‘It is open to speculation where the responsibility for the application of moral strictures lies. However, South Africa has a censorship system which – within the inherent limitations of any such system – is currently acknowledged to work tolerably well.’

Fourie was incredulous: ‘Now there’s first another old board meeting and God knows what else. Now we ask, but how, how do we explain this to Equity or a theatre practitioner abroad if we want to conduct negotiations? How, how do we defend it if it comes our way? No, they don’t care. The big reason is our volk isn’t ready yet, these are the exact words, our volk isn’t ready yet to share toilets. Can you believe it?’4 ‘Nou is dit eers weer ’n ou raadsvergadering en die God weet wat alles. Nou vra ons, nou maar hoe verduidelik ons dit vir Equity of vir ’n teaterpraktisyn in die buiteland as ons onderhandelinge wil voer? Hoe, hoe verdedig ons dit as dit nou ons kant toe kom? Nee, maar hulle gee nie om nie. Die groot rede is ons volk is nog nie gereed, dis die presiese woorde, ons volk is nog nie gereed om toilette te deel nie. Can you believe it?’ Fourie, author interview, 16 October 2020.

To his relief, the announcement was quickly rescinded and the theatre instead opened to all races, without restrictions, and on all days of the week. The decision was widely praised by the press, described as ‘a blow to petty apartheid’ and ‘a major change in the Government’s attitude over the years to race mixing’.5 Tom Copeland, ‘Nico: A blow to petty apartheid’, Cape Times, 30 January 1975. Yet this ruling came just too late for the next Swiss play Fourie programmed at CAPAB, an Afrikaans production of Frisch’s Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie, staged in the Nico Malan from 17 January to 1 February 1975.6 The cast included Mees Xteen, Pieter Geldenhuys, Liz Dick, Pieter Joubert, Louise Mollett-Prinsloo, Jana Cilliers, Siegfried Mynhardt, Neels Coetzee, Grethe Fox, Nerina Ferreira, Jan Prinsloo, Etienne Puren, Alan Leas, Jonathan Rands, Pierre van Pletzen, Jane Auld, Margot de Villiers, Hildegard Fobian, Suzanne Goldberg, Lindsay Groves, Gillian Harris, Judith Krummeck, Moira Mason, Bo Petersen, and Johan Swart. Programme for Don Juan of Die liefde vir die meetkunde at the Nico Malan Theatre, Cape Town, January–February 1975, CAPAB, Artscape Archive. And so the next presentation of Swiss theatre was, yet again, for whites only.

Fourie was not involved in either the direction or translation of Frisch’s Don Juan. For the former, he engaged Mavis Taylor, a lecturer at the drama school of the University of Cape Town who frequently directed at The Space Theatre and who had, since 1968, directed a number of plays for CAPAB. To produce the Afrikaans text, Fourie commissioned the polyglot Nerina Ferreira, a prolific translator of European plays and an iconic Afrikaans actress and director.

Born in Cape Town in 1921, Ferreira was the granddaughter of the last president of the independent Boer republic of the Orange Free State.7 Ferreira’s biographical sketch was compiled from the following sources: Danie Stander, ‘“Darling, ek is onrondneukbaar”: Intertalige en intersemiotiese vertaling in TRUK se 1983-produksie van Nerina Ferreira se Afrikaanse vertaling van William Shakespeare se The Taming of the Shrew as Die vasvat van ’n feeks’, LitNet Akademies 18, no. 3 (2021): 24–58; Igsaan Salie, ‘A colourful career found in translation’, The Argus, 22 April 2006; Amanda Botha, ‘Ferreira ’n hoeksteen van SA teater’, Die Burger, 14 June 2012; Nerina Ferreira in Sandra op ’n drafstap: Nerina Ferreira, television programme, Foxwood TV, 2018, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FNyU1DyxNo&t=1162s. After obtaining a Master’s degree in Afrikaans at the University of Cape Town and after a stint working as a journalist, Ferreira travelled to London where she qualified as a podiatrist. On her return, she opened her own podiatry clinic while working part-time as a schoolteacher. Her involvement in theatre began when she took up her first role with the respected amateur Kaapstadse Afrikaanse Toneelgeselskap (KAT), an antecedent of the Volksteater. In 1964, she had her professional debut as an actress at CAPAB, the start of a long relationship with the organization during which she also translated and directed for them.

Fourie remembers that Ferreira could translate from eleven languages; other sources claim that she could read and understand up to fourteen.8 See ‘Nerina Ferreira’, Encyclopedia of South African Theatre, Film, Media and Performance (ESAT), available at https://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerina_Ferreira; See also Stander, ‘“Darling, ek is onrondneukbaar”’. Among the roughly seventy works of prose and forty plays she translated are Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Långstrump books, Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms, and Feydeau’s La Puce à l’oreille which opened the Nico Malan in 1971. Sometimes Ferreira ascribed her multilingualism to being exposed to different languages at a young age – her mother spoke French, while her grandfather spoke German.9 See Salie, ‘A colourful career’. At other times, she credited ‘all the sailors with whom I had slept’ after meeting them at the iconic Cape Town nightclub Darryl’s.10 ‘by al die matrose by wie ek geslaap het’. Pieter Fourie, interview with Danie Stander, 14 June 2021. Referring to Ferreira’s playful jest, her nephew Pieter de Vos points out: ‘But the truth is that she resisted the stereotyping of the old national concept of Wife and Mother, exemplary in the service of others’.11 ‘Maar die waarheid was dat sy haar verset het teen die stereotipering van die ou nasionale konsep van Vrou en Moeder, voorbeeldig in diens van ander.’ Pieter de Vos in Stander, ‘“Darling, ek is onrondneukbaar”’, 50.

Fourie describes Ferreira as ‘a remarkable woman, a complete individualist’ who ‘didn’t care what people thought about her’.12 ‘’n merkwaardige mens, heeltemal enkeling, sy steur haar aan niemand nie’. Fourie, interview with Danie Stander, 14 June 2021. As a translator, she was simply ‘fearless’, her work ‘helping to create the whole revolution of enlightenment in the theatre’.13 ‘vreesloos’, ‘gehelp om die hele revolusie van verligtheid in die teater te skep.’ Ibid. He also recalls how she used to wait for the lights to dim in CAPAB’s whites-only theatres before bringing her coloured domestic worker in to watch her plays.

Written in 1952 and revised in 1961, Frisch’s Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie subverts historical treatments of the Don Juan myth to present a hero in search of a male identity separate from sex and his female counterpart.14 For scholarly analyses of Frisch’s Don Juan, see Klaus van den Berg, ‘Spielraum in Max Frisch’s Graf Öderland and Don Juan: Transparency as mode of performance’, in A Companion to the Works of Max Frisch, ed. Berwald, 23–38; See also Peter Ruppert, ‘Max Frisch’s Don Juan: The seductions of geometry’, Monatshefte 67, no. 3 (1975): 237–48. As such, the play reflects the author’s concern with the wearing of masks and the imposition of roles, themes he later returned to in Andorra and his novel Stiller. Frisch’s Don Juan desires to be left alone to practise geometry. Instead, women are magnetically drawn to him, and so he allows himself to be trapped in the roles of seducer and murderer of jealous husbands until he is bored to abstraction. Untouched by divine justice despite repeated efforts from the church and society to bring him to heel, he finally stages his own descent into hell in an attempt to escape. Yet his plan is only partly successful. Finally, Don Juan can only find refuge in his domestication, by taking up the roles of husband and father that he has so long resisted. Forced to acknowledge a woman as an individual and more than a sexual object, he is able to make an existential movement out of the myth, even if he is eternally captive to his new subjectivity, represented by the capacious and shaded grounds of his wife’s castle.

Unlike Fourie, Ferreira translated from Frisch’s German. Barring a handful of errors, her Don Juan is a close rendering of Frisch’s Don Juan, driven, above all, by a foreignizing strategy.15 Errors include translating ‘kippt sein glas’ (‘downs his glass’) as ‘stamp sy glas om’ (‘knocks his glass over’) and ‘Marsch auf den Bock’ (‘get moving’) as ‘gaan kry jou sit daarbo op die bok’ (‘go sit on top of the deer’). Max Frisch, Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965), 86, 82; Max Frisch, Don Juan of Die liefde vir die meetkunde, trans. Nerina Ferreira, n.d., manuscript, Departement Afrikaans & Algemene Literatuurwetenskap, University of South Africa, 86, 82. She retains all person and place names, even the Latin ‘Pater’ of the Catholic Priest, Diego, using it as common noun in the dialogue as well. In a number of cases, she also eschews idiomatic Afrikaans equivalents in favour of imitating the German: ‘Gott sei Dank’ is translated as ‘Die Vader sy dank’, for example, and ‘Halt! Wer da?’ isn’t translated at all.16 Frisch, Don Juan oder Die Liebe, 91, 46; Frisch, Don Juan of Die liefde, 91, 42.

Yet elsewhere, Ferreira does find idiomatic Afrikaans equivalents for German expressions, and so her translation – like all translations, to a greater or lesser extent – also domesticates Frisch. ‘Junge! Junge!’ (‘Boy! Boy!’) is rendered as ‘So ’n klein rakker!’ (‘Such a little rascal!’), for example, and ‘Lug und Trug’ (‘lies and deceit’) as ‘’n sluwe plannetjie’ (‘a cunning plan’).17 Frisch, Don Juan oder Die Liebe, 9, 38; Frisch, Don Juan of Die liefde, 3, 34. In singular instances, whether deliberate or not, these domesticating choices also perpetuate the values of Afrikaner Christian nationalism: Frisch’s ‘O Gott’ (‘Oh God’) becomes ‘Ag, hemel’ (‘oh, heavens’).18 Frisch, Don Juan oder Die Liebe, 76–7; Frisch, Don Juan of Die liefde, 75–6. Like the Afrikaans translators before her, Ferreira had to contend with the fact that for most Afrikaners in the mid-1970s ‘O God’ was a shocking and deeply blasphemous utterance, resonating very differently than ‘O Gott’ in German.

A more notable semantic shift occurs with Ferreira’s choice to render ‘Braut’ as ‘nooientjie’ (‘unmarried young woman’ or ‘girlfriend’) in the third act.19 Frisch, Don Juan oder Die Liebe, 45; Frisch, Don Juan of Die liefde, 41. When Don Juan sleeps with his best friend’s significant other in Ferreira’s translation, adultery in the strictest sense has not taken place. But this is a curious intervention. Elsewhere, the play’s treatment of sex and infidelity is unflinchingly communicated, earning Ferreira’s translation the label ‘swift and racy’.20 Owen Williams, ‘Don Juan of high visual style’, The Argus, 20 January 1975. Interviewed shortly before her death, she remembered receiving criticism over the years for translating ‘rude words’ into Afrikaans, pointing out that she had to, out of respect for the original author. She emphasized: ‘I wasn’t put in as a censor, I was there to translate.’21 Salie, ‘A colourful career’.

This ethos is clearly discernible in her Don Juan. In it, the owner of the brothel still counts several bishops among her clients, and still operates under the protection of the state. Don Juan still sleeps with his married mother-in-law, whose previous extramarital relationship with Pater Diego is repeatedly hinted at. Don Juan’s hands are still uniquely capable of locating the fountains of lust of married women. After bringing countless of them to orgasm, ‘hulle monde, vertrek van die vervoering, en hul oë ook, hulle oë waterig en op skrefies getrek van die wellus’ (‘their mouths, distorted with ecstasy, and their eyes as well, their eyes watery and narrowed with lust’), and murdering the husbands who sought to avenge them, his secular world view still has a place for neither heaven nor hell, nor divine judgement.22 Frisch, Don Juan of Die liefde, 66.

Of course, sex and infidelity are integral to the well-worn story of Don Juan, even to Frisch’s subversion of it, and Ferreira’s text would have been a different play without them. Don Juan wasn’t exactly a new play when Fourie programmed it at CAPAB. Did its treatment of sex and immorality have the power to shock a South African audience in 1975, decades after it was written? It seems not. Although not well-attended, the play enjoyed a positive critical reception. Taylor’s production was described as ‘stimulating, bizarre and multi-levelled’, with ‘the geometric set […] a constant reminder of Juan’s divided self, and its perfect forms ironically upstaging the chaotic relationships enacted by confused man’.23 Glennifer Gillespie, ‘Don Juan the doomed hero’, Cape Times, 20 January 1975. Owen Williams, meanwhile, described it as a ‘very skilled, at times near-perfect piece of work’.24 Williams, ‘Don Juan’. The play’s many references to sex and infidelity, including those that involve the clergy, were not censored in any way and, judging its critical reception from newspapers and CAPAB’s yearly report, it caused no controversy whatsoever.

Indeed, that year, CAPAB had bigger problems than censoring a Swiss playwright’s depiction of infidelity and sex. Facing pressure to open the Nico Malan to all races, they also had to handle the controversy surrounding the last-minute cancellation in April 1975 of yet another one of Bartho Smit’s original Afrikaans plays, Bacchus in die Boland, which depicts a reversal of roles between white master and coloured labourer.25 See Grütter, ‘Interim Progress Report’, 448–9.

Perhaps Don Juan was an especially apposite choice for 1975, containing, as it did, a pointed barb in the closing scene. In Frisch’s play, Don Juan, his wife Miranda, and the Bishop are discussing the dramatization of his story into a play currently showing in Seville, ‘Der Burlador von Sevilla […] oder Der Steinerne Gast’ (‘The Trickster of Seville […] or The Stone Guest’).26 Frisch, Don Juan oder Die Liebe, 89. This is a reference to the early literary treatment of the Don Juan legend traditionally attributed to Tirso de Molina (pseudonym of Gabriel Téllez). Reporting that he thankfully isn’t a character in the play, the Bishop reflects, ‘Die Vader sy dank – anders sou ons dit mos verbied het, en die teater het immers toneelstukke nodig’ (‘Thank God – otherwise we’d have to censor it, and the theatre, after all, needs plays’).27 Frisch, Don Juan of Die liefde, 66.

And so, we must conclude, finally, that the situation is more complicated than it might appear from Hermien Dommisse’s introduction to Smit’s collected translations where she writes: ‘The Afrikaans theatre has long laboured under a crushing dearth of original plays. The demand is so much greater than the supply, and were it not for translated works, the doors of many a theatre would have been shut.’28 ‘Die Afrikaanse toneel gaan reeds jare lank gebuk onder ’n knellende armoede aan oorpronklike toneelwerke. Die aanvraag is soveel groter as die aanbod, en was dit nie vir vertaalde werke nie sou die deure van menige teaters toegestaan het.’ Dommisse, ‘Voorwoord’, i.