‘Whispers several times.’
2 ‘Andorra schedule of sounds and music’.South Africa’s Jewish population was neither the only, nor the most culpable, bystander to apartheid. Nor, for the purposes of this discussion, were the English-speaking South Africans who were content to share in the benefits of a system formally consolidated under Afrikaner rule but rooted in policies and practices of segregation that long predated their political ascendancy.
3 J. M. Coetzee writes that the ‘white liberals who diagnosed apartheid as a form of hubris or madness, and by denouncing it as such sought to distance themselves from it, were ultimately […] doing little more than distracting attention from their continuing material complicity in the exploitation of black labour.’ Coetzee, ‘The mind of apartheid’, 1. I am most interested in the ‘non-political, law-abiding, patriotic’, to echo Weisbord: white Afrikaners seemingly blind to the human rights abuses perpetuated in their name. Were they able to recognize themselves in Frisch’s abstract stage world?
If so, they would have found a ready-made script in the excuses the Andorrans give for their complicity in Andri’s murder. The Soldier protests that he was only following orders. The Somebody doesn’t recall events in much detail. Nevertheless, his Afrikaans testimony is chilling: ‘Toe hulle hom kom haal het, het ek vir hom jammer gevoel. Wat die soldate wat hom kom haal het, met hom gemaak het, weet ek nie, ons het net sy skreeu gehoor … Eenmaal moet ’n mens ook kan vergeet, vind ek’ (‘When they took him away I felt sorry for him. I don’t know what the soldiers did to him after they took him away, we only heard him screaming … There must come a time when one can also forget, I think’).
4 Frisch, Andorra, trans. Kirsipuu and Kirsipuu, 55; Frisch, Andorra, trans. Bullock, 155.The play’s reception by the state suggests that it was not regarded as much of a threat. Staged only after the controversial Publications and Entertainments Act of 1963 had been passed, it was not banned, as Schiess had feared. On the contrary, it was repeatedly performed in Afrikaans, sometimes by government-funded bodies. After its 1964 premiere, it was staged that same year by the Performing Arts Council of the Free State (PACOFS) at Bloemfontein’s Civic Theatre. Although PACT had flagged its subversive potential in 1963 and rejected it again in 1965, they revised their stance in 1973, presenting it at Pretoria’s Breytenbach Theatre and Johannesburg’s Alexander Theatre.
5 Mario Schiess to Dr S. Czech, correspondence, 28 March 1967, private collection.Perhaps, the case of Andorra shows that apartheid’s net of laws was only as rigid as those tasked with enforcing them. When PACT Drama staged the play, Mannie Manim – no longer at the Johannesburg Civic – was its administrative head. He recalls nothing of their production, but his reflections shed light on the internal workings of the state-funded drama departments, and on how such processes could determine whether a play was staged or not.
Drama departments were headed by a committee responsible for approving or denying the programme submitted to them by the organization’s administrative and artistic heads. During Manim’s tenure, the PACT drama committee consisted of roughly a dozen ‘government-appointed people – mainly intellectuals, mainly academics’.
6 Mannie Manim, author interview, 27 November 2020. Its chairman was none other than Geoffrey Cronjé. Before
Andorra even reached the stage, it was subject to approval by a member of the Afrikaner Broederbond (literally ‘Afrikaner Brotherhood’, a secretive, exclusively Afrikaner organization instrumental in designing and maintaining apartheid policies) who was particularly influential in Afrikaner Nationalist circles, and in whose writings ‘we catch glimpses of apartheid nakedly occupied in thinking itself out’.
7 Coetzee, ‘The mind of apartheid’, 3.As Manim reflects on his experiences, the tensions between theatre practitioners and the state emerge with striking clarity. ‘Well, there’s nothing much to tell’, Manim says.
8 Mannie Manim, author interview, 27 November 2020. ‘I used to have great respect for professors because I don’t have any academic background. I never went to university. I went to the university of the theatre, I always say. And so, professors were something to me. I thought, wow, you know, these guys, they’ve studied, they know all there is to know about these things. Well, PACT and dealing with that drama committee eventually got me rid of that completely false impression. Because they didn’t know anything about theatre. They didn’t know anything, in my opinion, about stuff that our country needed, that our theatres needed, that our actors needed, that our directors needed.’
Manim recalls that, especially in the early years, the scripts he and artistic director Francois Swart wanted to stage were often turned down. This happened for various reasons, the committee’s overriding concerns being ‘anything to do with black and white, anything to do with morality – with their sense of morality – anything to do if you got anywhere near religion. So, their major concerns were not to upset the status quo.’ He and Swart eventually learnt to work around the committee and their subcommittees. One of their strategies was to claim that a script had not yet been published; another, that a translation had not yet been received – a tactic they pursued successfully with Camus’s Les Justes, translated in 1969 and presented with André P. Brink’s provocative title, Die Terroriste.
If Manim’s memories are instructive, they suggest that the performing arts councils did not operate according to a single logic, but were shaped by the personalities at their helm and by their varying appetites for risk. Yet one must also consider that
Andorra’s utopian premise, ‘that humans are basically the same and differences among them only culturally constructed’, was simply too subtle to be considered a threat.
9 Schaumann and Schaumann, ‘Max Frisch’s Andorra’, 68.Then again, it is possible that Afrikaner audiences and apartheid’s drama committees and censors took from the play a very different message from the one outlined above.
Andorra’s ambiguity opens it to a far cruder interpretation: that the products of illegal miscegenation deserve to be prosecuted and killed, and that the whites will lose everything to the
swart gevaar (‘black danger’) if they engage in immoral behaviour tainting the ‘pure’ blood in their veins. This interpretation parallels the play’s reception elsewhere. During its first, short, Broadway run it was called a crude trivialization of the Holocaust.
10 See Jonathan Kalb, ‘Theater; A provoking parable that won’t quit’, New York Times, 7 April 2002, available at https://archive.md/jEj1k. It has also been mocked as ‘a play about Jews in which no Jews are to be found’, criticized for staging anti-Semitic clichés and for being latently anti-Semitic itself.
11 ‘ein Stück über die Juden in dem keine Juden vorkommen’. Georg Kreisler, Sodom und Andorra, 1962, Preisler Records, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jonOAlDJ2x4&list=OLAK5uy_k8FSNcND9OcFGhfzzJBnFXo3VMTh0g1Gw&index=2.Reviews of the Volksteater’s
Andorra suggest that any critique of apartheid was indeed only visible to ‘those who have eyes’.
12 ‘jene, die Augen haben’. Schiess to Frisch, circa 1963. Among the many newspaper clippings Schiess saved, not a single one explicitly connected the play to the South African situation that defined individuals according to racial labels that robbed them, whether black, coloured, or white, of their personal identities. Yet anyone who read the analysis in the
Pretoria News without recognizing their own society must indeed have been suffering from a type of blindness: ‘Fundamentally it is about the plight of any individual forced into a mould by any society, until his identity is lost and he wears the imposed mask – perhaps without being really aware of it’, their reviewer wrote. ‘It is, above all, a study of the individual faced with – and driven by – insidious forces he cannot analyse or control.’
13 P. A. K., ‘Guilt-edged security’, Pretoria News, 7 July 1964. The Afrikaans writer and Sestiger
, Abraham de Vries, meanwhile, ended his review by calling
Andorra a ‘drama that, against your will, also speaks to your conscience’.
14 ‘drama wat teen u sin ook tot u gewete spreek’. Abraham de Vries, ‘Andorra – ’n moet!’, Die Vaderland, n.d.Schiess was increasingly aware of the contributions his Afrikaans Frisch and Dürrenmatt plays were making to the development of Afrikaans literature as a whole. But, in Schiess’s view, this departed sharply from the goals of Afrikaner nationalism: he was throwing his lot in with the Sestigers, trying to widen the cracks between the state and Afrikaans literature.
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Figure 11: A photograph of Max Frisch found among Mario Schiess’s papers.
Shortly after the production finished its run, Schiess reported its success to Czech:
The Afrikaans speaking section of the community (in power politically) is split into two groups. The orthodox group, violently nationalistic, narrow-minded in the extreme, bone-hard Christians grimly holding on to the worst aspects of Calvinism trying to force their way of life onto everybody, and the more liberal (and younger) ‘rebels’, just as proud of their heritage and their comparatively new language but open to the new art, new philosophy, new influences. Aggressive and optimistic as it is easy to be for the white man in this country, they are gaining a larger and larger foothold and more and more support. Just recently one of their writers [Etienne Leroux] had been awarded the Hertzog prize for literature, the premier award in Afrikaans, in spite of violent opposition from the church. The fierce controversy had not died down yet when the up-to-now most liberal play yet shown in Afrikaans,
Andorra, met with such success. Generally this is regarded as the beginning of the ‘new theatre’ in Afrikaans. Mr Frisch has found an echo which might interest him.
15 Mario Schiess to Suzanne Czech, correspondence, 21 July 1964, private collection.Schiess remained vocal about
Andorra’s local relevance, convinced that his production – ‘in the back of beyond’, as Frisch’s London agent phrased it – was uniquely positioned to cut to the heart of the play.
16 Suzanne Czech to Mario Schiess, correspondence, 14 April 1967, private collection. Shortly after Frisch’s death in 1991, Schiess looked back and remembered: ‘There was a moment when Rossouw as the unlucky Jew delivered the line: “Die son skyn groen deur die bome ook as hulle my kom haal” [“The sun shines green through the trees also when they come to fetch me”], which still sends cold shivers down my back when I think of it. The whole pain of those unjustly persecuted, purely because of their race, and their despair at uncaring nature – and a God that allows it to happen – was felt in the theatre. It was a scream that South Africa needed to hear in 1964.’
17 Mario Schiess, ‘Max Frisch dies, but his genius lives on in plays’, The Pretoria News, 17 April 1991.