‘The site is near the top of a ridge to the north of the city centre and thus commands a fine view over the city.’

In December 1954 Smit and his wife, the actress Kita Redelinghuys, who had since joined him in Europe, left for London where she took up studies at the Webber Douglas School of Dramatic Art. In July 1955 Smit departed for Munich to continue his own postgraduate education. Yet his career took a decisive turn when he became an apprentice director at the Münchner Kammerspiele. There, Smit worked under the intendant Hans Schweikart – who enjoyed a close working relationship with Dürrenmatt – devising his own stagings for upcoming productions which were then discussed and compared with Schweikart’s.4 Bartho Smit, Sestigers in woord en beeld: Bartho Smit (Johannesburg: Perskor, 1984), 22. ‘Following the erosion brought about by the Nazis and the disruption of the war, there were very few new German playwrights’, Smit pointed out.5 ‘Ná die Nazistiese erosie en die ontwrigting van die oorlog was daar destyds min nuwe Duitse dramaturge.’ Ibid., 22. And so, the Kammerspiele’s repertoire consisted mainly of translations and German-language plays from other countries. One of these, staged during the 1955/1956 season, was none other than Der Besuch der alten Dame.6 Email correspondence with Bettina Pfotenhauer of the Stadtarchiv München, 16 December 2020.

While in Europe, Smit had met Afrikaans theatre doyenne Anna Neethling-Pohl, one of the founders of the Volksteater twenty years previously who had since become involved with the NTO. While he was in Munich, the two began an exchange of letters. In 1955, Smit wrote to her about his commitment to theatre, explaining:

If one could present the best of contemporary European theatre in Afrikaans, Smit argued, Afrikaners would be inspired to create their own modern works, ‘instead of the nineteenth-century imitations which are still all that we have today’.10 ‘in stede van die 19de eeuse nabootsings wat vandag nog al is wat ons het’. Smit to Neethling Pohl, 24 November 1955. By the time he returned to South Africa in 1957, he was convinced it was fundamentally necessary for playwrights such as Shakespeare, Racine, and Schiller to be available to Afrikaners.11 See Bartho Smit to Hermien Dommisse, correspondence, 22 May 1957, National Archives of South Africa: South African Centre for Information on the Arts (SACIA), Centre for SA Theatre Research (CESAT), Hermien Dommisse Collection, document 555/1129. Accordingly, Smit dedicated himself ‘full-time to the translation of classical theatre works into Afrikaans’.12 ‘voltyds aan die vertaling van klassieke teaterwerke in Afrikaans’. Smit to Dommisse, 22 May 1957.

His translations had a ready audience back home. In 1958 the NTO mounted seven productions, of which only one was an original South African play – James Ambrose Brown’s Seven Against the Sun.13 Rinie Stead, ‘The National Theatre Organization 1947–1962’, in Die Breytie-boek: ’n Versameling artikels oor Suid-Afrikaanse teater opgedra aan P.P.B. Breytenbach, ed. Temple Hauptfleisch (Randburg: Limelight Press, 1985), 65–72. The remainder included no fewer than four Afrikaans translations. One of these was Die jakkalsstreke van Scapino, a translation of Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin – Smit’s first commission as a theatre translator. His next translation, Die Les, an Afrikaans version of Ionesco’s La Leçon, was staged in 1959 alongside his first success as a playwright, Moeder Hanna (1956), as part of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (South African Academy for Science and Arts), an organisation dedicated to furthering the Afrikaans language.

Smit viewed translation and playwriting as intertwined and mutually beneficial. He believed translation would enrich the Afrikaans theatre landscape, cultivating audiences ready for his plays. On his return, he devoted himself to both activities.

But the connection between translation and playwriting became increasingly complex, producing results Smit had never anticipated. In 1957, he had two original plays to his name, both written before his time in Europe. Five years later, when Die besoek was staged, he had written three more. He had submitted his fifth play, Putsonderwater, to the Afrikaans Theatre Committee of Johannesburg for performance at the new Civic Theatre. Had it been accepted, Der Besuch might never have been translated, nor staged as the opening season’s ‘Afrikaans’ offering.

On 5 June 1962 the committee turned it down in favour of Dürrenmatt.14 See Johannesburgse Afrikaanse Toneelkomitee, ‘Notules van die vergadering van die werkende komitee’, 22 May 1962, National Archives of South Africa: South African Centre for Information on the Arts (SACIA), Centre for SA Theatre Research (CESAT), Hermien Dommisse Collection, document 555/1569. This wasn’t the first time the Afrikaans theatre establishment had avoided Smit’s work. Another of his plays, Don Juan onder die boere, had been chosen to open the new Bloemfontein Civic Theatre in 1959 but was replaced at the last minute.15 Chris Barnard, ‘Die storie van sy sterftes’, in Bartho, ed. Barnard, 89. That year, the NTO also changed course after it had agreed to produce Smit’s Die Verminktes. The reasons for Smit’s repeated rejection as a playwright weren’t hard to guess at. Like the work of his fellow Sestigers, his plays explored themes hitherto avoided in Afrikaans literature. This included miscegenation and castration, as well as the interrogation of venerated Afrikaner institutions such as the church. Time and again, they were considered too politically challenging and potentially offensive to Afrikaner Christian Nationalist sentiments to be staged.

Instead of turning to amateur theatre – a fruitful avenue to get contentious plays staged, as Schiess would demonstrate again and again – Smit struggled for years to have his plays performed within the government-funded arts apparatus. Eventually, his experiences of ‘almost-performances and almost-inaugurations of new theatres’ became legendary.16 ‘amper-opvoerings en amper-inwydings van nuwe teaters’. Smit, Sestigers in woord en beeld, 29; See also Barnard, ‘Die storie van sy sterftes’, 89–91; See also Jack Cope, The Adversary Within: Dissident Writers in Afrikaans (Cape Town: David Philip, 1982); See also Hermien Dommisse, ‘Voorwoord’, in Bartho Smit, Bartho Smit-vertalings 2: Dürrenmatt (Pretoria: Haum-Literêr, 1984), i–iii.

Yet, as his contemporary Jack Cope pointed out in the 1980s, ‘[f]or all this, Smit remains a staunch Nationalist and continues to hold a job as head of the literature department of the most powerful printing and publishing group in the country’.17 Cope, The Adversary Within, 142. For much of his career, Smit worked at Afrikaanse Pers, a publishing group at one point chaired by Hendrik Verwoerd. Although Smit was instrumental in publishing the work of his fellow-Sestigers, he remained, like so many of his generation, caught between cultural and familial ties to the volk and the demands of his work as a creative artist. Something of this duality is reflected in Cope’s description of Smit as ‘a dissident “in spite of himself”’.18 Ibid.

In 1956 Smit had described himself to Neethling-Pohl as ‘a proponent of apartheid, after all’, a joke about his and his wife’s temporary separation in Europe that nevertheless speaks to his political leanings.19 ‘wel ’n voorstander van Apartheid’. Bartho Smit to Anna-Neethling Pohl, correspondence, 12 June 1956, National Archives of South Africa: South African Centre for Information on the Arts (SACIA), Centre for SA Literature Research (CENSAL), box 263. He never counted himself one of the ‘so-called engaged writers’ concerned with social injustice.20 ‘sogenaamde betrokke skrywers’. Smit, Sestigers in woord en beeld, 81. He also refused to join his fellow Sestigers in 1970 in putting pressure on the government to return Athol Fugard’s passport, withdrawn because of the playwright’s treatment of race laws in his Blood Knot.21 Manuel Correia, ‘Five Afrikaans writers back Athol Fugard’, Rand Daily Mail, 16 June 1970. Rather than demonstrating Smit’s struggle credentials, then, his experiences as the most banned Afrikaans playwright show only how incompatible Afrikaner nationalism had become by the 1960s with a modern Afrikaans theatre that tried to address the totality of human experience.

Smit finally received recognition from the Afrikaans theatre establishment in 1978 when he was awarded the prestigious Hertzog Prize for his original dramas. Yet South Africans encountered him, in the first instance, as a translator. Even as he wrote one play after the other without an audience to see them, his translations were staged in quick succession: Afrikaans versions of Roblès’s Montserrat in 1963, Ionesco’s Rhinocéros in 1963 and his Le Roi se meurt in 1966, Hofmann’s Der Bürgermeister in 1967, Strindberg’s Dödsdansen in 1967 and his Påsk in 1969, Anouilh’s Becket ou l’Honneur de Dieu in 1979, and Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba in 1980. After Dürrenmatt adapted his novel Die Panne for the stage in 1979, Smit, who had translated the novel back in 1960, translated the stage version as well, though it was likely never produced.22 Although the amateur Libertas Theatre Club’s 1971 programme for John Kerr’s Mary, Mary indicates that their next offering in October that year was to be Dürrenmatt-Smit’s Teenspoed, I have not been able to confirm that it was actually staged. The archive of Marie van Heerden (currently in the possession of her son, Johann van Heerden) contains no information about this production, and there was also no coverage of it in 1971 in the local newspaper, Eikestadnuus, which usually did report on the activities of the group.

Compounding the unique historical circumstances surrounding Smit’s translations and his original playwriting is that he absorbed influences from the plays he translated.23 For a discussion of the similarities between Smit’s translations and his plays, see Salomi Louw, ‘Die Bartho Smit-vertalings’, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 23, no. 3 (1985): 55–63. Even as he was assisting Schweikart in his staging of Der Besuch in the mid-1950s, he was writing Putsonderwater. Unsurprisingly, the plays have much in common. Both are allegories that examine the dark side of a society that appears, on the surface, to be orderly and just. Both are populated with nameless types like ‘the priest’, ‘the doctor’, and ‘the policeman’. And in each dilapidated and in its own way drought-stricken town, whether Güllen or Putsonderwater, community leaders are criticized for failing to protect the most vulnerable.

As it was, Smit had to wait six more years for Putsonderwater’s premiere in 1968, and even then, he could only have it staged abroad, by the Volksteater Vertikaal in Ghent. It must have been of great significance to him that it was then chosen by Belgian audiences as the best production of the past four years. Even more so when he learned that it received twice as many votes as Dürrenmatt’s Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi.24 Told in Smit, Bartho Smit, 37–8.

Most of the people who saw the curtain go up on Die Besoek in October 1962 didn’t appreciate the irony that an Afrikaans translation was being feted at the cost of an indigenous Afrikaans play that remained unperformed. A newspaper clipping reporting on the great event of an Afrikaans Dürrenmatt in the Johannesburg Civic also mentioned in passing that Smit’s latest play, Putsonderwater, ‘the strongest and most advanced prose drama yet written in Afrikaans’, would be available in bookshops the following year.25 ‘die sterkste en mees gevorderde prosadrama wat nog in ons taal geskryf is’. ‘Groot drama in Afrikaans vir skouburg verwerk’, Die Vaderland, 13 September 1962.

One of the reasons is that Smit had produced a fluent and idiomatic translation that audiences could forget was really written about a different place and for a different audience. Was this illusion contingent on Smit making himself invisible as a translator? Critics certainly evaluated Die Besoek as unmediated Dürrenmatt, rather than an Afrikaans interpretation.26 See especially A. P. Grové, Oordeel en vooroordeel: Letterkundige opstelle en kritiek (Cape Town: Nasionale Boekhandel, 1965), 161–3. The only contemporary newspaper review that referred to his translation at all called it simply a ‘briljante vertaling’ (‘brilliant translation’).27 Stark, ‘Makabere besoek’.

Twenty years later, after Smit’s collected translations were published and he was awarded a prize for translation, this aspect of his oeuvre finally received critical appraisal. He was praised for his fluency, with his skill valued most where he succeeded in writing dialogue that was ‘natural, speakable, and highly playable’.28 ‘natuurlik, praatbaar en hoogs speelbaar’. Elmari Rautenbach, ‘Vernuftigste vertalings: Dramas is nou vir almal toeganklik’, Beeld, 22 July 1985. In one scholarly evaluation of his translations, the following phrase stands out: ‘The given drama has been translated as if it is Smit’s own creation.’29 ‘Die gegewe drama is vertaal asof dit eie skepping is’. Louw, ‘Die Bartho Smit-vertalings’, 58–60. Perhaps, then, to perform the particular sleight of hand that audiences marvelled at in the Johannesburg Civic in October 1962, Smit had not made himself invisible, but rather Dürrenmatt.