‘Forgetting will not undo it.’

Schiess’s choices were undoubtedly constrained by the playwrights’ boycott. The previous year, he had written to Beckett’s agents to enquire about the performing rights to Play, first produced in German as Spiel. He received the reply that he could not obtain them unless he was able to stage it in a theatre where no one would be excluded ‘on grounds of colour’.4 Suzanne Finlay to Mario Schiess, 12 March 1964, correspondence, private collection. ‘Mr Beckett recently wrote to us to say that he wished none of his plays to be performed in any theatre where discrimination was made for the reason above mentioned’, Suzanne Finlay of Curtis Brown continued. Schiess could make no such promise. Considering such a stance unlikely to make a difference to either the duration or conditions of apartheid, he remained unfazed. Responding to the boycott with an opinion piece in 1965, he suggested: ‘Perhaps it will be more profitable to make friends with the new franc and German mark and let the dwindling dollar and bankrupt pound sterling lie temporarily to the left.’5 ‘Miskien gaan dit meer wins afwerp om met die nuwe frank en die Duitse mark maats te maak en die tanende dollar en die bankrot pond sterling tydelik te laat links lê.’ Mario Schiess, ‘Toneelsanksies – Die einde?’, Dagbreek en Sondagnuus, 21 March 1965.

When, the following year, the Volksteater extended their, by now, regular invitation to Schiess to present a play of his choice, he selected Dürrenmatt’s Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi. The Volksteater commissioned a translation from Rita Elferink, who had been one of the translators of Die Brandstigters in 1964. The resulting work, entitled Die huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi, was staged in the Little Theatre in Pretoria from 21 to 29 October 1966.6 The cast consisted of Heins du Preez, Lambert Millar, Reon Meij, Emsie Botha, Koos Meij, Amanda Boshoff, and Karin Skawran. Programme for Die huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi at the Little Theatre, Pretoria, 21–29 October 1966, Volksteatervereniging, private collection. After Bartho Smit’s Die besoek van die ou dame and Schiess’s Die Fisici, it was the third time that Dürrenmatt was staged in Afrikaans.

Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi was premiered in 1952 at the Münchner Kammerspiele and revised several times thereafter.7 See Timo Tiusanen, Dürrenmatt: A Study in Plays, Prose, Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 93. Elferink’s 1966 translation corresponds closely to Dürrenmatt’s second version included in Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Komödien I (Zurich: Arche, 1957), and is the version consulted for this chapter. In it, four men – a public prosecutor, a communist revolutionary, a nobleman-doctor, and a politician – fight for possession of one woman, Anastasia. Each embodies a specific idea or attitude towards being in the world. The public prosecutor, Florestan Mississippi, recognizes no authority but divine justice, striving above all to see the punitive law of Moses restored. His antipole, Frédéric René Saint-Claude, recognizes only earthly justice and pursues it by attempting a communist overthrow of government. The nobleman, Graf Bodo von Übelohe-Zabernsee, is a quixotic figure who embodies selfless love in its purest form, while the politician, Diego, hungers only after worldly power. As these fanatic believers and their ideas clash, they compete for Anastasia’s attention, which she grants freely to whichever suitor is most convenient at the moment. In the end, they all – except Diego – are dealt decisive blows. The stage is littered with corpses that nevertheless resurrect to proclaim their eternal return on the world stage. Anastasia, meanwhile, the symbolic Whore of Babylon, meets her death unchanged by the events in the play and the ideas the men in it have tried to impress upon her.

Elferink’s Afrikaans translation has survived among her papers. Except for the retention of European references that would likely have been obscure to 1966 Pretoria audiences – the Goethe play Götz von Berlichingen, for example, or the Zwingli Monument in Zürich – it is overwhelmingly domesticated.8 See Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Die huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi, trans. Rita Elferink, n.d., manuscript, Rita Elferink Collection B14, folder 4, document 2, University of Johannesburg Library Special Collections, 11, 39. Not only does she find idiomatic equivalents for German expressions – ‘Ek is regtig die kluts kwyt’ (‘I have really lost the plot’) for ‘Ich bin ganz verstört’ (‘I am quite distraught’), for example – but she departs entirely from the syntactical and lexical peculiarities of Dürrenmatt’s German, communicating the contents of his dialogue and at times embroidering it.9 Dürrenmatt, Die Huwelik, 7; Dürrenmatt, Komödien I, 100. And so ‘Ich glaube’ (‘I believe’) becomes ‘Ja mevrou, dat u u man vergiftig het’ (‘Yes, ma’am, that you poisoned your husband’), while ‘Ich blicke in einen Abgrund der Leidenschaft’ (‘I am looking into an abyss of passion’) is spun into ‘By u is die hartstog soos ’n donker kuil waarin mens bodemlose dieptes en skrikwekkende afgronde gewaar’ (‘With you, passion is like a dark pit in which bottomless depths and terrifying abysses are discernible’).10 Dürrenmatt, Komödien I, 102, 106; Dürrenmatt, Die Huwelik, 9, 14.

This strategy, perhaps inevitably, resulted in accommodations to the sensibilities of the play’s domestic context and the expectations of its new audiences. ‘Mein Gott’ (‘My God’) is translated as ‘Die hemel bewaar my’ (‘Heaven protect me’), and ‘Negeraufstände’ (‘negro uprisings’) as simply ‘opstande’ (‘uprisings’), in which more than one head rolled, as in the German, but in respect to which ‘planlos’ (‘without plan’) has been delicately omitted.11 Dürrenmatt, Komödien I, 111, 116; Dürrenmatt, Die Huwelik, 17, 21 Where in Dürrenmatt’s original, Christianity has become a farce, in the Afrikaans, it has simply lost its true meaning for most people.12 Dürrenmatt, Komödien I, 123; Dürrenmatt, Die Huwelik, 26.

Yet any changes made for the benefit of a conservative Afrikaner audience were made haphazardly. Elsewhere, Die Huwelik places potentially offensive images squarely in an Afrikaans context, most noticeably concerning the former lives of Saint-Claude and Mississippi. Once male prostitutes, ‘blanke offerdiere in die hande van spekvet burgers wie se krete van wellus soos ’n kattegeskree in ons ore weerklink het’ (‘white sacrificial animals in the hands of fat citizens whose cries of lust echoed in our ears like the yowling of cats’), they are both left with ‘’n verkragte agterent’ (‘a raped behind’), arguably even more explicit than Dürrenmatt’s original ‘geschändeten Hintern’ (‘violated behinds’).13 Dürrenmatt, Die Huwelik, 24. Dürrenmatt’s original text reads as follows: ‘weiße Opfer in den Händen fettiger Bürger, deren Lust über uns wie Katzengeschrei in den Himmel stieg.’ Dürrenmatt, Komödien I, 121.

Elferink’s translation remains faithful to Dürrenmatt’s depiction of the country in crisis at the heart of the play, simmering with revolutionary sentiment, and likewise to its treatment of communism. In the Afrikaans, as in the German, Saint-Claude is a citizen of the Soviet Union and a member of the Cominform. The country where he seeks to effect a communist overthrow punishes political murders with the death penalty. It is governed by the most hated regime in the world, and, as Saint-Claude claims, is the only country where communism remains viable as a political and economic system.

An analysis of the causes of war ‘in the recent European past and in the future’, Die Ehe’s resonances with 1960s South Africa are impossible to ignore.14 See Tiusanen, Dürrenmatt, 101. Or so one would think – raising the question of whether Afrikaner audiences, immersed in Dürrenmatt’s fantastical stage world from their comfortable seats, were able to recognize their everyday reality in it, or whether they forgot it entirely.