by Andre Brink
In the years after that, when disillusionment and despondency began to set in, it seemed as if the magic of that moment, and of the game that brought it about, would dissipate and slowly dissolve. But then came the World Cup of 2007 in France, when after all the infighting and backbiting – in rugby, and in the politics of the country – once again that trophy was raised, this time by John Smit and his Boks; and once again, at least for a brief moment of respite in the turbulence of the country, South Africans of all backgrounds celebrated together. This time, Thabo Mbeki was there to share in the magic. But behind all the ecstatic explosions of joy, every South African, in France where the match had been played, in South Africa, and wherever in the wide world the diaspora had flung them, felt the joyful presence of that first charismatic president, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Even in his physical absence he was still triumphantly and overwhelmingly present.
But rugby also insinuated itself into the most cherished part of my personal life. At the end of 2004 I met Karina in Salzburg. And soon afterwards the seal on our relationship was provided by nothing less than rugby. In the Super-12 series of matches involving provincial teams from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, there was one morning when I had to wake up at about four to see the match of our Stormers against the Auckland Blues; knowing about my addiction, Karina telephoned from Austria fifteen minutes before the kick-off to make sure I was awake; and then, just after the match, she sent a message: Did we win? At that moment there was no more doubt in my mind. I knew we would make it – in sickness or in health, for richer or poorer, till death us do part.
Recently, she awoke one morning from a dream about being reunited with a boyfriend from her early youth, a particularly happy dream that suppressed all the ordinary or unpleasant events which had eventually caused that relationship to founder. Now he suddenly reappeared in a very alluring fashion and invited her to return with him to Poland, where they had both grown up. For a moment she was tempted. Then she very firmly turned him down – because, she explained, it had occurred to her that she now lived in a country where she had learned to love biltong and where she had become addicted to rugby. She could no longer live without it. For both of us it is a form of theatre which has settled in our bones.
My true baptism of fire in the real theatre came in my second year at university, when the dramatic society tackled a Dorothy Sayers play, Busman’s Honeymoon. The mere fact of an exclusively Afrikaans-speaking university going on tour with an English play, was not just pretentious but presumptuous. My strongly accented English was not helped at all by my total lack of stage experience, while my complete ignorance about amorous matters did not bring much conviction to Lord Peter Wimsey’s wooing of his bride. My only consolation was that the bride, Harriet, knew as little about the behaviour of a couple on honeymoon as her bridegroom; and in spite of a few clumsy private rehearsals to improve our kissing skills there was no erotic spark in the performance, and, I suspect, nothing on either side to inspire it. But through two months of hard labour under the benign but unsparing eye of the English professor, R. E. Davies, a bunch of raw young Afrikaners reached the stage where they could expose their version of English manners to a fortunately undiscriminating public.
The venture taught me little about acting, but a lot about interaction. In spite of the closeness within our family, and a fair amount of consorting with friends at school, my youth was a largely solitary voyage of discovery. But on this tour the bunch of students in the group became an inseparable unit. We had to do everything together: set up and strike our rickety decor, manage ticket sales in streets and shops, take care of the front of house, wade through parties and receptions, many of which were opened and closed with a prayer, and manage relationships, some more intimate than others, sort out our accommodation with private people in the towns we visited. In the village of Greytown in Natal two of us had to fend largely for ourselves as the lady of the house, as it turned out, had just run away with a lover, leaving her morose and hard-drinking husband and a little boy of ten in charge of catering for my friend Christie and myself.
I’d met Christie on my first day at university. He was the son of the professor of music; and on the first evening of our friendship he invited me over to their house for an evening of piano playing. I started with my only showpiece, Liszt’s second Hungarian Rhapsody. He followed with Chopin’s Grand Polonaise. Right there I decided that I would never touch the piano again, and I have always been indebted to Christie for saving me from endless wasted hours, and many potential audiences from boredom unto death.
It was towards the end of our run with Busman’s Honeymoon that he committed another act of rescue. I had decided that the tour would be rounded off with a performance in the capital, Pretoria. All the others were sceptical about our chances of success. But Christie supported me. Our main argument was that we should be able to secure the attendance of a number of schools, which would readily fill the large hall we were planning to rent.
The real inspiration behind this ambitious plan was Esther. She was a junior pupil at one of the choice Afrikaans schools. If I went about it the right way her principal might be persuaded to give permission for her school to attend. She would see me perform. Our future together would be assured. Another Olivier and Vivien Leigh.
For a month I spent most of my afternoons, and all my savings, on making calls to Pretoria schools to offer them the chance of a lifetime to attend the definitive performance of Busman’s Honeymoon. Initially, almost all of them sounded exceedingly encouraging. I was making endless sums in my tour notebook. It promised to become the single most substantial contribution the dramatic society had ever made to the coffers of the university.
But one by one the schools cancelled their promised attendance. There were clashes with their own performances, with sports meetings, swimming galas, folk dancing, political meetings, God knows what. Even Christie was becoming hesitant. But I persisted with a doggedness only a tragic hero could understand. A week before the event Esther’s school withdrew. By now it was too late for us to cancel: the booking fee for the hall had been paid, Pretoria had been covered in a rash of posters, tickets had been sold, pre-publicity had started appearing in the press.
There was still a chance – a very small, but vital chance – that Esther might attend – not as part of a block booking for her school, but privately, with a friend or two. I actually dared to telephone her myself to seal this. Almost too shy to speak, and sounding more annoyed than anything else, she declined to commit herself in any way. But before she rang off she did mumble something that sounded like, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Of course I took this as a promise. Christie did his utmost to make me acknowledge how slim this possibility really was. But he stood courageously by me even when all the other members of the touring party were shaking their heads.
It was a rather disconsolate group that travelled to Pretoria by bus, set up our by now very seedy little set, dwarfed by the immensity of the stage, desperately made another round of phone calls to school principals and teachers of English, and took to the streets for some last-minute personal advertising.
Ten minutes before the curtain there were about thirty people in the audience, a small scattering in that vast, lugubrious hall. And no sign of Esther.
The mood backstage was bleak. No one felt like going on. But by now it was too late to turn back.
Five minutes to go. Then three, two, one. Still no Esther.
‘Here we go,’ said Lood Muller, who played the murderer, with a scowl to match his role. And tugged at the rope to open the curtain. But it stuck.
‘This is a sign from God,’ said somebody. Quite in keeping with the Christian character of our university. But I refused to pay heed.
‘Open the bloody thing!’ I shouted, close to tears.
Some of the other actors came running to give Lood a hand. This time the curtain yielded. Which caused considerable confusion, as at least three characters who were not supposed to be in th
e opening scene now found themselves centre stage. In their haste to scuttle backstage, one of them – Jurie, who played the parson – tripped over a counterweight supporting the OP wall of the set, which collapsed to tumultuous applause from the audience. It was a total disaster. And yet, because of the uproar in the audience and the near-hysteria onstage, when the play began at last we were all fired up by the extremity in which we found ourselves; and for at least twenty minutes we turned it into one of our best performances. Until the adrenalin became exhausted and the play started sagging. By the end of Act One several members of the audience trickled out through the side doors.
Esther had still not shown up. And was very obviously not going to grace us with her presence.
Unable to face the others in the dressing room, I slinked off to a little storeroom backstage where a number of boxes and some scaffolding were stacked around a very dusty upright piano. I collapsed on the floor, too drained even to strike a tragic pose. That was how Christie found me. He didn’t say a word. He came past me and sat down on the piano stool. Almost mechanically he opened the lid. He played a few random chords. The old piano was sadly out of tune. But he paid no attention. Slowly the chords began to slide into a recognisable pattern. He was playing Chopin’s Third Ballad. That was the last straw. I broke down and sobbed like a baby.
Halfway through the ballad somebody came in and said something about time to start. I heard Christie shooing him off. He played through to the end. Then he came to sit on the floor next to me, put an arm round my shoulders, and said, ‘Let’s go.’
‘I can’t,’ I sobbed.
‘You’re going to get up,’ he said very quietly but very firmly. ‘And you’re going to go out on that stage. And you’re going to act like you’ve never acted before.’
I shook my head against his shoulder.
‘Go,’ he said.
I got up. There was a washbasin in the corner. I went to it and splashed cold water on my face. And then a very dishevelled Lord Peter Wimsey went to the stage, the curtain was opened, the play resumed its inexorable course. We were all playing like never before. And at the end the fifteen or so people left in the audience applauded like a full house. I was exhausted, but also felt strangely fulfilled. I had made a discovery that would need time to grasp fully: that in every performance there are at least two plays being acted out simultaneously – one to the audience, another in the mind and the emotions; one public, the other personal. Sometimes they might overlap, but at times they are in conflict. Both are indispensable. And I knew that if the theatre could undo a life it had its own way of also making one. And that it would never let go of me again.
In due course I also turned to playwriting. My first piece to be published, with the unpromising title of Die Band om ons Harte (The Bond Around Our Hearts), was written when I was twenty-one, and set in 1820 on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony, soon after the arrival of the first contingent of British Settlers. It was a time when relations between Dutch/Afrikaans colonists, the newly arrived settlers, and the government at the Cape came under great pressure from the Xhosa nation who, trying to flee in their turn from the expansion of the Zulu empire in the east, were extending their boundaries into colonial territory. Strange alliances were forged in those circumstances. I’m afraid the play was rather superficial and I did not have any real grasp of the deeper complexities involved. Its only redeeming feature was, perhaps, the use of a wholly non-realistic figure, the old Boer woman Alida Landman, who came to transcend the obvious divisions to represent, rather darkly, the brooding spirit of the land itself. But good intentions certainly did not salvage a bad play. All it did was to commit me more resolutely to the possibilities and intricacies of playwriting and stagecraft.
The years I spent in Paris, from 1959 to 1961, brought an unprecedented exposure to the theatre. During my last school year at Lydenburg, in 1952, I had attended two or three performances by the touring company of South Africa’s National Theatre Organisation, which for the first time exposed me to live, professional theatre, just enough to whet my appetite. At university I became an assiduous theatregoer, but even then it was not possible to see more than four or five shows a year – mainly local plays in English or Afrikaans, or classical works translated into Afrikaans: a few Ibsens, a few Molières, the odd Shakespeare. And from time to time there was an opportunity of hitch-hiking to Johannesburg or Pretoria and seeing performances by visiting companies, most impressively a series of Flemish productions. In this case it was not just the professionalism of the work that enthralled me, but the newness, the modernity of the plays – a translation of Look Back in Anger, a performance in the original Flemish of Claus’s Een Bruid in de Morgen (A Bride in the Morning). Theatre no longer meant just a story told on the stage, but a wholly new kind of experience, working with new ways of transforming the everyday into play, into performance. The space of the stage became charged with magic, with endless possibilities of celebration, an acting-out of both joy and despair.
It was this discovery of theatre that turned Paris into a decisive step in my own progress towards the stage. Whenever my then wife Estelle and I could afford it, we were in the theatre. Any number of classics, at the Comédie Française or the Palais de Chaillot or the Odéon, in lavish and spectacular productions. But there were three playwrights who changed my whole perception of theatre in the world. There was Anouilh, particularly in Becket, but even in a farce like l’Hurluberlu, where the ludic imagination soared above mere reality, mere history. Then there was Ionesco. I had never seen anything remotely like La Cantatrice Chauve, or La Leçon, or Jacques, or Les Chaises. It was as stunning as any of the shows of ‘magic’ from my youth. What Peter Brook was later to call ‘the concrete language of the stage’ was abundantly, exuberantly, and also chillingly, demonstrated in the dizzying word games which played havoc with meaning and turned language itself into a ‘thing’, a character in the open space, a reality, both grotesque and sublime, in its own right.
And then there was Beckett. There was Endgame. There was Krapp’s Last Tape. Many years later, at the Odéon, there was Oh les Beaux Jours (Happy Days) in which Madeleine Reynaud defined cosmic solitude in a never-to-be-forgotten solo performance. But during that first stay in Paris there was, above all, Waiting for Godot. Of Godot we saw three vastly different productions during those two years, one in the Odéon, the second in a tiny, dilapidated theatre in Montmartre, the third in Montparnasse, to be followed by countless others in many countries, in the years to come. But never enough. What I see on the stage is, every time, something strung from my own entrails. That play – in which, as one famous early review declared, ‘nothing happens, twice’ – still holds me in its thrall. Whenever I hear the hackneyed phrase ‘the human condition’, Godot is what I see before me, inside me.
Sadly, it is a play that broke up one of the most significant friendships of my youth. Since I was seventeen or so, I had admired the author W. A. de Klerk. He was one of the first Afrikaans novelists to break away from the stark tradition of naturalism to experiment (very safely, almost coyly, yet with a measure of courage not easy to muster in our stifling cultural world) with existentialism. In his plays he remained a staunch follower of Ibsen. However new much of this writing was in Afrikaans, it was – although I did not realise it at the time – depressingly derivative. But for several years he’d remained, for me, the Great Playwright in Afrikaans. I had spent some summer holidays on his farm in the Western Province, helping his farmhands to labour in the vineyards and orchards – in exchange for long conversations in the evenings, after the day’s work, a leisurely swim in the dam, and a sumptuous supper. It was he, more than anybody else, who guided me towards foreign literature and philosophy – from Mark Twain to Goethe, from Ibsen to Dostoevsky, from Kierkegaard to Colin Wilson. It was he who encouraged me to learn German and read Faust in the original. He was my mentor, my guru, my philosopher-friend. When I left for Europe for the first time, he came to see me off in Cape Town harbour,
with a box of grapes from the farm to wish me bon voyage.
Then, early in our second year in Paris, he wrote to ask whether he could visit us for a week. It was almost impossible to find space for him in our minuscule attic flat, but we did. It felt like a visit from an emissary of God. Estelle was more sceptical about his greatness, but for my sake she was willing to give it a go. He was a Great Man who had come to bestow upon us the magnificence of his creative presence. Even when he turned out to be more interested in being shown around Pigalle than in accompanying us to the Louvre or to the theatre, I stubbornly stuck to my adulation of him. Far be it from me to disparage the seedier attractions of Paris. When it turned out that his real interest in coming to Europe was not to drink at the fountains of wisdom and beauty but to pursue a paramour, even I began to feel a bit more apprehensive. But the breaking point came when Waiting for Godot came up for discussion. As it happened, it was less than a month after we’d seen it for the first time; I could not stop talking about it. Please, please, please, I begged him: it was still running, he should be able to get a ticket. To my consternation he exploded. He had read the play, he said in a tone of voice that boded no good. In his considered opinion it was an abortion. It was, he said, pausing for maximum effect before he pronounced the final word, shit. It was the only time I had ever heard him utter a profanity. To make absolutely sure that I had heard correctly, he repeated it. The play was shit. If this was the way drama was going in Europe – although he had reason to believe that the British and the Americans were slightly more enlightened – then the end of the theatre was nigh. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Worse, a Götterdämmerung. (He always favoured German as the summit of European – and world – literature.)
I was flabbergasted. I tried to reason, to argue, to plead. He refused to enter into any discussion. He knew the play was shit, and that was that. Drama meant action. Action meant conflict. Conflict meant a confrontation of wills. Will demanded a demonstration of greatness, of heroism, a sense of grandeur. ‘This little shit of a play,’ he proceeded, ‘negates everything drama has stood for in 3,000 years of civilisation. Instead of an Oedipus, instead of a Lear, instead of a Faust, instead of Brand or Hedda Gabler, here we have two fools, two idiots, two vagrants, two good-for-nothings, two shits. Doing what? Doing nothing. Talking. Yes, talking. I beg you. For hours on end. Talking about the state of their boots, talking about a tree sprouting a leaf, talking about talking. Talking about waiting for a man who never turns up. Talking about—