‘In mitigation I plead: It is the performing art to which I had an early bias. It is also, out of the four, the one most subject to controversy.’

From 17 November to 28 December 1969 Fourie went on a CAPAB-subsidized theatre tour to Europe. There, he encountered the work of a number of playwrights, including Frisch and Dürrenmatt. This trip led Fourie to conclude that ‘the central problem of theatre in South Africa is isolation’.4 Fourie in Grütter, ‘Interim Progress Report’, 69. One way to remedy this, he reasoned, was to engage European directors to work with South African actors. Abroad, Fourie had met several German directors including Dieter Reible and Peter Kleinschmidt, both of whom would later direct plays at CAPAB. Another remedy, he concluded – like Bartho Smit a decade earlier – was to translate the best of modern theatre into Afrikaans and present it to Afrikaners in their own language.

Naturally, the most significant factor behind the isolation Fourie identified was the playwrights’ boycott. Like Schiess, Fourie believed the stance taken by British playwrights was misguided and unnecessarily detrimental to the development of South African theatre. Fourie goes so far as to describe it as ‘onvergeeflik’ (‘unforgiveable’), pointing out that it was precisely because of Britain’s historically close cultural ties with South Africa that the resulting deprivation was so damaging.5 Fourie, author interview, 16 October 2020. Practically all that was left to them was Shakespeare, Fourie points out. It is no surprise that during his tenure at CAPAB, as many as six Afrikaans translations of Shakespeare were staged.

Wanting to ‘expose the Afrikaans audiences and the actors to a much bigger and wider world than they had become accustomed to since 1926 with the beginning of Afrikaans theatre’, Fourie was left with a conundrum.6 ‘bloot stel, die Afrikaanse gehore en die akteurs, aan ’n baie groter en wyer wêreld as waaraan hulle sedert 1926 met die begin van die Afrikaanse toneel gewoond was’. Ibid. He eventually went in search of repertoire ‘behind the iron curtain’, commissioning translations of the work of playwrights such as Pavel Kohout, Nikolai Erdman, and Václav Havel.7 Ibid. The plays from the Soviet world were remarkably relevant to the South African situation. Some of them might as well have been set on local soil, Fourie points out, remembering plays like Kohout’s August, August, August – translated by Nerina Ferreira and staged in 1970 – and Erdman’s Der Selbstmörder – translated by André P. Brink as Die Selfmoordenaar and staged in 1973. Advising him in his search for repertoire were the theatre personalities he had befriended abroad, among them the designer Raimond Schoop, who had brought the Swiss playwrights to Fourie’s attention and who would go on to design the sets of both Die huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi and Die Brandstigters.

Mulling over the circumstances under which he became acquainted with Dürrenmatt’s and Frisch’s work, Fourie concludes that it was a happy accident. The Swiss were among the few Western European playwrights who would grant South African performing rights to their works without difficulty, and for Fourie, it was ‘thoroughly wonderful’.8 ‘regstreeks wonderlik’. Ibid. Unlike the British with their ‘collective guilt complex’, the Swiss had no colonial conscience to assuage, only a ‘neutral, free spirit that flowed through everything and everywhere’.9 ‘kollektiewe skuldkompleks’, ‘neutral vrye gees wat deurgespoel het orals heen’. Ibid.

During Fourie’s well-documented ‘stormy years at CAPAB’, he was fired and reinstated more than once over the plays he programmed.10 See Nico Luwes, ‘Die stormjare by KRUIK’, in Pieter Fourie, ed. Olivier, 48–74; See also Nico Luwes, ‘Pieter Fourie (1940–) se bydrae as Afrikaanse dramaturg en kunsbestuurder: 1965–2010’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of the Free State, 2012). Like Manim and Francois Swart at PACT in the Transvaal, Fourie had to steer his way around a drama committee who were answerable to an executive committee populated by ‘puppets of the government’.11 ‘strooipoppe van die regering’. Fourie, author interview, 16 October 2020. Tasked with upholding the interests of the apartheid state, not only with respect to purely political issues, but also to the broader concerns of Afrikaner Christian Nationalism, they had the final say over what he could stage. In this, they acted as extensions of the official seat of government in the north. ‘It’s political censorship’, Fourie explains, ‘someone picks up a telephone in Pretoria and says it’s off and then it’s off.’12 ‘Dit is politieke sensuur, iemand tel ’n telefoon op in Pretoria en sê dit is af en dan is dit af.’ Fourie in Luwes, ‘Die stormjare’.

Indigenous South African plays and translations were read by CAPAB’s various committees with a view towards possible self-censorship. The very first text thought to be censored at CAPAB in this way was J. P. J. van Rensburg’s 1967 translation of Aristophanes’ ancient Greek comedy, Lysistrata, kept off the stage due to its ‘extremely vulgar and sometimes rather risqué’ text.13 In Grütter, ‘Interim Progress Report’, 444. At the time, even its translator thought it unsuitable for production, despite having had ‘a great deal of sinful delight translating it’.14 J. P. J. van Rensburg in ibid.

At CAPAB, Fourie actively challenged the structures trying to exercise control over his repertoire choices – interference, he believed, hampered the development of actors, audiences, and playwrights alike. Most of the resistance he encountered from the executive committee was not because of the translated plays he programmed, but due to the original Afrikaans ones. One of CAPAB’s mandates was to make opportunities available to local playwrights. But the literary landscape in which it operated was characterized by a newly complicated relationship between the Afrikaner establishment and Afrikaner writers.

In 1970 Fourie invited Bartho Smit to direct the first professional production of Putsonderwater, the play that had lost out to Dürrenmatt’s Die Besoek back in 1962. Days before the start of rehearsals, the chairman of the CAPAB board turned it down. The following year, when Fourie commissioned Smit to write a new play, Christine, with which to open the newly built Nico Malan Theatre, he again encountered opposition.15 For more information about the controversy surrounding Christine, see Luwes, ‘Die stormjare’, 62–4; see also Fourie, ‘Die einste hy’, 37–8. Fourie’s reaction to the production’s last-minute cancellation led to one of his dismissals. He was dismissed again, in 1979, after he condemned the executive committee’s decision not to stage an English translation of P. G. du Plessis’s ’n Seder val in Waterkloof. Fourie’s own plays also fell foul of the committees at CAPAB: Die Plaasvervangers, for example, which in 1979 was considered too controversial.

The Nico Malan is one of South Africa’s largest and most technologically advanced theatres. Like the Johannesburg Civic it, too, is based on European models, specifically the Opernhaus in Frankfurt am Main. And, like the Civic, it opened in 1971 with Afrikaans plays that were in fact translations: Uys Krige’s Afrikaans King Lear and Nerina Ferreira’s Afrikaans rendering of Georges Feydeau’s La Puce à l’oreille, staged with the title Hond se Gedagte.16 See Grütter, ‘Interim Progress Report’, 73.

During the generously funded glory years of Afrikaans theatre, the self-censorship of state-subsidized organizations still – as in 1962 – hampered the growth of relevant modern theatre concerned with daily life in South Africa. Playwrights such as Smit, who since the 1950s had been looking forward to an Afrikaans theatre capable of grappling with ‘our world and our own problems’, found themselves up against this reality time and again.17 ‘ons wêreld en ons eie probleme’. Smit to Neethling-Pohl, 24 November 1955. In the meantime, the Afrikaans theatre canon continued to constitute itself through translation.