Nico Malan Theatre

See Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB)

Opening

The theatre complex was officially opened on 19 May, 1971, as part of The Republic Festival of that year. The inaugural performance was scheduled to have been Giuseppe Verdi's Aïda, but the leading singer Emma Renzi fell ill, so the production was replaced by CAPAB Ballet's Sylvia. Other productions in the opening season were Mozart's Die Zauberflöte in Afrikaans and Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly.

Christine, a commissioned work by the Afrikaans playwright Bartho Smit, was to have been the Afrikaans Company's contribution, but was banned, so they put on Dieter Reible's experimental Afrikaans production of Koning Lear.

A controversial project in many ways, the theatre was originally reserved for the use of whites only, which caused an huge backlash. After enormous pressure was brought to bear it finally became the first South African theatre to allowed all races onto its premises in 1975. However, the boycott of the theatre by non-white communities lasted many more years. Architecturally and technologically the most advanced of all South African theatres when it was opened in 1971, it had been constructed for a massive R12million. One of the first theatres in the Southern Hemisphere with an electro-mechanical facilities for transporting décor. The theatre was also geared with a computerised lighting system. A fire in the opera houses’ lighting switchboard caused approximately a R1 million in damages in 1976. In 1980 the largest symposium to date, a conference on Disaster Treatment, was attended by a 1400 people. In 1981 an even bigger crowd showed up to hear the former South African and Israeli Cabinet minister, Abba Eban, speak. **As an attempt to popularise it and rid itself of the apartheid stigma, it was renamed The Nico (with the slogan "The Nico for All") in 19**. *By 199* the funding formula from the state had altered and it became more clearly dependent on rental income for its survival. At this time, for political reasons, the centre was once more renamed, becoming Artscape (along with its production company, CAPAB) and it was virtually recast as a venue rather than a performing arts board, though certain entrepreneurial projects remained, including a New Writer’s Programme and a variety of outreach projects*?

  Taliep Petersen and David Kramer’s Poison was staged here in 1992. 

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