‘They fought and died – for what? For freedom? For human dignity? For the wiping out of totalitarian rule? Does human dignity count in Ghana (or South Africa if you happen to be black?) Is totalitarian rule wiped out in China, Russia?’
2 Schiess, ‘Remembrance Day’.Nineteen-sixties South Africa had enough ideologues and unquestioning believers to validate ‘Durrenmatt’s basic theory […] that the violence inhabiting our living rooms is caused by a collision between fanatical believers in various formulas of thought’.
3 Tiusanen, Dürrenmatt, 101. The play also resonated with the country’s own anxieties: apartheid South Africa’s stance toward communism was marked by hostility and paranoia, as it was widely perceived as its chief ideological threat.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) directly enabled the Struggle in various ways, whether through educating black Africans who would go on to play decisive roles in the African National Congress (ANC), or through its role in helping to establish uMkhonto weSizwe, what became its paramilitary wing.
4 For an overview of the impact of communism on South Africa, see Tom Lodge, Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party 1921–2021 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2021). At the time of his arrest in 1962, Nelson Mandela himself was a member of the SACP Central Committee, though his ideological views would later shift and he would subsequently deny his party membership.
5 See ‘Mandela and the South African Communist Party’, South African History Online, available at https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/mandela-and-south-african-communist-party. Today, South Africa is home to an active communist party – the SACP – which continues to influence politics through its longstanding alliance with the ANC. The country also hosts other leftist parties, such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose Marxist-Leninist platform shapes political debate and opposition.
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Figure 12: Emsie Botha as Anastasia and Reon Meij as her drunk suitor, Graaf Bodo von Übelohe-Zabernsee, in the Volksteater’s 1966 production of Die huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi.
All the more astounding then, that, in 1966, the actor Lambert Millar spoke these lines from the stage of Pretoria’s Little Theatre:
Hoor jy hulle sing? Dit is die kommunistiese ‘Internasionale’ en dis nog net hier wat hulle daardie verse met soveel geesdrif sing, dis nog net hier waar hulle aan daardie woorde glo, nog net hier, kon ons die kommunisme tot ’n werklikheid gemaak het, en nie as die grusame klug wat dit elders geword het nie. Hier en hier alleen het daardie moontlikheid nog bestaan.
6 Dürrenmatt, Die Huwelik, 27.(Do you hear them singing? It is the communist ‘Internationale’ and it’s only here where they sing those verses with such enthusiasm, it’s only here where they still believe in those words, only here could we have made communism a reality and not the gruesome farce it has become elsewhere. Here, and here alone, did that possibility still exist.)
Unlike Dürrenmatt, who specifies the singing of the ‘Internationale’ only in stage directions, Elferink’s translation moves it into the dialogue. Instead of downplaying the play’s resonances with the South African situation, the Volksteater amplified them. As Schiess recalls:
An amusing incident happened during rehearsals. At one stage a group of people moved past (unseen) singing the ‘Internationale’. So I went to the record shops to see whether I could get a recording. They nearly threw me out the shop, the ‘Internationale’ is the communist anthem, didn’t I know that, and it was banned. I related the story to my cast and then Heins du Preez [playing the role of Mississippi] said: ‘I’ll get you the score’. Heins was an avid nationalist, having served with John Vorster, General van den Bergh, and others at ‘Koffiefontein’.
7 Koffiefontein is a small town in the Free State, South Africa. During the Second World War, it hosted a prisoner of war camp where South Africans suspected of pro-Nazi activities were held alongside Italian soldiers. They included members of the anti-British Ossewabrandwag such as Hendrik van den Bergh, later head of the Special Branch, and John Vorster who became prime minister of South Africa in 1966 and was State President from 1978 to 1979. Sure enough, Heins came to the next rehearsal with a score of the ‘Internationale’. He’d found it in a set of encyclopaedias in the library of the University of Pretoria. We sang it ourselves and recorded it.
On the first night Volksteater had invited all the luminaries of politics because Heins was such a good buddy of theirs. Not one of them recognized the ‘Internationale’ when it was played, not even General van den Bergh, ‘Lank Hendrik’
8 A misspelling of Hendrik van den Bergh’s nickname, ‘Lang Hendrik’, literally ‘Tall Hendrik’. See Heidi Swart, ‘Intimidation, interception and break-ins: SA security forces and the threat of accountability’, Daily Maverick, 15 March 2019, available at https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-03-15-intimidation-interception-and-break-ins-sa-security-forces-and-the-threat-of-accountability/. though he was the head of the secret police! On that occasion I had a good chat with Minister de Klerk, father of the president who played such a historic role in our history. The minister offered me a cheroot and we smoked while having an interesting conversation. I must say that I liked him a lot in an other-than-the-usual setting. Nationalist politicians could be very nice people, far removed from the monsters they are now regarded as.
9 Schiess, ‘Chronicle’, 57–8.This anecdote provides a window into the heart of 1960s apartheid. At first glance, it might suggest that in encounters with other whites, the men maintaining it could tolerate the ideas that they outlawed elsewhere. More accurately, however, it demonstrates their complacency. They did not feel threatened by a play, let alone one from Switzerland that addressed concerns on the other side of the world. Rather than introducing new and subversive ideas, the Volksteater’s performances of Die Huwelik functioned as containment chambers, spaces in which extreme and dangerous fantasies could be safely enacted and enjoyed within a homogeneous community.
But this too must be said: while Dürrenmatt’s play pits opposing ideas against one another and stages their alchemy, it does not, by any means, advocate for communism. Saint-Claude is merely one character among many, and his philosophy represents just one of many extreme world views that the play implicates in the eruption of violent events. If anything, it suggests how unchangeable the world is, and how futile it is to hold such convictions.
In the end the revolutionary overthrow in
Die Ehe fails; the police are standing by armed with water hoses (‘Wendrohren’) to crush the uprising.
10 Dürrenmatt, Komödien I, 143. In Elferink’s translation, they carry machine guns (‘masjiengewere’), an escalation made for the benefit of its Afrikaans audiences.
11 Dürrenmatt, Die Huwelik, 40. As soon as the government gains the upper hand and the country begins to celebrate the return of economic and political stability, Saint-Claude is executed by his own party members – thus capping a grand night in the theatre for Van den Bergh and his colleagues.
The play’s final words would have comforted them that the play, at least on the surface, was really a religious one: ‘Opdat Sy heerlikheid luisterryk mag verrys/ Deur ons onmag en swakheid volbring,’ a straightforward translation of Dürrenmatt’s ‘Daß aufleuchte Seine Herrlichkeit,/ genährt durch unsere Ohnmacht’ (‘That his glory may light up/ fed by our helplessness’).
12 Dürrenmatt, Die Huwelik, 57; Dürrenmatt, Komödien I, 168.Any danger of these luminaries prematurely leaving and missing the conclusion was forestalled by the cyclical structure of the play itself. It begins at the end with Saint-Claude’s death to get the worst over with first, if only for ‘therapeutischen Gründen’ (‘therapeutic reasons’).
13 Dürrenmatt, Komödien I, 95.Demonstrating ‘humanity’s guilt in the debacle of humankind’, Schiess’s
Die Huwelik received praise in the English and Afrikaans press.
14 ‘die skuld van die mens aan die debakel van die mensdom’. H. G., ‘Huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi: Schiess sorg vir prikkelende opvoering’, Die Transvaler, 24 October 1966. Reviewers described it, variously, as ‘through-provoking’, ‘fresh’, and ‘strange’.
15 ‘prikkelend’, ‘vars’, ‘vreemd’. Ibid.; ‘Volksteater voor met vars stuk’, Die Transvaler, 30 September 1966; ‘“Mnr. Mississippi” vreemd, maar gryp jou aan’, Die Vaderland, 25 October 1966. Most of them avoided engaging with the play’s local resonances, focusing instead on Dürrenmatt’s purported status as a Protestant writer, based on a description of him in the play as a ‘zähschreibende Protestant’ (‘tough-writing Protestant’), rendered in Afrikaans ‘koppige Protestant’.
16 Dürrenmatt, Komödien I, 127; Dürrenmatt, Die Huwelik, 29.But in the context of his positive review, one journalist wrote: ‘Indeed, someone who didn’t know that the piece was written in 1952, and by Dürrenmatt, could easily have thought it refers to the current situation in South Africa.’
17 ‘Inderdaad sou iemand wat nie weet dat die stuk in 1952 geskryf is en deur Dürrenmatt nie, kon dink dat hy op die huidige toestande in Suid-Afrika sinspeel’. ‘Volksteater voor’. The other reviewer who registered this connection was less impressed, complaining that ‘the dragging in of a bit of topicality’ only served to disturb the spectator’s ‘world of illusion’.
18 ‘die insleep van ’n stukkie aktualiteit’, ‘wêreld van illusie’. ‘“Mnr. Mississippi” vreemd’. The precise nature of this intervention is lost to posterity, but it is clear Schiess was trying to highlight the play’s potential to speak to the South African situation. It is also clear that his attempt had little impact. The same reviewer commends Schiess for placing his insights into modern European theatre at the disposal of Afrikaans theatre, thereby making a unique and lasting contribution to the latter.
This reviewer wasn’t far off in describing the fruits of what had, over the years, taken on the form of a focused labour. By 1968 Schiess himself would boast of having contributed to ‘an interesting development, namely the transformation of a colonial dialect into the new culture language Afrikaans (previously, it was referred to as Kitchen Dutch)’.
19 ‘einer interessanten Entwicklung, nämlich der Umwandlung eines Kolonialdialektes in die neue Kultursprache Afrikaans (früher wurde es Kitchen-Dutch genannt)’. Mario Schiess to Herrn Reinhardt Stumm, n.d., correspondence, private collection. He most likely failed to recognize that contributing to the development of Afrikaans into a muscular ‘Kultursprache’ was also a contribution to apartheid itself. And so, perhaps Schiess’s work in the 1960s demonstrates, more than anything else, how fine the line was between resisting and maintaining the status quo while existing, and trying to prosper, in apartheid South Africa.
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Figure 13: Lambert Millar during the execution of Saint-Claude in the Volksteater’s Die huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi, 1966.