‘The Civic Theatre will be manned and maintained exclusively by its own trained professional staff.’

The Johannesburg Civic’s ambitious inaugural programme swam in the same current. Its first season received visible government endorsement, with the gala event on 27 August that officially opened the theatre – an Afrikaans Offenbach, Die verhale van Hoffmann, sung by Mimi Coertse and Gé Korsten – playing in front of an exclusively white audience that included Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd and his wife, Betsie.

It should be clear by now that the establishment of the Western arts in South Africa was entirely in keeping with the agenda of the National Party to ensure the prospering of a white population at the tip of Africa. This did not apply merely to Afrikaans theatre, but to the arts as a whole. ‘Those days they had a name for it, which was Kultuur met ’n hoofletter K’, Mannie Manim points out. ‘In other words, it was culture with this, this terrible capital K. Because that was what was so important. To show that they were culturally advanced, that they were up there with the European nations of the world, you know, that they were able to further all these various cultural activities. And that’s all I can put it down to. That that was their aim, was that, you know, a decent civilized society would have these things. And then, going with that, of course, was the fact that they had to be pure white.’

But much of the labour that went into the establishment of that culture was black. It was precisely this that moved Fugard to write his open letter that sparked the playwrights’ boycott, despairing that the Civic Theatre, in spite of the black labour that had built it, catered exclusively to white audiences. Unseen and unnoticed by the throngs of theatregoers who rubbed shoulders with the Verwoerds that night, commemorative boxes of chocolate in hand, were the black stagehands, technicians, and cleaners who ran the theatre.

As the theatre’s technical director, Manim worked closely with this behind-the-scenes cast. Years later, in 1976, he would co-found the Market Theatre with Barney Simon, establishing one of the few spaces in South Africa that deliberately exploited legal loopholes to pursue multiracial theatre. One formative experience came at the Civic, when the theatre’s first managing director, Michael Grobbelaar, asked him to interview a queue of jobseekers at the back of the building – an encounter that would unapologetically shape his commitment to this ideal.

‘They were all black men’, Manim remembers. ‘Most of them were old enough to be my father, at least. And there were a hundred odd in that queue of people and they were there for work. One or two of them had done something in similar buildings in theatres somewhere. And the rest of them were just human beings wanting employment. And one of the most difficult things in my life was going down that line and trying to work out who would be good in the team, who could use what I was offering. They were the technical stagehands and they were the cleaners and they were that ilk of people that we were employing. I think I had about 20 jobs going, for these hundred-odd people.’

One of them was Phineas, climbing around in the fly tower to facilitate the audience’s suspension of disbelief, adjusting stage lights on the trusses to shine on Claire Zachanassian and her entourage, and opening and closing the heavy curtains on Die Besoek. And so, when, in 1962, professional Afrikaans theatre finally proved it could find both the necessary talent and the audiences to flourish, it was also with his help.