‘And what are we thinking, we of the younger generation, who were not born when it happened or were too young to understand?’
2 Schiess, ‘Remembrance Day’.Die Meteoor was performed in July 1967, a few weeks after originally envisaged. As if trying to neutralize the excitement of the play’s attempted silencing, the conservative Afrikaans paper,
Die Vaderland, labelled the production simply as ‘vervelig’ (‘boring’).
3 C. Marais, ‘‘‘Die Meteoor” is vervelig as geheel’, Die Vaderland, 10 July 1967. Its reviewer found fault with the play itself, concluding that overemphasis on the comical had led to underdevelopment of its essential concerns. Yet elsewhere, the Afrikaans press couldn’t praise
Die Meteoor enough. The equally conservative
Die Transvaler carried a piece entitled ‘Amateurs skitterend in
Die Meteoor’, that read: ‘No fault can be found with
Die Meteoor on ethical or moral grounds. The piece is both tragic and comical, both satirical and glorifying.’
4 ‘Met Die Meteoor is daar op sedelike of morele gronde geen fout te vind nie. Dié stuk is beide tragies en komies, beide satiries en verheerlikend’. P. C., ‘Amateurs skitterend in Die Meteoor’, Die Transvaler, 11 July 1967. This particular reviewer went as far as to claim the Volksteater had made a grave mistake by withdrawing from the play.
That Schiess staged
Die Meteoor at all was a victory. Yet he did not think of his production as a success, concluding: ‘it had a lot to do with the theme of the play, people are somewhat uneasy about making fun of death.’
5 Schiess, ‘Chronicle’, 69. He also came to regard 1967 as a watershed year that ended ‘the smooth sailing that had marked my theatrical career up to now’.
6 Ibid. This wasn’t only due to the difficulties
Die Meteoor had picked up. He had also received uniformly negative reviews after staging Strindberg’s
Miss Julie and Shaw’s
Village Wooing with the Hakahana Players in Johannesburg, not least for his own performance. With his reputation having taken a hit, Schiess had also lost the support of the Volksteater, who, despite their conservatism, had for nearly a decade provided him a steady stream of opportunities. ‘Volksteater, after
Die Meteoor debacle surely would let some years go by before they asked me [to direct] again, if ever’, he reflected.
7 Ibid., 74.After 1967, Schiess began to produce films and direct his own plays. He still directed Frisch and Dürrenmatt, although less frequently. The first occasion was in 1968 after the American playwright Henry Denker had withdrawn permission for the Jewish Guild of Johannesburg to stage his
A Far Country because it would only be seen by segregated audiences. Schiess stepped in with an English production of Frisch’s
Andorra, staged in November 1968 at the Zionist Centre’s Guild Theatre. Two years later, he again staged one of Frisch’s plays,
Don Juan, or the Love of Geometry, in Michael Bullock’s English translation
, a Hakahana Players production that played at the Piet van der Walt Theatre in April and May 1970.
8 The cast consisted of Edward Harty, Etienne Weideman, Margaret Schiess, André Richter, Shirley Sacks, Jana Cilliers, Ueli Althaus, Mike Nixon, Pat Kaplan, Enone van der Bergh, Martin Burns, Lorenzo Costantiello, Monika Müller, Sylvia Müller, Avril Lewis, Sandra Bloch, Rosana Costantiello, Stephanie van Niekerk, Klaus Wasserthal, Sarel Nienaber, and Roy Bulkin. Programme for Don Juan, or the Love of Geometry at the Piet van der Walt Theatre, Pretoria, April–May 1970, Hakahana Players, private collection. Some ten years later, in 1981, he staged Dürrenmatt’s adaptation of his novel
Die Panne, after having attended one of the Swiss playwright’s rehearsals for the piece in Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Staged in the original German with the amateur Theandaba Spielbühne group,
Die Panne was seen in Pretoria and in Windhoek in Namibia. But after
Die Meteoor in 1967, Schiess never again staged a Swiss play in Afrikaans.
The two reviews of Die Meteoor discussed above parallel the play’s polarized reception in Europe. But they also, in a fitting conclusion to this fascinating chapter in South African theatre history, speak to the paradoxes and ambiguity of white Afrikaner life under apartheid. The story of Schiess and his Afrikaans Swiss plays offers a glimpse into the lives of the people making and consuming Afrikaans theatre in the 1960s. The individuals who made up the ranks of the Volksteater, the translators they commissioned, their audiences, and their reviewers, undoubtedly benefitted from the social and economic opportunities created by the regime. But they were not its uniform mouthpieces, nor did they necessarily share its conservative viewpoints. Instead, many enjoyed the European art that reached them and the controversial ideas it explored. Yet all the while, instead of wielding their untapped power to effect change, most of them slumbered away in comfort and complacency while their elected leaders did what they thought necessary to preserve the last bastion of white culture and privilege in Africa.
Chronicling this history as a white Afrikaner who was eight years old at the time of South Africa’s first democratic election, I find myself echoing Frisch when he writes: ‘If they are not immune, why should I be so confident of my own immunity?’ In his sketchbook, Frisch develops the theme: ‘People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions.’
9 Frisch, Sketchbook, 231.Heavily influenced by Frisch, Schiess was asking similar questions and reaching similar conclusions. In an undated handwritten document among his papers entitled ‘Remembrance Day’ commemorating the end of the First World War, he reflects on subsequent wars and global atrocities.
Also in us resides the diabolical next to the divine, and since we claim brotherhood of mankind with Goethe, Schopenhauer, Bach, Beethoven, brotherhood of mankind with Himmler, Heydrich, Hitler follows in its wake. Only if we have the courage to recognize this and stop our habitual hypocrisy of blaming others first (‘it’s always the other fellow’, ‘we could never do that’) have we got a chance of betterment. If the memory of the death and destruction of the last war coupled with the realisation that it was possibly the most civilised people in Europe that was capable of those atrocities makes us recognise the dormant monster in us, then we can possibly see a meaning in it all: a grim warning that culture and civilisation does not save us from the evil within us (which takes over so much easier, when we form a mass – lynching, war, etc), that what we require is self-knowledge and self-discipline, that before we can conquer the world we must conquer ourselves.
10 Schiess, ‘Remembrance Day’.Schiess obtained his South African citizenship in 1969, having finally exchanged Europe for the ‘red earth’ at the tip of Africa, and all of its attendant problems.
11 Michèle Schiess, interview, 9 June 2024. By then he had tried for nearly a decade in a tiny corner of the Transvaal to pry open cracks for the views of his former countrymen, Frisch and Dürrenmatt, to filter through, reassuring himself, as he once wrote to Frisch, that ‘those who have eyes will see what is meant’.
12 Schiess to Frisch, circa 1963.~
Figure 17: Mario Schiess in 1967 on the set of Die Meteoor.