The historical record

I first learned about this production of Waiting for Godot from a newspaper clipping in the Billy Rose Theatre Division archives in New York's Lincoln Center. An article in the New York Times from 18 June 1981, the clipping bears the headline ‘Baltimore Protest Halts Drama by South Africans’. Over a three-day period, all of the US's major newspapers would run this story, along with many international news outlets. The context: after two years of organizing, the First Baltimore International Theatre Festival was opening.Footnote ⁵ Theatre companies had arrived in Baltimore from Spain, England, Ireland, Israel, Japan and South Africa, along with one company from within the US.Footnote ⁶ The South African company, the recently established Baxter Theatre of Cape Town, was preparing to present Waiting for Godot, costarring Kani and Ntshona; these artists, who headlined the billing, had gained international acclaim five years prior with Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island, the scathing anti-apartheid performances that they co-created with playwright–director Athol Fugard. Kani and Ntshona were well known in the US, both to anti-apartheid activists and to followers of international theatre: they had won a Tony Award for best actor, their plays were reviewed and referenced in US anti-apartheid publications, and when they were arrested and confined in South Africa for continuing to perform these shows, their arrest inspired a massive protest among both theatre-lovers and activists, which resulted in their release. But now, in Baltimore, five years later, an antagonistic group of activists confronted Kani and Ntshona in the United States. Holding picket signs outside the theatres of the festival, these activists called themselves the Coalition in Support of the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa and insisted on the closure of Waiting for Godot. They called for a severance of all ties with South Africa, and insisted that the inclusion of the Baxter Theatre amounted to a legitimization of the South African government. Ultimately, the protest was so successful that the Baltimore iteration of Godot was compelled to close before it ever opened.

Given the reputations of Kani and Ntshona as giants of anti-apartheid theatre, the reception in Baltimore is initially baffling. And in historical hindsight, with the well-known productions of Godot in San Quentin Prison (1957) and in post-Katrina New Orleans (2007) – productions in which the play was widely understood to highlight the conditions and tribulations of marginalized populations – the perspective of the Baltimore protestors seems jarringly anomalous. As I sat at my desk in the archives with this single article from the New York Times – the only remnant of this production that I had access to at the time – I felt stunned. How could anti-apartheid activists mistake John Kani and Winston Ntshona for apartheid's apologists? Why did these incredibly brave artists – who had already survived solitary confinement in a political prison – back down and cancel their show? What transpired between these activists and these actors? As I began to piece together answers to these questions, it became important to understand how the production's earlier performances were received and interpreted.

The show first opened a year and a half prior, in early 1980, in Cape Town. Directed by Donald Howarth, a British director–designer who had worked in Cape Town several times before, it featured Kani and Ntshona as Vladimir and Estragon, alongside Pieter-Dirk Uys as Pozzo, Peter Piccolo as Lucky, and Soli Philander as the messenger. Reviews from this first iteration were overwhelmingly positive, though as Philander recounted to me in an interview, the discourse in Cape Town focused mostly on the production as an artistic achievement, rather than as a political statement.Footnote ⁷ Reviews praised the direction as ‘flawless’ and the acting as ‘moving’, ‘polished’, and ‘brilliant’.Footnote ⁸ Kani, Ntshona, Piccolo, and Uys were all nominated for Fleur du Cap awards, and Uys ultimately won the award for best supporting actor.Footnote ⁹ Reviewers noted the ways that the play was given an ‘African flavour’ – ‘the arid set, the parched sky, and a lullaby crooned in Xhosa’ – but they did not expressly attach a political message to this particularization. Rather, they praised the play's ‘universality’, and one ambiguously credited Kani and Ntshona with ‘a new dimension to Beckett's dialogue’.Footnote ¹⁰

However, while the reviews focused on aesthetics, a letter to the editor of the Cape Times suggested that some audience members discerned a political message, at least in the casting choices, where a black Vladimir and Estragon meet a white Pozzo and Lucky, before being greeted by a coloured messenger at the end of each act. The letter was written by Peter Fourie, a local actor; it accused the director of inscribing a political message into Beckett's play, in a ‘violation of the text which is totally antithetical to the nature of the piece’. According to Fourie, Beckett's play was inherently a ‘dramatization of a state of mind, a depiction of the inner, not the outer world’. He concludes, ‘Mr. Howarth's attempt to give [Godot] a local connotation is an affront to the serious theatre-goer and an unforgiveable bastardization of one of the great plays of this century. Beckett has been diminished and trivialized in the name of some misguided liberal endeavour’.Footnote ¹¹

Fourie's letter inspired many responses to the Cape Times, three of which were printed within the week. One was from Donald Howarth, the director; another from John Slemon, the Baxter's artistic director; and a third from a Stanley Levensteen.Footnote ¹² Levensteen, who called the play ‘one of the greatest theatrical experiences I … have ever had’, argued that Godot was ripe for political overtones because ‘it is concerned with human suffering, injustice, and man's inhumanity to man’. Borrowing Fourie's language, he asks rhetorically, ‘is not the inner world at least to some extent a reflection of its outer environment’?Footnote ¹³ In apparent accord with Levensteen, John Slemon quoted a reviewer who had written, ‘It takes a great actor to alter the general perception of a classic role’.Footnote ¹⁴ In other words, according to Slemon, the production did challenge audiences to look at Godot anew. This was not simply a local production of a ‘universal’ text; it did offer something unique – and that uniqueness was intentional and appropriate.

Over the course of the South African run, that uniqueness – the play's political dimension – would become increasingly apparent to audiences and reviewers. Following the Cape Town run, the play was mounted at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, the Port Elizabeth Opera House, and Johannesburg's Market Theatre. The Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth runs were short – one performance in Grahamstown and under a week in Port Elizabeth – but the Johannesburg run lasted three weeks.Footnote ¹⁵ In a 2017 interview with me, Soli Philander gently mocked the apolitical reception of the show in Cape Town, and recounted that over the course of the run,

Indeed, the reviewers increasingly used language that highlighted the racial dynamics and class inequities between the characters in this production. They described Uys's Pozzo as an Afrikaner farmer and described Piccolo's Lucky as ‘white trash’. Characterizing Vladimir and Estragon as representative of an underclass, one reviewer wrote, ‘Like their counterparts in Joubert Park and the Bowery's Skid Row, [Beckett's tramps] still retain their pride and humanity, which comes out in copious draughts of humour’. Explicitly naming the racial overtones, the same reviewer concluded, ‘As can be seen by the large number of black theatre-goers who have flocked to see this production, the play is relevant to our times’.Footnote ¹⁷ Another wrote, ‘In light of the South African political situation, a line like “nobody ever recognizes us” sounds particularly relevant coming from the mouth of John Kani. Pozzo's remark to Estragon and Vladimir, “you are human beings created in the image of God”, was also stunning.’Footnote ¹⁸ And yet, some reviewers continued to characterize the play in apolitical terms. John Michell, reviewer for the Rand Daily Mail, wrote, ‘What it's all about and how you react to it is of course up to you … Becket questions premises, then questions the question of questioning premises, which leaves you right back where you started’.Footnote ¹⁹

This mix of political and apolitical interpretations likely pleased the artistic team. In interviews, Kani and Ntshona shared with me that they did find that the play spoke directly to the inequities of the South African political landscape, and they found those connections to be meaningful and powerful – but they did not set out to make a protest play with this project. They wanted to produce something more subtle, something that was faithful to the European vision for the play but that also spoke to a local context. In an interview with me, Kani explained,

Kani went on to talk about how he and his collaborators – especially director–designer Donald Howarth – set the play on the edge of a rubbish mound where black people would scavenge for food and other goods left by white South Africans. It was a setting that ‘would be easily recognizable to every South African’ as a local space in which inequities were in sharp relief. This localization would, in Kani's words, ‘make people who are majority black, seeing this play, somehow identify with it’. Lingering with a line from the play that underscored its relevance to black South Africans under apartheid, Kani said to me, ‘There's a beautiful line, I think it's Didi [Vladimir], who says, “born astride a grave”. I cried when I read that line. I cried when I read that line. We are born astride a grave’.Footnote ²¹

Ntshona, too, spoke to me about how their Godot took on the politics of apartheid. ‘Creative works are like plants: they respond to the atmosphere they find themselves in’, he said to me in a 2017 interview. Beckett's text, with the hopelessness of the main characters and the inequities of the play, was the seed of a plant, and in the soil of South Africa it grew differently than in Europe. ‘When John and myself were working together, there was no way you could escape the social–political thing … [But] it's not like every day we wanted to climb rooftops and shout about [apartheid]’.Footnote ²²

So in the hands of these South African political artists, Godot contained a critique of colonialism and apartheid, but the artists wanted it to do so with subtlety. By the end of the South African run, it seems like critics and audiences were responding just as they wanted: they saw, in Baxter's Godot, their own political experience as a particular permutation of a universal experience of suffering through indignities.

After the run at Johannesburg's Market Theatre, Godot travelled beyond South Africa's borders. At this juncture, Pieter-Dirk Uys left the company, and Pozzo was played by Bill Flynn for the remainder of the run; all other actors remained with the project, and the design (with minor adjustments for different venues) remained intact. The ensemble next took the project to New Haven, CT – a two- to three-hour drive from New York City. In this run, the show was reviewed by a considerable number of local, New England newspapers, in addition to receiving two reviews from NYC-based national publications. The New Haven run garnered more negative reviews than the show received in any other city, and the critique came disproportionately from the small, local papers. Critics called the production ‘tedious’, ‘sluggish’ and ‘punchless’; several concluded that the South African ensemble did little justice to the play, which could be better presented by a local company.

But the reviews in national publications, written by critics from outside the immediate area, rang very different notes. Mel Gussow of the New York Times praised the ‘invigorating production’ and the ‘remarkable actors’ who had an ‘almost conjugal connection as artists’. In his estimation, Kani's Vladimir and Ntshona's Estragon were ‘warm-blooded incarnations of archetypal characters’.Footnote ²³ Newsweek's Jack Kroll said that the play took on ‘new meaning’ that ‘no other actors in the world could have given it’. He described the set as ‘the veldt’, using distinctly South African vernacular to evoke a semi-arid landscape, and suggested that this Godot had an earthy realness to it: Vladimir and Estragon were ‘real people in a real place … waiting, not for God, but for some guy who might have a job for them’.Footnote ²⁴ In other words, their hope of finding Godot had overtones not of an atheist critique of a Godless world, but of a political critique of inequity.

The disparity between the New England reviews and the reviews in national (New York-based) publications takes on particular significance in light of the play's reception at its next stop: London. Here, the reception was incredibly warm and strikingly political. Without any equivocation or nuance, London critics interpreted the play as a broadside against the racist policies of the white South African state. The critic for The Stage wrote, ‘In this multi-racial version of Beckett's text … the central characters are seen as black South Africans waiting for freedom and political change’.Footnote ²⁵ The review in the New Standard read, ‘Performed by black actors, the tramps appear to be symbolizing their hopeless lot in South Africa … Godot is black majority rule’.Footnote ²⁶ And Londoners flocked to see this production that they interpreted as being starkly political: strong ticket sales led to an extended run at the Old Vic Theatre. According to Kani, Beckett's personal secretary later told him that the extension at the Old Vic was the most significantly extended run of any Godot production that he knew of.Footnote ²⁷ The ensemble also travelled to Oxford for a short run at the Oxford Playhouse, though cast members remember little about this incarnation of the show, and I have not been able to find any reviews of it.

Following London and Oxford, the company was invited to perform in Baltimore, at the First International Baltimore Theatre Festival. As one of the highest-profile performances at the festival, it was going to perform in a 525-seat venue, and was anticipating full houses. But the response from anti-apartheid activists could not have been more starkly different from that in London. Immediately upon their arrival, the artists were met with picketing protestors and demands to withdraw from the festival. The protestors also engaged in a letter-writing campaign decrying the production and its inclusion in the festival; they targeted local officials, newspapers in the US and South Africa and the leaders of the festival.Footnote ²⁸ This coalition opposing the show, which called themselves the Coalition in Support of the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa, included the NAACP, the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, the hospital workers’ union, the Welfare Rights Organization, the Theater Department at Morgan State University, and the Henry McNeil Turner Society of the Bethel AME Church.Footnote ²⁹ Anthony Robinson, who co-chaired the coalition, called the Baxter Theatre ‘part and parcel of the South African propaganda machine to misrepresent what is taking place within that country’.Footnote ³⁰ In response, Al Kraizer, the artistic director of the festival, accused the coalition of ‘tactics of intimidation’, and Baxter artistic director John Slemon shared that ‘the actors felt that their families and friends would face repercussions at home’ if the Baxter were to continue performing in spite of the protest.Footnote ³¹

Throughout the eight stops on the company's tour, this production of Waiting for Godot was hailed as a bold anti-apartheid broadside and denounced as pro-apartheid propaganda; it was received as a ‘universal’ artistic masterpiece even as others interpreted it as distinctly South African; it was also deemed both riveting and tedious. The discrepancies call us to further develop our field's understanding of how touring performances are consumed and interpreted, and how they fuel international social-justice movements. They call attention to the specificities of local politics and public spheres, underscoring that even broad international movements can operate with distinct local concerns and artistic appetites.

Cultivating and sustaining righteous anger

In a 1991 article in Diaspora, Loren Kruger analyses and critiques an ‘affect of urgency’ that characterized much of South African protest theatre during apartheid. Writing about black protest theatre written with cathartic, climactic endings, Kruger argues that such plays evoke a combination of pity and outrage within their international, affluent, white audiences, affording them the opportunity to safely sample the horrors of black life under apartheid.Footnote ³² She draws on Frantz Fanon to argue that in so doing, these plays reassure the dominant global powers of their hegemony, even while castigating them.Footnote ³³ She argues that this theatre is both reductive and exhibitionist; it flattens the complexity of South African culture and its heterogeneous elements while offering black South African pain as a commodity for liberal white elites overseas to purchase and admire.

Kruger points out that she is not writing about Athol Fugard's plays in this article, which, she says, have been ‘absorbed into an international canon of “great works”’.Footnote ³⁴ She is certainly, then, not writing about any South African production of Waiting for Godot – or at least not intentionally so. She is writing, instead, about plays like Survival, Asinimali, and Sarafina, which charged their audiences with a simplistic but palpable sense of identification with oppressed and defiant protagonists. It is remarkable, then, to realize that Godot does seem to have charged its London audiences with this affect of urgency. It could not possibly be more dramaturgically distinct from the protest plays, but in the production's depiction of inequity, destitution and endlessness, performed in a recognizably South African setting, with South African accents, and with a few tweaks to Beckett's script, it put apartheid in London's spotlight. In so doing, it seems to have stirred the consciousness of the audiences and to have imbued them with the combination of outrage and pity about which Kruger writes. The newspaper articles and reviews brim with this affect of urgency, as reviewers state their unequivocally allegorical interpretation of the play, testify to the play's ‘emotive political messages’, and describe their own reactions as shocking epiphanies.Footnote ³⁵

But only in London. Or rather, more in London than anywhere else. What Londoners experienced as ‘political frisson’, Capetonians generally experienced as ‘universal’ and intangible, and New Englanders experienced as ‘sluggish’ and ‘punchless’.Footnote ³⁶ The divergence between these audience reactions may have begun long before the audiences took their seats: in the advance press and the marketing of the productions. In London, the Baxter, the Old Vic (the London theatre presenting the show) and the London press collectively prepared audiences to interpret the play through a political lens. John Slemon, the Baxter's artistic director, told me that he secured the run in London by sending the producers the letter to the editor of the Cape Times that been written by Peter Fourie.Footnote ³⁷ By selecting that letter, he exaggerated the ire that the play drew from the political right in South Africa. Kani and Ntshona bolstered this perception, granting advance press interviews in which they emphasized the controversy that the show had caused in South Africa: ‘When the play opened there was such an uproar!’ Kani was quoted as saying in London's Observer. ‘The mere fact that the cast was mixed, and the mere fact that the tramps were played by blacks, and the fact that those blacks were John Kani and Winston Ntshona … The people of South Africa saw the play in a different light’.Footnote ³⁸

Kani may have exaggerated the extent to which the people of South Africa saw the play in a different light, but, by so doing, he helped to usher in a reality in which the people of London really did see the play in that new light. Audiences took their seats ready to draw connections to news stories, personal testimonies, slogans shouted at protest marches, and other works of art that referenced apartheid policies more explicitly. In his book The Theatrical Public Sphere, Christopher Balme attests to the value of artists and producers orienting their performances to the political movements and discourses in which they are embedded. Drawing on Loren Kruger, Balme writes,

In other words, the framing of theatrical events often isolates them from the broader discourse in the public sphere. Thus Balme conveys special enthusiasm for productions that ‘either move out into the real world, or … bring the public sphere into the theatre’, or somehow provide for an ‘extension of the theatrical public sphere into the wider community’.Footnote ⁴⁰ When productions are in a position to be referenced in a broader discourse, their unique ‘combination of rational-critical, agonal and ludic modes of interaction’ can enliven that discourse in particularly impactful ways.Footnote ⁴¹

In London, where the theatre-going public was living in a hub of the anti-apartheid movement, where they were primed with news stories like the one that ran in The Observer, and when they sat in the same theatre in which they had seen Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island five years prior, Waiting for Godot looked ‘very much like a Fugard play’.Footnote ⁴² As Irving Wardle wrote in his review of the London production, the references to ‘struggle’, to physical violence, and to perpetually waiting for change all seemed to be references to apartheid.Footnote ⁴³ Sitting in the theatre watching the two actors who had so brazenly critiqued apartheid policies (in Sizwe Bansi and The Island), and now seeing those same actors, on the same stage, satirically wait for change that never comes, audiences rekindled the memories of the earlier plays to flesh out this one. It became a ‘[node] in a network’ of anti-apartheid discourse, ‘rather than [a] self-contained, orginary [work] of art whose aesthetic function evaporates with the end of the performance’.Footnote ⁴⁴

To a lesser extent, this was also true for the New York critics who came to see the play in New Haven. Like the Londoners, they lived in an international hub of the anti-apartheid movement, and they knew Kani and Ntshona's prior work well, so to some extent they were primed to experience the show as a political statement. And of course, they did – and they appreciated this artistic–political experience. The New England critics, who did not live in a hub of the anti-apartheid movement, and who may not have been personally familiar with Kani and Ntshona's prior work, did not experience the show as a ‘node in a network’ – or at least not to the same extent.

While it is difficult to assess the political efficacy of a theatrical performance with precision, I want to suggest that the priming of the public to anticipate a political show may not simply have been effective marketing; it may also have been effective political organizing. Donald Culverson, historian of the anti-apartheid movement in the US, argues in his book Contesting Apartheid that the theatre of the anti-apartheid movement was a valuable tool for organizers. He explains that ‘unlike domestic issues, apartheid was not amenable to direct observation’, and thus organizers had to work creatively to identify spaces and times to draw public attention to the issue.Footnote ⁴⁵ Touring performances did this quite naturally – they gathered concerned people together, immersed them in an experience that sustained their attention on phenomena that were not amenable to direct observation, and, when they were at their most effective, they provided an experience that was emotionally palpable and memorable. For these reasons, he writes, anti-apartheid plays – specifically the works of Athol Fugard (though there were certainly many others) – ‘became fixtures on campuses and conventional theater circuits. These venues enabled black South Africans to speak directly to Americans about apartheid, rather than having their experiences interpreted’.Footnote ⁴⁶

While Culverson was, of course, writing about explicit protest plays, and not about Waiting for Godot, London audiences did not seem to experience much difference between the two. Within the public sphere of anti-apartheid discourse and Kani–Ntshona plays, the London iteration of Godot rekindled a sense of righteous anger and reminded audiences (if not exactly informing those audiences) of the apartheid practices that were increasingly being critiqued in the metropolises of Europe and North America. So even when reviewers critiqued the aesthetics of the production, as Irving Wardle did when he suggested that British companies could produce a more entertaining and satisfying production of the same play, this production continued to attract audiences.Footnote ⁴⁷

Even the African National Congress, the international movement leading the fight against apartheid, saw the London production of Godot as a potential tool for the movement. Though initially sceptical of why these icons of anti-apartheid theatre were performing a European play, they debriefed the performance with Kani and Ntshona, calling the play ‘powerful’, ‘very deep’, and ultimately a story about ‘people's dignity’ and ‘humanity’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As was usual for Kani and Ntshona in these international tours, after the authorities from activist movements saw the show, the rank-and-file membership of the activist communities followed. ‘It's almost like the word went around like grass fire that this project we can support’, Kani said.Footnote ⁴⁹

So, while I do not disagree with Loren Kruger when she argues that the ‘affect of urgency’ associated with protest theatre was reductive and exhibitionist, I also want to complicate that assertion with the possibility that this reductive exhibitionism may have been politically useful. Certainly it was seen that way by the activist leaders of the day. It kindled a righteous anger among theatre-goers, focused them on the problems, and charged them with emotionally resonant stories of victims. And even Godot, with a very different dramaturgy, had a similar effect on audiences when they were primed by the press and the theatres to experience it as a political piece.

Oppositional activism

If Baxter's Waiting for Godot was such a boon to the anti-apartheid movement, then it would stand to reason that the movement's organizers in Baltimore would have attempted to rally their supporters to go and see it. Yet they did just the opposite: they boycotted, picketed and denounced the production as part of a pro-apartheid propaganda effort.Footnote ⁵⁰ Sometimes, international political movements need the energy and momentum that oppositional, confrontational engagement can best provide. According to Culverson, in the early 1980s, the growing anti-apartheid movement in the US was diversifying its tactics, and sharpening ‘its political edge by engaging in both assimilative and confrontational activities. Assimilative, or inside, strategies included lobbying, election campaigning, petitioning, and litigation, whereas confrontational, or outside, approaches employed demonstrations, civil disobedience, and other publicity-seeking methods’.Footnote ⁵¹ Sitting passively in a dark theatre and growing righteously angry about apartheid may also fuel the movement, but if the play does not explicitly denounce apartheid or teach its audience about apartheid policies, then it may be even more valuable as a target of the movement than as a consciousness-raising tool. As Dennis Chong has argued, the opportunity for movement members to picket and rally offers ‘expressive benefits’: activists can ‘voice their convictions, affirm their efficacy, share in the excitement of a group effort, and take part in the larger currents of history’.Footnote ⁵²

To direct this frustration at a theatre company, and to put particular pressure on the two leading black actors, may feel unfair to the artists, who themselves are victims of the same oppression that the activists are decrying – and who are delicately balancing a subtle critique of apartheid with their desires to make a living and grow as artists. But whether or not it feels fair to artists is not the primary concern of the activists, who are consumed with the pressures and challenges of sustaining a decades-long movement fighting oppression that is taking place thousands of miles away. Touring theatre productions effectively bring a manifestation of one part of the world into another. Depending on the production, activists may decide that this is a useful educational tool, or they may decide that it is a useful target.

The history of the Baltimore protest ultimately reveals that the relative appeal of championing or critiquing these touring performances may depend more on local, domestic concerns than on international ones. Though the activist coalition of Baltimore presented itself as acting in solidarity with the oppressed people of South Africa, a deeper dig into the archives reveals that their concerns were really twofold. First, as their name suggests, they were concerned that producing Waiting for Godot (or any other production out of South Africa) in Baltimore was effectively validating the South African government. But second, they were concerned that the white festival organizers had not consulted Baltimore's black community in the planning of the festival.Footnote ⁵³ They felt boxed out of the local processes that were determining the cultural, economic and political landscape of their city. This second concern – about the racial politics of Baltimore – was entirely missed in some of the reporting on the event, including major articles in the New York Times and Washington Post and a widely published Associated Press article announcing the withdrawal of the Baxter from the festival.Footnote ⁵⁴ But the editorial staff of the Baltimore Sun, in an editorial critiquing the activists, identified the primacy of this second concern (albeit dismissively) when they stated, ‘It is doubtful that most of them care very much about South Africa. Their main objection seemed to be that the festival organizers, in hiring a largely black African company, did not clear it with “the black community,” meaning themselves’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Baltimore Afro-American, in an article that was much more sympathetic to the activists, suggested that the concern about local racial politics preceded the concern about international racial politics: ‘The choice of the internationally known Baxter Theatre by the planners of the festival drew ire from black community leaders, already enraged by their exclusion from the planning of the affair’.Footnote ⁵⁶ And when Kani and Ntshona announced their withdrawal from the festival on local television, Kani hinted – though he did not state outright – that the essential concern was not with the Baxter:

For the leading activists in Baltimore, who sustained the international movement by convincing Americans that the struggle against racism at home should be understood as inseparable from the one in South Africa, it was common to link local concerns with foreign ones. Makekolo Mahlangu, who co-chaired the Baltimore Coalition with Anthony Robinson, explained to me, ‘We had a motto: “Soweto–Baltimore. One challenge, one fight”’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This rhetorical device reflects a growing phenomenon of the time, as activists throughout the US linked US racism and South African apartheid.Footnote ⁵⁹ In an editorial praising the boycott, the Baltimore Afro-American articulated the same sentiment:

Some in the coalition – like Mahlangu and Anthony Robinson, who co-chaired it – were most invested in the international political angle. Others, like Stephen Hay, chairman of the Theatre Department at Baltimore's historically black Morgan State University, were more invested in the local political angle. Within the coalition, these concerns seemed to blend harmoniously; neither Mahlangu nor Robinson remembers emphasizing one over the other.Footnote ⁶¹

That said, John Kani understood this to be a distinctly local concern. He and Winston Ntshona met personally with the leaders of the coalition, in an encounter that all have described to me as open and honest. But in an interview with me in Johannesburg, Kani described the coalition's concerns as being entirely unrelated to South Africa. Perhaps he had more direct contact with Hay than with Mahlangu or Robinson, or perhaps the activists’ rhetoric about Baltimore simply resonated more deeply with him than their arguments that the Baxter was an instrument of apartheid – but in Kani's memory of the event, the activists had not even claimed to be concerned about apartheid. The activists spoke to them about their frustration with Baltimore's city council, about their marginalization in a municipality where African Americans constituted 65 per cent of the population, and about their political aspirations to take over the local government. To rally their base, Kani remembers them explaining that they wanted to begin by protesting the theatre festival, which had ignored the black community even as they worked to put Baltimore on the map of international, cosmopolitan cultural magnets. The festival organizers had assembled an all-white board and staff, they had done no outreach to the local black community, and they had only invited a single American company – the Actor's Theatre of Louisville – who were performing as an all-white cast. Moreover, Hope Quackenbush, the executive producer of the festival, had responded to these critiques by defensively and shamelessly insisting that African Americans were indeed part of the festival organizing, because ‘blacks were on the festival staff as stagehands’.Footnote ⁶² Kani remembers the activists asking him and Ntshona if they would help the local black community by pulling out of the festival, which would boost the visibility and the enthusiasm of the local activists in their broader political agenda. The protest had ‘nothing to do with South Africa’, Kani said to me. ‘It was local politics that made us withdraw from the festival’.Footnote ⁶³ The Baxter Theatre effectively became a lightning rod, channelling the frustration of the black community against the local white community, which ignored it and took it for granted.

The polite requests that Kani remembers getting directly from the activists were also echoed, somewhat less politely, by the activists’ allies at the African National Congress. In the United States, the ANC worked closely with domestic black movements. They linked their causes closely together and they turned out activists for one another's events. In order to preserve this partnership, the ANC organizers in New York now turned to Kani and Ntshona and applied additional pressure to get them to comply with the requests from the Baltimore coalition. Kani paraphrased the verbal request of the ANC leaders in the US: ‘We would appreciate if you were to listen with a kind ear to their plea for you not to perform’. And just in case I took the gentle tone at face value, Kani went on to clarify: ‘Do you know what would happen if then we come back to South Africa and we kinda like defied the pleas of the ANC leaders abroad? We would be fucking killed. Our houses would be burnt. We would be branded informers and traitors to the struggle. We knew that’.Footnote ⁶⁴

The activists were relatively uninformed about Kani and Ntshona's work, and by the time they sat down with the artists, the wheels of the protest were already in irreversible motion. Robinson acknowledged to me that he had never seen or read Waiting for Godot, and that he did not initially know of Kani's or Ntshona's reputations (though he did come to learn about, and to respect, their prior work).Footnote ⁶⁵ In statements to the press, he got a few details wrong: he claimed that only two of the five actors were black, and that these casting practices amounted to ‘tokenism’; in so doing, he seemed not to understand that Soli Philander, as a coloured actor, was also a victim of apartheid, nor that Kani and Ntshona were playing the lead roles and had conceived of the production. In another press statement, he dismissively mocked the idea that Waiting for Godot might read as an anti-apartheid commentary.Footnote ⁶⁶ He seemed not to know, or not to care, that most Londoners and many South Africans had understood the show as having an anti-apartheid message. In my own interview with him, he reiterated this fundamental point: he did not believe that the play was a political statement against apartheid, and he thought that Kani and Ntshona were being used and manipulated by the Baxter.Footnote ⁶⁷ Though Kani and Ntshona clearly tried to clarify their intentions, and though Mahlangu and Robinson received them with relative warmth, the activists kept up their pressure. They lined up in opposition to artists whose political convictions they shared.

Conclusion: international political movements and performing bodies

For anti-apartheid activists in 1981, protesting the show – and ultimately shutting it down – presented the opportunity to solidify a broader, stronger coalition of African American and anti-apartheid activists. When they shut the production down, they were able to claim a victory for both causes, and to fuel both movements. Robinson and Mahlangu built on this success by turning out their coalition for many other protests over the next several years – both in Baltimore and in Washington, DC.Footnote ⁶⁸

In contrast, British and South African critics of the South African government rallied behind this play – and in London, the show seems to have put some wind behind the sails of the anti-apartheid movement. But London seems to have been unique in this respect. When plays are not explicitly decrying the very abuses that the movements are organized around protesting, then the ability of international movements to successfully rally around these plays may have more to do with local culture than with international politics.

Out of this research emerges both new insight into the specific historical phenomenon of apartheid-era touring productions and also new insight into contemporary phenomena that bear some resemblance. Speaking historically, the Baxter's production of Godot, and specifically its distinct reception in different places, enable us to understand how the international theatrical circuits dovetailed with international activist circuits, sometimes supporting one another, and occasionally tripping each other up. When a specific production house was well integrated in the anti-apartheid movement, and when the theatre-going populace of a city was immersed in the culture of the movement, the research shows that the theatrical production was able to both capitalize on, and serve, the interests of the movement. In those cases, the affect of urgency – while perhaps reductive – was galvanizing. But in localities that were further afield from the movement's centre, it may have been just as useful to the movement to position themselves as critics of the theatre than as supporters of the artists.

Contemporary touring performances may be productively interrogated in light of this historical record – and scholars, activists, and other conscientious global citizens may find that the history of this Godot can inform how they wish to position themselves in relation to touring performances. In certain contexts, people may decide that performances like Exhibit B, To the End of the Land, and the repertoire of Belarus Free Theatre deserve international support; like the ANC decided in London and New Haven, these performances may be useful sites for international audiences to gather, to learn, to be moved and to align themselves with political movements. But much may depend on the local politics of venues and host cities; in some cases, movement organizers may feel they have more to gain by protesting these productions, despite the irony of undermining artists whose political convictions they largely share.