‘These minutes sometimes refer to, but seldom include, the deliberations of the various arts committees. […] Naturally minutes frequently conceal as much as they reveal.’

Unaware of the existing translation by Rita Elferink, Fourie produced a new one. Yet, lacking a working knowledge of German, he translated the play from an unspecified existing English translation. In Bloemfontein in 1972, he had also taken a measure of poetic licence in staging it with the title Olympia en haar vryers.5 The cast included Louw Verwey, Henk Hugo, Johan Botha, Louise Mollett-Prinsloo, Jan Prinsloo, George Barnes, Trudie Taljaard, and Leon Cloete. Programme for Olympia en haar vryers at PACOFS, Bloemfontein, 1972, PACOFS, private collection. Traveling through South Africa as a young playwright, Fourie explains, he had come to understand the tremendous importance of titles. ‘For us, especially for Afrikaners in the countryside, Die huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi says absolutely nothing’, he points out. ‘He doesn’t have a Google where he can go read up about it. He doesn’t have an archive or a library or anything […] and it’s really a bit of whoring but I decided Olympia and her Lovers will attract them. And they damn well came!’6 ‘Die huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi sê vir ons, Afrikaners op die platteland veral, absoluut niks. Hy’t nie ’n Google waar hy kan gaan oplees nie. Hy’t nie ’n argief of ‘n biblioteek of niks nie […] en dit is eerlikwaar so ’n bietjie hoereer, maar ek het besluit Olympia en haar vryers gaan, gaan hulle trek. En hulle het verdomp gekom!’ Fourie, author interview, 16 October 2020.

To be fair to Fourie, even the character Saint-Claude admits in Dürrenmatt’s play that it might as well have been titled ‘Frau Anastasia und ihre Liebhaber’ (‘Ms Anastasia and her Lovers’).7 Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi (Zürich: Arche, 1966), 13. Meanwhile, changing Anastasia’s name to Olympia wasn’t Fourie’s invention. In a handful of early English-language productions of The Marriage of Mr Mississippi, the female character is also named Olympia. The earliest of these I could trace, staged at the Arts Theatre in London in 1959, used a translation and adaptation by Eric Peters and Robert Schnorr.8 See ‘The Marriage of Mr Mississippi’, Theatricalia, available at https://theatricalia.com/play/ayw/the-marriage-of-mr-mississippi/production/prp. Fourie never specified which English version he used to produce his Afrikaans text, but it seems likely that it was the same one. In any event, by the time Fourie staged the play at CAPAB in 1973, it was with the same title Schiess had used in 1966, Die huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi, its female character now named Anastasia.

Because of how Fourie produced the Afrikaans text, a comparison between it and Dürrenmatt’s original has limited usefulness. Suffice it to say that any domestication took place via a detour through London. This much is clear from his replacement in the play of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.9 See Friedrich Dürrenmatt, ‘Die huwelik van mnr. Mississippi’, trans. Pieter Fourie, n.d., unpublished manuscript held by the National Drama Library, Bloemfontein, 17.

Two sections of the play are nevertheless worth singling out. This is the debate between Mississippi and Saint-Claude about the respective merits of communism and Christianity, on the one hand, and their explicit memories of male prostitution, on the other. While the former is accurately conveyed in Fourie’s translation, the latter is not, reduced simply to ‘onsself aan perverte verkoop’ (‘sell ourselves to perverts’) to earn money ‘in oomblikke van walging’ (‘in moments of disgust’).10 Ibid., 41. Perhaps Fourie had inherited the latter rephrasing, and Dürrenmatt’s ‘geschändeten Hintern’ (‘violated behinds’) had been too explicit even for London audiences in the late 1950s.11 Dürrenmatt, Komödien I, 121. Either way, the successful staging of Fourie’s translation suggests, yet again, that contentious ideas about religion and politics had an easier route to the stage when communicated through translated works and not indigenous Afrikaans plays.

Like Schiess, Fourie set out in his production to underline the play’s contemporary and local relevance. Elements he introduced included dressing one of Saint-Claude’s assassins in an American combat uniform and having him carry an American flag. Most obviously a reference to the American war on communism, it evokes the persistent rumour that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was tracking Mandela’s movements in 1962 and that it was the United States who had tipped off South African police to his location shortly before his arrest. Another of Fourie’s interventions was the introduction of African drums to the orchestration of the ‘Internationale’. Yet another that ‘when the European revolution swells, the threatening voices outside the windows are African’.12 Owen Williams, ‘A fine, imaginative production of Dürrenmatt play’, The Argus, 29 October 1973.

The available reception history suggests that Fourie’s efforts were rather more successful than Schiess’s had been. Critic Peter Reynolds, acutely aware of the ‘political truths’ of the play and their proximity to South African audiences, pointed out that ‘the constant application to our own situation, never laboured or even directly introduced by Fourie or his players, impinges so strongly on the imagination that one is often hard put to laugh’.13 Reynolds, ‘Dürrenmatt, with a refreshing lack of reverence’. Owen Williams, meanwhile, reflecting on the ‘many ambiguities’ in Dürrenmatt’s work, concluded: ‘Fourie makes some of these meanings a little more clear and, while retaining the universality of the play, gives it a distinctly local relevance.’14 Williams, ‘A fine, imaginative production’.

Yet again, we must conclude that the ambiguities inherent in the Swiss playwrights’ work made their plays uniquely suited as a vehicle of thought-provoking theatre in South Africa. The committees at CAPAB, after all, evaluated texts, not the end products of the rehearsal process. Along the way, they underestimated what the politically motivated director could add in an imaginative staging.

But even after successive exclusively white audiences had seen Fourie’s Die huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi, the play didn’t attract unwanted attention from the executive committee of CAPAB, nor from higher up. Clearly, even if foreign plays exposed audiences to unfamiliar and contentious ideas, they still weren’t perceived as a serious challenge to the apartheid state. Ultimately, they were protected from political interference because directors could argue that they were about events and people far removed from South Africa. Again, we see that translated texts benefited from the ability to carry their message under the camouflage of the foreign.