‘It’s not a time where you can believe what happened’.

By 1980 Mohr had directed and translated a number of European playwrights at CAPAB including Anton Chekhov and Peter Shaffer. In 1964 already, he had directed James Kirkup’s English-language translation of Die Physiker. But Mohr was also a fierce champion of original indigenous theatre and an even fiercer critic of the forces impeding its free development. During his inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town in 1973, he had argued that South African theatre was being fed ‘a diet of contraceptive pills’, and that the abundant fertility of local playwrights was deliberately suppressed by the country’s segregationist laws that inhibited intercultural contact.4 In James Ambrose Brown, ‘No viable S.A. theatre until barriers go down’, Cape Times, 26 May 1973. ‘To have any viability at all, our theatre must now act out South Africa’, he continued, condemning it for failing ‘to face squarely and fearlessly, our own time and our own fellow men’.

Mohr was speaking specifically about the country’s failure to capitalize on its multiculturalism, and on the resultant sterility that he perceived in the work of local playwrights. In the meantime, he continued translating and staging European plays. The last of these, Die Fisici, staged only four years before his death, would come remarkably close to ‘acting out South Africa’, though perhaps not in the way he had intended, or foreseen.

Mohr’s Die Fisici is a free, fluent, and domesticated translation. A few examples suffice. ‘Ungemein kräftig’ (‘exceptionally strong’) was rendered as ‘Sterk soos ’n bees’ (‘strong as an ox’), ‘lassen Sie mich bei Salomo empfehlen’ (‘recommend me to Solomon’) as ‘’n klapsoen vir lekker ou Koning Salomo’ (‘a smackeroo for good old King Solomon’), and ‘Trösten Sie sich: Ich Sie auch’ (‘Comfort yourself: I [thought you were mad] too’) as ‘Dankie vir die kompliment. En ek dog jy’s totaal bekonkel’ (‘Thank you for the compliment. And I thought you were totally crazy’).5 Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Die Physiker (Zürich: Arche, 1962), 17, 52, 56; Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Die Fisici, trans. Robert Mohr, manuscript, 1980, Artscape Archive, 6, 42, 46. In the press, Mohr, who also directed the piece, was praised for ‘livening up a fairly conventional piece of theatre – largely due to his excellent translation of the script into punchy, crystal clear Afrikaans’.6 Ronelle Scheffer, ‘Die Fisici is pure delight’, Daily Dispatch, 22 May 1980.

Yet, even so, it seems he failed to reach his target audience. Several reviewers remarked on the play’s poor attendance, even on opening night.7 See ibid.; see also W. E. G. Louw, ‘Die Fisici van Dürrenmatt: Hy praat nog met óns tyd’, Die Burger, 14 March 1980. Admittedly, there had never been a huge audience for the Afrikaans Dürrenmatt and Frisch plays that Fourie programmed. In 1973 Die huwelik van Mnr. Mississippi had attracted less than half-full houses, filled to 43% capacity. In 1975, Don Juan of Die liefde vir die meetkunde could only boast an audience attendance of 36%. This figure was only slightly improved upon by Die Brandstigters in 1978 with 38%, a play that was labelled in CAPAB’s yearly report as ‘the most unpopular’ of the year.8 Annual Report: Cape Performing Arts Board, 1978, Artscape Archive. In contrast, the original Afrikaans ’n Seder val in Waterkloof had attracted nearly full houses at 92%. With Die Fisici in 1980, audience attendance fell to an all-time low of only 25%.

Perhaps even by then, Afrikaans audiences had not warmed to Fourie’s Eurocentric programming. Long accustomed to the cozy local realism that had so irked Louw, their taste had not developed through regular exposure to new writing. Unprepared, they were ‘not ready for it in such an overdose’, as veteran actor Paul Malherbe remarked later in the same decade.9 Grütter, ‘Interim Progress Report’, 78. And so we must conclude that efforts to ameliorate the effect of the playwrights’ boycott by staging whatever international modern theatre was still available to South African directors and actors was only partly successful, just as the boycott itself never had the political impact its international proponents intended.

Die Fisici’s reviewers blamed its poor attendance on other factors. For W. E. G. Louw – for whom it was one of the best Afrikaans plays of the previous few years – it called into doubt Afrikaans audiences’ ability to distinguish between good and bad theatre. Others felt that Die Physiker had simply become dated and irrelevant. As when Schiess first staged it in 1963, the play was interpreted in 1980 as an exploration of the moral responsibility of scientific progress, particularly in relation to the atomic bomb. But now, critic Robert Greig asked: ‘Do the exquisite ethical dilemmas The Bomb provokes actually matter? In any case, The Bomb has become domesticated – it’s no longer out there, but at Three Mile Island and Koeberg’, he wrote, referring to nuclear power stations in the USA and South Africa, the latter then still under construction.10 Robert Greig, ‘Icy direction of sardonic play’, P. E. Evening Post, 19 May 1980.

Of course, in order to build Koeberg in the first place, South Africa had been conducting nuclear research as early as the 1960s. What Greig evidently didn’t know is that the country’s covert nuclear weapons programme was trying to make its own atomic bombs.11 For more information on South Africa’s nuclear weapons programme, see David Albright, ‘South Africa’s secret nuclear weapons’, Institute for Science and International Security report, Washington, 1994, available at https://www.isis-online.org/publications/southafrica/ir0594.html. The first of these was produced in 1982. By the time the programme ended in 1989, its arsenal had grown to six, with another one in production. In 1990, under orders from President de Klerk, South Africa dismantled its nuclear bombs, becoming the first country to voluntarily renounce the nuclear weapons it had developed itself. A celebrated move that paved the way for South Africa to rejoin the international community, popular suspicion nevertheless held that behind this urgent dismantling was the apartheid state’s fear of nuclear weapons falling into black hands.12 See Bill Keller, ‘South Africa says it built 6 atom bombs’, New York Times, 25 March 1993, available at https://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/25/world/south-africa-says-it-built-6-atom-bombs.html. Evidently, even as Greig was penning his review, the ‘exquisite ethical dilemmas’ he wrote about were hardly the stuff of history.

What Greig and Die Fisici’s small audience also couldn’t know was that South Africa was about to generate its own urgent questions about the role of science in modern warfare, illustrating with awful clarity what happens when scientists abdicate moral responsibility to their governments. From 1981 the South African Defence Force’s clandestine Project Coast brought together scientists, doctors, and veterinarians to develop and produce chemical and biological agents to control the domestic situation and to eliminate opponents of the apartheid regime.13 For a comprehensive overview of the activities of ‘Project Coast’, see Chandré Gould and Peter Folb, Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme (United Nations, 2002), available at https://unidir.org/publication/project-coast-apartheids-chemical-and-biological-warfare-programme/. Heading the country’s chemical and biological warfare programme was the country’s very own ‘evil scientist’, Dr Wouter Basson, later dubbed ‘Dr Death’ by the press and drawing comparisons with Josef Mengele for his alleged medical experiments on human beings.14 See Mia Swart, ‘The Wouter Basson prosecution: The closest South Africa came to Nuremberg?’, Heidelberg Journal of International Law 68, no. 1 (2008): 209–26.

This programme’s murderous activities, pieced together from revelations at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998 and Basson’s criminal prosecution in 1999, are grotesque enough to come straight out of a Dürrenmatt novel or play. Murder weapons they reportedly developed and supplied to defence force operatives included poison-concealing signet rings, deodorant containing salmonella, whisky laced with herbicide, cigarettes containing anthrax, vials of cholera designed to be added to drinking water, and injectable mamba-venom.15 See Gould and Folb, Project Coast, 89–99, 159–67. Yet, far more sinister was Basson’s alleged involvement in researching a race-specific bacterial weapon, the use of pheromones for crowd control, and the development of a vaccine designed to cause infertility in black South Africans.16 Ibid., 238; see also Miles Jackson, ‘A conspiracy to commit genocide: Anti-fertility research in apartheid’s chemical and biological weapons programme’, Journal of International Criminal Justice 13, no. 5 (2015): 933–50.

‘Ons weet klaar wat die mens doen met die wapens wat hy reeds het. Wat hy gaan doen met die wapens wat ek moontlik kan maak, kan ons ons net verbeel’ (‘We already know what humanity does with the weapons that he already has. What he will do with the weapons that I can enable, we can only imagine’), Möbius points out in Die Fisici.17 Dürrenmatt, Die Fisici, 54. Explaining his decision to remove his scientific knowledge from the world, he declares: ‘Ons wetenskap het verskriklik geword, ons navorsing gevaarlik, ons kennis dodelik’ (‘Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our knowledge deadly’).18 Ibid., 55. Indeed, when the psychiatrist looking after the three ‘mad’ physicists in Die Fisici responds to the claim that insane people can kill at any time, he says: ‘Normale mense ook. En meer dikwels’ (‘Normal people too. And more often’).19 Ibid., 11.

Many former Project Coast scientists who testified sought to atone for their involvement, pledging their support ‘to prevent other scientists from finding themselves trapped in similar circumstances’.20 Gould and Folb, Project Coast, 227. Dr Basson, however, the only witness for the defence in his trial, denied that he had developed or distributed weapons of assassination. Where his involvement could not be denied, he claimed that he had only been following orders. ‘I am a dedicated and committed medical practitioner and very proud to have served my country during what was a war’, he declared.21 In William Finnegan, ‘A verdict in South Africa’, The New Yorker, 14 April 2002, available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/04/22/a-verdict-in- south-africa. In the end, Basson was acquitted of all charges: left a free man, ‘Dr Death’ currently practices as a cardiologist in Cape Town.

In 1980 Robert Mohr’s Die Fisici – the last Swiss play staged in Afrikaans during the apartheid years I could trace – carried perhaps the most urgent message yet for its audiences. But as Dürrenmatt reminds us at the end of his pithy ‘21 Points about The Physicists’: ‘Die Dramatik kann den Zuschauer überlisten, sich der Wirklichkeit auszusetzen, aber nicht zwingen, ihr standzuhalten oder sie gar zu bewältigen’ (‘Drama can trick the viewer into exposing themselves to reality, but it cannot compel them to withstand or even to master it’).22 Dürrenmatt, Die Physiker, 79.