plays, branched out as a film director and producer, and distinguished himself as a Jungian dream-analyst. All of this while working seven-and-a-half hours a day as a quantity surveyor. In 1998, he died from ischemic heart disease at the age of only sixty-three.
As a young man, Schiess was most interested in what he called ‘the problem play’.
12 Schiess, ‘Why the Nihilistic Play?’. By this he meant plays by Williams, Miller, Genet, Ionesco, Cocteau, Beckett, Sartre, and Dürrenmatt and Frisch – ‘authors who deal with the most pressing problems of our own day or who deal with eternal problems of humanity in a manner which is close to our own time’.
13 Ibid. These were plays, so Schiess believed, that tended towards the ‘destruction of existing beliefs, doctrines, values without making any attempt to give us new beliefs, doctrines, values in their place’ and as such, required active audience participation.
14 Ibid. Now no longer passive bodies in the theatre, audiences were invited to come up with their own answers to the questions raised on stage, described by Schiess as ‘the spectator’s creating of his own new beliefs and values’.
15 Ibid.The vehicle that carried Schiess’s theatrical ambitions in the 1960s was the Hakahana Players (from the Herero for ‘be quick’), an amateur group founded with fellow-theatre maker Tim Spring. With no standing members other than Schiess and Spring, the Hakahana Players functioned as a loose collective that gathered around specific productions. With minimal administrative burden and no obligation to base repertoire selections around the internal rivalries of club members, the Hakahana Players gave Schiess the freedom to stage whatever he wanted to. While his decision to pursue theatre only as a ‘hobby’ had left him with a ‘sore heart’ (‘wehem Herzen’), it had nevertheless given him a curious advantage.
16 ‘With a sore heart, admittedly, I decided to pursue theatre only as a “hobby”’. Schiess, ‘Kurze Biographie’. Unlike professional theatre, amateur plays had a limited financial outlay. Schiess could produce them on his own through what he earned, making it possible to stage ‘plays of cultural value’ unlikely to draw a large paying audience.
17 Mario Schiess to Dr C. Badenhorst, correspondence, 28 November 1962, private collection. This, Schiess claimed, ‘alone justifies the existence of amateur theatre’.
18 Ibid.There was, at the time, another vehicle for staging non-commercial plays. This was within the government funded arts apparatus, represented from 1947 to 1962 by the National Theatre Organization (NTO), and from 1963 onwards by the four regional performing arts councils that replaced it. But having a play staged by these organizations involved submitting it to a government-constituted body for approval, something Schiess didn’t have to do when working with amateur societies. This isn’t to say that he never applied for government funding, nor compromised in order to get it. In 1962, for example, the Hakahana Players obtained funding from the Department of Education, Arts and Sciences, submitting their constitution which allowed only for white membership, and accepting the proviso that ‘mixed audiences or meetings of Whites and non-Whites are not permissible’.
19 ‘Application for a Government Grant, Appendix B: Conditions Applicable to Grants’, n.d., manuscript, private collection, 7.If the young Schiess had experienced unparalleled comfort in the Fulds’ home in Pretoria, it was a comfort won at the expense of the black majority who were kept out of the cities except as working bodies. This was the beginning of nearly fifty years of white Afrikaner rule during which ordinary Afrikaans citizens, in particular, ‘experienced little but the Nationalist world perspective from cradle to grave’.
20 Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 4th ed. (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2014), 198.Schiess was well aware of the stifling intellectual environment of his adoptive country, and of the forces that shaped it. Of these, he regarded the Dutch Reformed Church, an institution that supported apartheid until as late as 1986, as the most significant. As he would later write to Frisch:
The biggest curse on the Afrikaners, however, is the powerful, stubborn, fanatical, Calvinist church that keeps its lambs in an iron grip. A church in which racial segregation is considered a dogma. And the Afrikaner is generally very loyal to the church, raising his children in unbending faith with complete conviction. The church also has strong political power and doesn’t just regulate the moral life of its members. It also dictates their general mindset. Even the slightest deviation from the orthodox law of their forefathers is officially persecuted. Then there is their conviction that they are God’s chosen people, given the sacrosanct task of showing the world that they, alone, are right. This shows itself clearly in its policy of isolation.
21 ‘Das grösste Uebel der Afrikaner ist jedoch die mächtige, sture, fanatische, calvinistische Kirche, die ihre Schäfchen in eisernem Griff hält. Eine Kirche, in welcher Rassentrennung als Dogma gilt. Und der Afrikaner ist im allgemeinen sehr kirchentreu und erzieht seine Kinder im unbeugsamen Glauben mit voller Ueberzeugung. Die Kirche, welche auch politisch eine starke Macht bildet, regelt nicht nur das moralische Leben ihrer Mitglieder, sondern schreibt auch die Gesinnung vor und die geringste Abweichung vom orthodoxen Gesetz der Vorväter wird offiziell verfolgt. Dazu kommt die Ueberzeugung, sich als das von Gott auserkorene Volk zu betrachten, mit der sakrosankten Aufgabe, der Welt zu zeigen, dass es allein recht hat. Dies zeigt sich deutlich in seiner Isolationspolitik’. Schiess to Frisch, circa 1963.One of the consequences of this state of affairs, so Schiess wrote, was that ‘conversation in average society dangerously resembles the spirit of the dialogue in Ionesco’s
The Bald Soprano’.
22 ‘in der Durchschnittsgesellschaft [wird] die Konversation gefährlich an den Geist des Dialogs in Jonesco’s Kahle Sängerin erinnert’. Ibid. That play is famous for its meaningless banter and numerous non-sequiturs that suggest the breakdown of language itself. Its characters, Ionesco explained, ‘can no longer talk because they can no longer think; they can no longer think because they can no longer be moved, can no longer feel passions’.
23 Ionesco in Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 143. It was precisely this environment, so ripe for waking individual critical thinking and shaking off ready-made ideas, that made Schiess committed to staging the works of contemporary European playwrights. Yet in an environment that had long regarded theatre as escapist entertainment, asking audiences to redefine their belief systems in response to a play was easier said than done.
When in 1961 the German-Afrikaans Student Association of the University of Pretoria asked Schiess to direct a German play for them, he chose Frisch’s
Biedermann und die Brandstifter, ‘overjoyed at being able to introduce the work of his famous fellow countryman to Pretoria’.
24 Programme for Biedermann und die Brandstifter at the National Theatre, Pretoria, National Archives of South Africa: South African Centre for Information on the Arts (SACIA), Centre for SA Theatre Research (CESAT), Ludwig Binge Collection, document 992/25. Staged in April 1962 in the 220-seater National Theatre (later renamed the Breytenbach Theatre), it also travelled to Windhoek in Namibia where many of its German-speaking cast hailed from. This was the first presentation of a Swiss play in Southern Africa.
Interpreted as a play about Germany’s ‘ostrich-like attitude to the rise of the Nazis’, his production was described in the
Pretoria News as ‘a brave effort, an imaginative approach to a work of importance’.
25 ‘Fire Raisers’, Pretoria News, 27 April 1962. Yet despite its critical success, local German communities were affronted by what they perceived to be an anti-bourgeois satire. In particular, ‘that a Swiss who had not been in the war dared to mock the poor Germans who went through those dreadful times offended them deeply’.
26 Schiess, ‘Chronicle’, 30. This proved once again, Schiess wrote to Frisch, ‘that the fiercest Nazis are those who stayed in the colonies, since they experienced nothing that could have exorcised their convictions.’
27 ‘dass die wildesten Nazis jene sind, die in den Kolonien blieben, denn sie hatten ja nichts erlebt, was ihnen ihre Ueberzeugung hätte austreiben können.’ Schiess to Frisch, circa 1963.Ludwig Binge, a critic and academic who had been in the Pretoria audience
, was thrilled. He was closely connected with another amateur group, the Volksteater, and convinced them to ask Schiess to direct an Afrikaans production for them. ‘Very proud to have been asked by the leading Pretoria amateur group that had, in the past, been directed by the best names in Afrikaans theatre,’ the twenty-nine-year-old Schiess agreed.
28 Schiess, ‘Chronicle’, 33. In this way
Biedermann would reach Afrikaans audiences only four years after its Swiss premiere and before it was even seen in the United States.