A Conversation with Malcolm Purkey
A CONVERSATION WITH MALCOLM PURKEY
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE MARKET THEATRE
GRAHAMSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, JUNE 2010
Introduction:
Through July of 2013 Malcolm Purkey continued to serve as artistic director of the Market Theatre. He has been at the Market since 2005. Earlier in his career, he was a leader in the theatre movement that opposed apartheid as founder and director of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company from 1976-1999 where one of the major works he developed and directed was Sophiatown. Of the plays discussed in The Creative Spirit 6e, Purkey was the director of The Girl in the Yellow Dress and the producer of the recent productions of The Island and Mies Julie. As director of the Junction Theatre he also collaborated with the Handspring Puppet Company. Since its founding in 1976, the Market Theatre has premiered many of the most important plays produced in South Africa including a number of plays by Athol Fugard. In August of 2012 James Sibongeleni Ngcobo succeeded Malcolm Purkey as artistic director of the Market and Purkey assumed a new role as Dean of the AFDA School of Film and Live Performance.
Related Chapter:
Chapter 2, Theatre as a Mirror of Society
SA: Could you talk about your role at the Market Theatre?
MP: I can start by saying I’m the artistic director of the Market Theatre and have been for five years. Before that I ran a company called Junction Avenue Theatre Company, which had many of its premieres at the Market Theatre. I was privileged to have Barney Simon as a teacher of the nature of arts and as a teacher in relation to questions of producing. Mannie Manim and Barney were the founders of the Market Theatre.
In my view, there are a couple of key principles which have governed the Market Theatre since its founding and which were also central to Junction Avenue. The first is that we were and are dealing with a country in crisis and we cannot shy away from that. We have to encounter the hard questions, so that the art we create is definitely engaged in some kind of reflection of the social. It doesn’t mean that it has to be either propagandistic or directly reflective; it can have distortion, it can engage ironically, it can engage in a way that reveals. The other big principle for me, which I learned from certain practitioners from the early seventies, is the notion that we should be dealing with history from below. History is very important to our story, history and society. It should be from the perspective of the ordinary human being at the negative end of a society of power. It’s where one locates the perspective that is so vital to the work that happened in the Market Theatre, the perspective of the black majority.
SA: Has anything about that perspective changed?
MP: Since apartheid came to an end after a long struggle, new questions have been posed for the Market Theatre. What are we? Who are we? How do we work? For a while there was a crisis in the Market Theatre as its identity slipped and its passion slipped and its mission slipped, and also some of its management capacity slipped. I started five years ago. In my view, the same principles are still on the table. We live in a society that’s in a new kind of a crisis. Charmingly, democracy has thrown up new ways of seeing the world, and our theatre can engage with those. We have the added privilege of an emerging new intelligentsia, a young black intelligentsia, a new middle class. People have got a great hunger to see reflections of themselves, trying to throw light on where we are in the world, how we are making progress.
In that context, we are committed to becoming more and more a new writing theatre, as opposed to say, a new workshopping theatre, which was the dominant mode before in making plays. In that context, Craig (Higginson) has a huge amount to contribute. He has great skills as a literary manager and dramaturge. And I think we have an interesting tension between us. I’m still quite pseudo-Brechtian, and I think Craig still has ten years of British interest embedded in his soul, but it’s a creative tension that we work on all the time. We are committed to making plays that are important, popular, successful, and still can do box office.
SA: What kinds of things are you doing to bring in new writers and directors?
MP: We have some formal programs. We’re currently in our second year of a program funded by an institute in Holland. I don’t like to commission work where a lot of money goes to someone and you never know what you’re going to get out the other end. I’m a bit cautious about commissioning. But I am interested in development and education and training. We’ve run writers’ workshops since we arrived. We’ve had groups. We've also done individual one-on-one training and development. We’ve now got a group of six writers—we did six writers with mentors last year, this year we’ve got six writers again. About two years ago we ran a project for women directors and we saw some lovely work from there
SA: Can you give us an overview of what's going on at the Market Theatre now? What's the balance in your season? Is this a transformation of the Market Theatre or a continuation of its mission from earlier days?
MP: I’ll start with the following observations. At the Market Theatre, when I arrived, we did ten to sixteen projects a year and that was considered enough. There was a great fear because the audiences were so soft that if you put up productions in more than two venues at a time (and we have three) then this would be damaging and splitting the audience. Mannie Manim said something really interesting, a long, long time ago; he said, you never have a dark night. It’s a principle that I believe in very forcibly and so does he, and I think he built his theatres on that principle. Now of course, if you’ve got three venues, you can have two filled on any one night, you don’t have dark nights. But we’ve started, certainly the last two years, to use all three venues all the time. We’re doing twenty-five shows a year. It hasn’t damaged our audience. In the last financial year, we increased our audience size by thirty percent over the previous year, and increased our box office accordingly by seventy-six percent, which means a couple of things. It means we are certainly not giving away as many comps as we used to, we’re very careful to keep our prices at the right level, we’re not allowing too many concessions; we’re really saying we’re a professional operation, and audiences must be respectful of what we do and have to pay for it and value it at that level. It’s a slight change in my thinking; I used to be a believer that theatres could be free. I’m not sure. I think the experiments in New York's Central Park are good ones. I think there has to be a balance. People tend to be a little bit casual if they don’t pay. Now we’re doing up to twenty-five projects a year. About three to five of those projects are produced from scratch, with full production and full budget. We’re very careful about how we choose those productions. Mostly we choose those productions for the small venues (we have two studio spaces), and they’re usually dramas with about three to five people in them (can’t afford more). So you get things like Dream of the Dog, Ten Bush, The Suitcase, The Fat Black Women Sing, now Yellow Dress—a repertoire of new South African plays that we’re very proud of in the last five years. In addition, we will take in comedy, or comedy-influenced performance. We have a lot of colored comedy that comes from the Cape; we have a colored community that’s very loyal to that kind of work. We’re about to do a thing called Joe Barber 4—Joe Barber talks about two young men who work in a barbershop. They play about six or seven characters, some in drag, and the art of that is to be very tellingly accurate about working-class, idiosyncratic qualities and behaviors and sounds in the Christian and Muslim community within the colored world, which is a very Cape Town world.
We also do a lot of music or music-influenced things. We had great success with Songs of Migration, with Hugh Masekela and Sibongile Khumalo, which is a celebration of a hundred years of special kinds of songs relating to struggle, both in Africa and in African American worlds. Hugh Masekela is a great artist, so that of course sells tickets. Occasionally we’ll have a one-person comedy, such as Pieter-Dirk Uys, and he will sell out like crazy.
Why we’ve gotten more successful, is because we’re much more cautious about programming. That means maybe we are sacrificing some of our edgy mission, but I don’t think so. What we’ve done also is establish a very loyal following. We have a ten thousand-person database, and we keep talking to them all the time. Broadly speaking, they’re coming back. We’ve got what we estimate to be about an eighty percent black audience. We are tapping into the new emerging elite, the new emerging intelligentsia, and the new emerging middle class—the base of the theatre.
SA: What is the age of your audience?
MP: A very young audience, twenty-five to forty year olds, who want to see reflections of their lives. Historically, because apartheid was so brutal in keeping these people out of the system, once they're in they're in with a vengeance. They are hungry to participate.
SA: The Market Theatre, historically, is of such importance to the whole society, as well as to the theatre community. How do you assess its position today?
MP: I think it’s much harder to assert the real weight and authority of the Market, because in the eighties at the height of the states of emergency and the height of brutality of apartheid, it was a space for freedom and a space for thought and a space for challenge and a space for provocation, and it was a generative cauldron of wonderful work. There’s a direct link between the state of the nation and the work that came out. We are now in a much more interestingly complex, diverse voices space. I still think the Market Theatre’s very important, and we’ve reestablished it as a force. We have a black woman under thirty who is our producer, and she’s absolutely wonderful. She trained at university, at Wits in fact. I taught her there (I was twenty years teaching at Wits). Nomvula is a young black lighting designer. We are training up the first generation of black designers. We have a young woman who’s attached to the institution as a designer, and we’ve identified one or two others that we want to advance. Of course we have a passion for that. We have a passion for transformation in balance with quality and in balance with what I call a militant non-racialism, non-sexism, democracy. Of course we understand we have a historical legacy that’s both a wonder and a burden. But I think we are doing extremely well in taking forward elements of the previous mission and ideas that allow new generative work and creativity. It’s the same principles as I said before. You just have to accept that there’s a relationship between a certain kind of theatre and the social world in which we live. If you articulate that relationship with clarity, then audiences will want to see the work. I hope that’s true, and it seems to be.
SA: How do you see the Grahamstown festival serving the needs of the different theatres in South Africa?
MP: We talk to each other in phases. We try to have community and we try to have groups where we talk, and then we fall apart a bit, and then we find ourselves at odds about resources, and then we get back together again. But yes, it’s a small world. Really there are about a dozen senior theatre practitioners, and it’s easy to meet, especially in Grahamstown. The last five years in Grahamstown, you’d see all the major practitioners here. It provides a community for discourse.
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