Rose Ehrlich

Rose Ehrlich (18**-19**) was a prominent speech teacher and amateur theatre director and organiser in Bloemfontein.

She was a daughter of Wolf Ehrlich and his wife Helene Baumann. Rose’s father was of German birth and became a merchant and later a politician in Bloemfontein. In 1880 he married Helene Baumann, daughter of one of the first Jewish families to settle in Bloemfontein.

She corresponded with Olive Schreiner, and seems to have been an aspiring actor when Schreiner knew her.

After her return to South Africa, noted in some of Schreiner’s letters, Rose Ehrlich became a pioneer of elocution techniques, teaching speech and elocution at Grey College in Bloemfontein. Among those who performed in her classical plays (Euripides’s Alcestis and Aristophanes’s The Clouds) was one Gert Borstlap (later renamed “André Huguenet”)

She appeared in (and directed?) the first South African production of You Never Can Tell with an amateur company in Bloemfontein (with R.C. Steegers). She co-directed Die Koerantskrywers in 1919 in Bloemfontein. In 1939 she moved from Pretoria (?) to Cape Town where she produced The Moon is Down, Murder in the Cathedral, Escape from the Past.