The Company

There have been a few theatre companies using The Company as a formal name over the years, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, as part of the alternative theatre movement of that period in South Africa.

The name was sometimes attached to that of a particular venue (e.g. The Space Theatre, The Market Theatre, the Baxter Theatre, and so on) or it carried an adjectival description (such is the PACT Afrikaans Company, The Arena Company, or the Company of Four for instance).

Among those using the title The Company as the full name, have been:

The Company, Johannesburg (1972-)

An independent theatre company originally founded in Johannesburg during December 1972 by writer/director Barney Simon and lighting designer and theatre manager Mannie Manim to do avant garde[1] work.

Barney Simon was the artistic director and Mannie Manim was the administrative director within the Arena Theatre. It had a core company of actors – Aletta Bezuidenhout, Vanessa Cooke, Leonie Hofmeyr, David Eppel, Judith Cornell, Janice Honeyman, Sue Kiel, Danny Keogh, Lindsay Reardon and John Oakley-Smith.

The Company's aims were:

• to perform theatre with and for all South Africans
• to create and perform indigenous work wherever possible
• to present current international hits alongside the classics

In 1975, they presented Selle Ou Storie by Pieter-Dirk Uys as their first Afrikaans play at the Chelsea Theatre in Johannesburg, with Christine Basson, Val de Klerk, Danny Keogh, and directed by Pieter-Dirk Uys. The production, the first production of the controversial work in the Transvaal, won a number of awards. It was eventually also banned, as had happened in the Cape.

Other productions were Fortune and Men's Eyes, The Flat and Sharp Bazaar and The Drapes Come.

In 1975, The Company was awarded the tender to convert the old Johannesburg market building into an arts complex. The new venue was named the Market Theatre and opened in 1976, with The Company as its resident producing body. On October 19th 1976 The Company did the Marat/Sade (Weiss), directed by Barney Simon, as opening production in the Market Theatre main theatre.

They went on under the auspices of the Market Theatre to present works such as Bacchus in die Boland (1978), Long Day's Journey into Night (1978), Charles Dickens (1981), And Green And Golden (1982/83), Children of a Lesser God (1983), This is for Keeps (1983), Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (1986).

For more information, see the Market Theatre.

The Company, Cape Town (1973)

Founded as a professional company in Cape Town by Norman Coates, Alan Johns and Suzanne Goldberg in 1973, the group put on plays in a pub-style intimate 50 seater theatre space under the Rondebosch restaurant La Perla.

Their first production was Beginnings and Survivors, followed by a production of Franz Kafka's The Trial in June 1973, featuring Terry Osler, Suzanne Goldberg, Charles Whaley and Aden Love.

Sources

Tucker, Percy 1997. Just the Ticket. My 50 Years in Show Business. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press: p. 333.

Correspondence held by NELM: [Collection: MANIM, Mannie]: 2010. 38. 9. 2. 50. 2.

Emlyn Williams as Charles Dickens programme notes, 1981.

Ian Gray 1973. There's a theatre on the way upstairs. In: Showbiz South Africa. June, 1973: p.41

Market Plays. Stephen Gray (ed.) 1986. AD Donker.

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