When the Market Theatre opened in the 1970s in a converted fruit and vegetable market in central Johannesburg, it arrived at a moment of national rupture. Its doors opened just days after the 1976 Soweto uprising — when students protested Afrikaans in schools and the state’s violent response left hundreds dead — and the new venue quickly became a hub for plays the apartheid regime labeled dangerous.
From the start the Market broke another strict taboo: it deliberately attracted mixed Black and white audiences in a city where laws enforced segregation of people and places. That deliberate mixing, together with plays that confronted South Africa’s injustices, made the theatre a frequent target for censors. Performances were sometimes raided, actors put at risk, and, as current artistic director Greg Homann recalls, censors even interrupted shows onstage, turning official suppression into a grim second act for some productions.
Over more than fifty years the Market produced work that won international recognition: Woza Albert, Sophiatown, Sizwe Banzi is Dead and the musical Sarafina, which dramatized the Soweto uprising and later reached Broadway and was adapted into a film featuring Whoopi Goldberg. It also became a proving ground for artists who would become national icons, including actor John Kani and playwright Athol Fugard.
Kani remembers his initial doubts about the founders, Barney Simon and Mannie Manim. “I thought these two whities were nuts,” he said in a 2014 interview, but he added that “my entire career fell in place on this stage.”
The theatre’s leadership sometimes found creative legal workarounds to keep an integrated space alive. Homann describes one clever tactic: selling the bar for a nominal sum so it became privately owned, allowing people of color to gather there even though stepping into the foyer might still have violated segregation laws. Despite censorship and danger, the company persisted in telling stories that reflected the nation’s pain and resistance.
Audience responses were often raw and immediate. Director Arther Molepe, who has been involved since the early days, recalls white patrons storming out when confronted with stark depictions of apartheid, but he also remembers the early sense of unity: “There was no black, there was no white. We were just a whole group. So we were making things, making theater.”
This year the Market celebrated its 50th anniversary and continues to stage new productions that reexamine apartheid-era stories and probe contemporary South African life. Molepe directed a recent revival of Marabi, an early-20th-century story about a Black family’s struggle that ends with forced removal under segregation laws; the production drew standing ovations from largely millennial and Gen Z audiences, many of whom never lived under apartheid. Lead actor Gabisile Tshabalala, 35 and raised in post-apartheid South Africa, emphasizes the medium’s ongoing importance: “Theater is extremely important for young South Africans….especially as Black people…we get to tell our stories.”
Homann says the Market’s mission remains “to tell the South African story, whatever that might be of its day.” In the 1980s that meant chronicling the fight against apartheid; today the stage takes on the challenges of a young democracy — from education and corruption to gender-based violence — as the theater looks ahead to many more years of provoking thought and reflecting the nation’s struggles and hopes.