‘No good blaming a higher power, it is always the will of the masses. But the collective intelligence of the mass is less than that of an individual moron.’

Like previous Volksteater productions, Der Meteor had been Schiess’s play of choice. Translated by Henriette Lemmer, it had been scheduled to play at the Little Theatre in Pretoria attached to the Technical Training College and owned by the Department of Education. Yet two weeks before the run, the college management read the script of Die Meteoor and refused the use of the venue due to ‘the play’s candour on matters of religion and sex’.4 Baneshik, ‘“Meteor” is back’. The Volksteater, described by Schiess at this point in his memoirs as ‘a conservative Afrikaans organization’, ‘felt they could no longer be associated’ and withdrew from the production.5 Schiess, ‘Chronicle’, 68. The details of this attempt to censor Dürrenmatt have not survived, though, at the time, the pro-government Die Burger reported that pressure had come from high up (‘op hoë vlak’) to prevent the play from being performed at all.6 ‘Opvoering verbied oor seks’, Die Burger, 26 June 1967.

But Schiess was nothing if not an independent theatre-maker. He had long since established a vehicle to stage whatever he wanted to, even if he had to carry the costs himself. So Schiess simply ploughed ahead and produced the play as a Hakahana Players production, staging it at the 452-seater Piet van der Walt Theatre in the Pretoria Showgrounds.

Owned by the Pretoria City Council and presumably no less vulnerable to government pressure, the Piet van der Walt Theatre was available to Schiess, one imagines, because he had been instrumental in it being built. Schiess was approached in 1964 by Stauch Vorster Architects (established by the German-born architect Hellmut Stauch) to be the quantity surveyor on the project, where his experience in the theatre proved critical. He had been asked to keep costs under R100,000, a sum he describes in his memoirs as ‘a bit of a joke’.7 Schiess, ‘Chronicle’, 51. Yet by ‘cutting out everything that was not absolutely essential’, including air-conditioning and stage machinery, and making do with minimal stage-lighting, he stayed within budget. ‘Theatre can be made without all these “luxuries”’, he points out.8 Ibid., 51–2. By 1967, Schiess’s unusual strategy of working as quantity surveyor by day and director by night had proved remarkably resilient for making theatre in apartheid South Africa, validating his long-standing faith in amateur theatre.

In producing Die Meteoor, Schiess had the support of his ‘enthusiastic’ cast, ‘who were all livid’ at the attempt to derail their production.9 ‘Banned play finds a home’, Pretoria News, 23 June 1967; Schiess, ‘Chronicle’, 68. And so, when the curtain went up on the Hakahana Players’ production, it was with the same Volksteater players.10 The cast of Die Meteoor consisted of Aldo Behrens, Emsie Botha, Werner Zybrands, Heins du Preez, André Meij, Reon Meij, Laurika Behrens, Deon Hugo, Evert Dommisse, Pieter van Niekerk, Enone van der Bergh, Marina Meij, Christa Zylstra, and Menno Mennen. Programme for Die Meteoor at the Piet van der Walt Theatre, 5–9 July 1967, Hakahana Players, private collection. Many of them had appeared in previous Dürrenmatt and Frisch plays. Emsie Botha had even acted in all of them – Die Brandstigters in 1962, Die Fisici in 1963, Andorra in 1964, and Die Huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi in 1966 – before appearing in Die Meteoor in 1967 as Olga, the former call-girl turned wife of the Nobel prize-winning writer Wolfgang Schwitter.