‘The play begins with about 30 seconds of the beginning of Bach’s Passacaglia played on harpsichord.’
2 ‘Andorra schedule of sounds and music,’ n.d., manuscript, private collection.In 1964, the Afrikaans actress Emsie Botha asked from the stage of the Little Theatre in Pretoria: ‘Is dit waar, eerwaarde vader, wat die mense sê? Hulle gaan ons aanval, die Swartes daar oorkant, omdat hulle jaloers is op ons wit huise’ (‘Is it true, father, what the people say? They are going to attack us, the Blacks over there, because they are envious of our white houses’).
3 Max Frisch, Andorra, trans. Ants Kirsipuu and Wilma Kirsipuu (publisher unknown, 1972), 3. It was one month after the Rivonia Trial had sentenced Mandela and other opponents of apartheid to imprisonment, and weeks before John Harris planted his bomb in the Johannesburg Train Station. The play in question was Frisch’s
Andorra.Premiered in November 1961 in the Schauspielhaus Zürich,
Andorra had been seen in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, England, Israel, and, briefly, the United States before it made its way to South Africa.
4 See Caroline Schaumann and Frank Schaumann, ‘Max Frisch’s Andorra: Balancing act between pattern and particular’, in A Companion to the Works of Max Frisch, ed. Berwald, 58–71 on Andorra’s international reception history. Between 5 and 12 October, Mario Schiess and the Volksteater staged the play in an Afrikaans translation by Ants Kirsipuu and Wilma Stockenström in the Little Theatre in Pretoria.
5 The cast consisted of Emsie Botha, Archie Grant, Roy Holtzhausen, Etienne Pienaar, Cobus Rossouw, Louis van Niekerk, Bill Dormehl, Pieter van Niekerk, Schalk Liebenberg, Koos Meij, Wilma Stockenström, June Neethling, André Beaumont, Jan Olivier, Piet Olivier, Mike Brooks, Johan Davel, Johan Crafford, and Koos Verwey. Programme for Andorra at the Little Theatre, Pretoria, 6–11 July 1964, Volksteatervereniging, private collection. There, Barblin – the nineteen-year-old image of innocence – whitewashed her father’s house, striving for ‘’n wit Andorra’ (‘a white Andorra’), ‘’n sneeuwit Andorra’ (‘a snow-white Andorra’).
6 Ibid., 9.Black was the colour of the Italian fascist militia in the first half of the twentieth century; when Frisch called his Others ‘die Schwarzen’, it was to designate them as fascist. Labelling his Andorrans ‘white’ was to characterize them as supposedly innocent and inoffensive, in contrast with their extremist antisemitic neighbours. This much would have been clear to a 1960s European audience. But how were Afrikaans audiences to distinguish between these symbolic groups and the racial categories cemented in their society?
Spatial engineering had long relegated black South Africans to somewhere ‘over there’, whether through the Group Areas Act that separated races on the scale of the city, or by the Bantustans, discrete territories intended for black ethnic groups. These words also evoke the ‘Swart Gevaar’ (‘Black Peril’), an apartheid-era trope that stoked white fears of black violence to justify segregation and minority rule. White audiences watching Andorra would have seen these fears confirmed when, in Frisch’s stage world, ‘the Blacks’ invade to impose a violent agenda.