Playing the Market: The Market Theatre, Johannesburg (review)

This is the second edition of a book first published in 1990. While the bulk of the text, dealing with the Market's first ten years of existence, remains unchanged (some corrections aside), Anne Fuchs has added three new chapters covering developments since the release of Mandela. From the opening chapter, Fuchs demonstrates her awareness that theater exists in the form of initiatives, activities, institutions within the bounds of the political economy (to the patronage of which it may be subject). Heading this chapter "Spaces and Sites," Fuchs shows how the various prior experiences in theater of Barney Simon and Mannie Manim provided them with models and countermodels, a sharpening of the sense of what was im/possible and un/desirable under the constraints of the period—the late 1970s—in which the Market project began to take shape.

In a book that is acutely sensitive to the material conditions of theatrical performance, the following is also a key recognition:

The semiotics of theatre have to do with performance conditions: the composition of audience and venue conditions and modifies performance reception, all of which can constitute an additional refinement to the message of the text as already modified by actors, direction and décor. (50-51)

(I am, admittedly, not sure about Fuchs's hierarchization of factors here: often performance conditions and the components of performance bear on each other from the very outset of the conceptualization of a theater project through complex and symbiotic processes of recognition, adjustment, constraint, invention.)

Fuchs discusses at length the way that—by contrast with, say, Robert McLaren (Kavanagh)—Barney Simon initially accepted the Black Consciousness line that his work, as white practitioner, should be noninterventionist in the black arena:

His role, as he saw it, was not to insist on black conscientization, but to help the white population in South Africa to perceive the social, political and economic contradictions in which they were living. (35)

Fuchs's presentation here of the history, the data, is a little breathless at first, but she does finally consolidate her recognitions into a strong, well-reasoned statement as to the outcome of Simon's strategies in defining the (contradictory) role of the Market: required by the capitalist forces that supported it to maintain an anti-apartheid stand, creating (of course) valuable cultural and ideological goods in projecting that stand, and yet in so doing confirming the exploitative nature of all capitalist strategies.

In the central section of the book Fuchs examines the various options the Market took (plays by Pieter-Dirk Uys, Born in the RSA, Woza Albert, etc.) as it shaped its being and image. In a further chapter she takes 1980 as a sample year and looks at the structures of feeling, activity, and production that this year at the Market represents.

Three final chapters (previously published as articles) and a postscript effectively update the book, with a wealth of data (accounts of new productions and production trends) and some agreeably acerbic observations on recalcitrant audiences and critics. A few other emerging factors could have been explored: the increasing reliance on revivals (Asinamali, Woza Albert) and recent anxieties about the squandering of State arts funding. Also it's a pity there is no reference to Mary Benson's 1997 memoir of Fugard and Simon. But you can't have everything. Fuchs's work is estimable.