Abstract
In 1980 the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town staged Waiting for Godot when apartheid divided South Africa. The production was directed and designed by the white English playwright Donald Howarth and used an interracial cast, including the legendary black South African actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona as Vladimir and Estragon, at a time when the nation’s policies of racial segregation also affected South African theatres. As Cóilín Parsons has suggested, the production “has retained a certain celebrity status” in South African theatre history and in Beckettian performance histories, where it is frequently referenced alongside Ilan Ronen and Susan Sontag’s respective productions in Israel and Sarajevo, as politically situated presentations of Beckett’s tragicomedy. Despite the cultural memory attached to the Baxter Theatre production, it remains the least examined of these politicised performance histories. Supported by historiographical methods and extended interview with Howarth, as well as access to original documentation from Howarth’s private archive, this chapter offers new readings into this seminal South African production and the neglected politics of Beckett and race on South African and international stages.
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Notes
- 1.
See Niamh M. Bowe’s chapter in the present volume for a discussion of Sontag’s production.
- 2.
Described on the Festival’s website as: “This is participatory, experiential drama at its most extreme and on the last Happy Days before Brexit the festival is culturally occupying the border with a quintessentially Irish play that nonetheless has universal appeal, whose themes could not be more relevant to our times”. See www.artsoverborders.com/programme/walking-for-waiting-for-godot. Accessed 24 Oct. 2018.
- 3.
See also http://thespacetheatre.com/. Accessed 25 Oct. 2018.
- 4.
This venue became known as “The Nico”, with the Theatre bearing the name of the Administrator of the Province of the Cape of Good Hope, who led proposals for the Centre.
- 5.
Slemon was, by his own admission, a failed actor on the boards of the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, before he demonstrated his flair as a Manager at the city’s Abbey Theatre. His appointment at the Baxter was initially questioned, but any doubts were quickly nullified by the energy and zeal he brought to the role, the theatre’s vision and its programming.
- 6.
All subsequent references from Howarth are taken from this interview. Sadly, Howarth died on 24 March 2020, but he was pleased to see a final copy of the chapter when I last saw him in 2019. This interview was integral to the development of this chapter, as were his good-humoured conversations and his spritely reenactments of scenes from the play. He will be greatly missed.
- 7.
Sugar in the Morning was originally produced as Lady on the Barometer in 1958. Meanwhile, another Howarth play, A Lily in Little India (1965), was also staged at the Hampstead Theatre Club in a performance that would see Sir Ian McKellen’s West End debut when it transferred to the St Martin’s Theatre in 1966.
- 8.
Howarth told me of this production: “The programme said Othello by William Shakespeare and when Brian Astbury gave out the programme he would stamp it with ‘Slegs Blankes’ on the programme”.
- 9.
All subsequent quotes from Uys are taken from this interview.
- 10.
On reflection, Howarth said he would have made further changes to the casting: “If I had been able to do it again, I’d have cast Lucky as neither African nor white, as there’s a large Indian population in Durban and in the Cape”.
- 11.
The production histories of Beckett’s drama in London has been dominated by white actors. Of the few performances featuring black actors, Norman Beaton played in Krapp’s Last Tape at the Bloomsbury Theatre in 1988 and, more recently, Talawa Theatre Company presented the first London performance of Godot with an all-black cast at the Albany Theatre in 2012.
- 12.
Amidst the dispute, the actors had decided to postpone their first performance by one day “to allow members of the company to observe the fifth anniversary of the Soweto student rising in which more than 600 blacks were killed” (“Baltimore Protest Halts Drama By South Africans”).
- 13.
Advice to the Players was first presented at the “Shorts Festival” at the Actors Theatre in Louisville before becoming a 90-minute play when it was staged at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays in 1986.
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McFrederick, M. (2021). “The Air Is Full of Our Cries”: Staging Godot During Apartheid South Africa. In: Davies, W., Bailey, H. (eds) Beckett and Politics. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_12
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