‘The Johannesburg Civic Theatre is the best equipped theatre in Southern Africa and of its kind hardly to be exceeded in the world.’
2 Civic Theatre Subcommittee, ‘Copy for leaflet’, manuscript, n.d., AG3290: A1, Johannesburg Civic Theatre Records 1962–2017, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.Fifty kilometres to the south, in Johannesburg, twenty-two-year-old Mannie Manim was frowning at piles of painted cloth spooled on the theatre floor. It was 1962, and as the first technical director of the newly built Civic Theatre, he was setting up the scenery for one of its inaugural productions, Verdi’s
Un Ballo in Maschera. This involved putting rolls of painted cloth shipped in from La Scala in Milan on battens and hoisting them up into the fly tower. ‘Pull the thing up!’, Manim remembers calling to Phineas, the black stagehand at the top. ‘What are you doing up there? Get that thing off the floor, come on!’ The reply he got was: ‘It’s up. It’s up all the way.’ ‘But that’s what’s still on the floor’, he points out.
3 Mannie Manim, author interview, 27 November 2020.Although dwarfed by La Scala, the 1033-seater Civic was, at the time, the biggest theatre in South Africa. It had cost the Johannesburg City Council R600,000 to build – adjusted for inflation, in the region of seventy-five million.
Designed by Manfred Hermer as a ‘European-style opera house’, the Civic was envisaged from the start as a bastion of European high culture.
4 Ibid. In the months leading up to its opening, several European theatres had been consulted on logistical matters ranging from budget to personnel requirements to ticket sales. When ‘that twentieth-century Parthenon on the southern slope of the Braamfontein Hill’ finally opened its doors in August 1962 with among its goals ‘the cultivation and improvement of public taste in drama, opera, ballet, dancing, music, painting, and other similar arts’, it was nearly inseparable from its models.
5 Michael Grobbelaar, ‘Interview with Radio Mirror’, 1962, AG3290: A1, Johannesburg Civic Theatre Records 1962–2017, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.~
Figure 6: The façade of the newly built Johannesburg Civic Theatre, 1962.
This went further than mere emulation. The theatre’s administration was determined that its opening season be ‘absolutely first class’ and received advice that ‘the required standard would [not] be achieved unless a hard core of the necessary talent was imported so that the local resources regarded themselves as merely filling in’.
6 Civic Theatre Subcommittee, ‘Memorandum: Interview with Mr Leon Gluckman and Mrs Taubie Kushlink’, n.d., AG3290: A1. Johannesburg Civic Theatre Records 1962–2017, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. One outcome of this was
Un ballo in maschera, performed with an Italian conductor and director, and two Italian singers alongside Emma Renzi, a South African-born soprano living and working in Italy.
That day in 1962, Manim, Phineas, and the other black stagehands working with them had no choice but to lower the battens again, unroll the painted cloths, and spread them out on the floor. ‘We had to then look at each of these cloths and choose the nicest part’, Manim remembers. That was the part that we could get!’ Any emulation of European culture on the tip of Africa, it seems, was always fated to be partial and subjective. The same, as we shall see in this chapter, is true of translation.