Introduction

In the maelstrom of cultural debate that attended South Africa's transition towards non-racial democracy in the early 1990s, few institutions were more vocally held to symbolise the apartheid cultural apparatus, at least as far as the performing arts were concerned, than Pretoria's State Theatre. Even if one never entered the complex, adjacent to a domed plaza housing a larger-than-life bust of former apartheid prime minister JG Strijdom, the massive modernist structure situated solidly in the centre of the apartheid capital architecturally and symbolically bespoke a familiarity with Pretoria's bureaucratic and political establishment, and reciprocally invested a city often caricatured for its civil servant mentality with the conspicuous trappings of Western high culture.

As a schoolchild growing up in the city, I was among the many Pretorians marshalled to line Church Street for the grand opening of the facility in the week of Republic Day in 1981. I had dutifully donned my Boy Scout uniform, and what I recall as an early lesson in the banality of public pageantry reached a personal anticlimax when the black limousine of then-State President Marais Viljoen raced past me. The president hardly deigned to be seen, let alone to wave triumphantly as I had expected, as fanfares echoed out from the balconies of the self-proclaimed ‘new world centre’ and dignitaries arrived by the Mercedes-full.

Associations between the State Theatre and the apartheid order extended, of course, well beyond physical proximity and the semiotics of public space. The State Theatre was the headquarters of the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal (PACT), the largest of the four provincial performing arts councils, and offerings presented on its stages were among the few to receive a government subsidy in the old South Africa. Viewed from the outside, at the most commonsensical level, the State Theatre and the apartheid state were clearly on intimate terms.

Yet, with one notable exception, much has been assumed and relatively little documented about the place of South Africa's publicly funded theatres in promulgating ‘apartheid culture’ on the shifting terrain of national cultural politics during the apartheid era. For one thing, PACT and its counterparts in other provinces (PACOFS in the Free State, NAPAC in then-Natal and CAPAB in the Cape) were established in the mid-1960s on cultural terrain that had already irrevocably been shaped by colonialism and apartheid's coercive physical and cultural removals of the 1950s.