King Kong
By PATRICIA WILLIAMS ' ING KONG' was always a movement and
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never just a musical. It was the first show of its sort in South Africa. It was also the first time that white and non-white had worked together . in the theatre so completely. And it was jazz, Which speaks for more than itself. There was a bad moment during a glossy 'evening' put on for Potential backers when the composer, Todd Matshikiza, couldn't get past the doorman until someone realised who he was, and a depressing one later that night when one of the organisers (subsequently imprisoned during the Emergency) Spoke to the small, society audience about 'we Who do culture work among the Africans.' But apart from that it was a rare coming together. We conceived King Kong (inevitably, it hap- Pened in a wealthy, liberal, Anglo-Jewish home) In a closed circle of enthusiasm, well aware of the scepticism round us. Later the scepticism turned to extravagant praise, and some of the enthusiasm went sour. But by that time the show hardly belonged to us any more. It was public Property. That was eighteen months ago. Now it 'Scorning to London.
King Kong himself died about a year before the show was written. Some 'political' people sniped at us before the show even opened, and said he was the wrong kind of symbol. We didn't think so. No one who met him ever forgot him. A lawyer friend of mine who was visiting a prisoner awaiting trial in the Johannesburg Port tells me he saw a huge, haunted man brooding in the shadows, and still cannot erase his one sight of Kong. He was an original; a huge, solitary bloody-minded ape of a man who did what he pleased fiercely in a country where this isn't easy with a black skin. The non-white heavyweight boxing champion of the country, he used to beat up his opponents in the ring and then beat them up again in the street outside. Probably he was a schizophrenic.
He murdered a member of the Spoilers, the toughest and most vicious of the township gangs, and was acquitted on a plea of self-defence. The Spoilers bragged they would kill him within minutes of his leaving court. But someone who saw it told me he walked five miles to the hostel Where he lived, shadowed by the Spoilers, with- out hurrying and without looking round. They didn't touch him. Some months later he murdered hi's girl (the chaos in his brain some- how merged her with the harrying Spoilers), summoned, the police himself, and in court,
articulate for the first time in thirty-two years, asked for the death sentence. Instead he got twelve years, and killed himself after three days. It was the first non-white 'human interest' story I ever remember getting into the white press. When the show ran into difficulties I heard People saying 'Kong must be laughing' or 'Kong doesn't want the show to go on.' There were Others nearer home who didn't either. The Spoilers threatened Todd Matshikiza. Todd says: 'They said they'd burn my house, they'd burn my car, they'd twist my neck. Of course I was scared. Who wouldn't be?' The police, he pointed out bitterly, were no protection. In the end the gang walked in and out of performances and were delighted –largely because none of their secrets had been given away. In those early days rumours of who else was 'in' buzzed through the townships. The enormous woman who ran the shebeen, 'Back of the Moon,' threatened to sue when she heard part of the show was set there. She finally settled for free scats.
The all-African cast (the law does not permit white and black on the same stage) was seventy: large enough to worry any producer, worse when curfew and transport restrictions forced them home by 10.30 at night, often with an hour's tiavelling to do, Most of them were amateurs. In fact, sonic were simply 'nice-time girls.' The rest were domestic servants, clerks, teachers and messengers, who were employed during the day and then came straight down to rehearsals in the disused warehouse we had managed to hire for a nominal fee. Later, arrangements were made for hot-dogs, cokes and a coffee-urn; until then they worked through solidly without a break, Sonic of the principals were professional. King Kong and three Spoilers were played by the Manhatten Brothers, a harmony team who have worked together for twenty-five years with a style reminiscent of the Ink-Spots. Their records sell by the thousand. Miriam Makeba, the female lead, used tO tour with them as their star singer, billed as 'South Africa's nut-brown baby: To the astonishment of white South Africa she went eight months ago to America, fame and fortune, and now earns enough in a week to keep a township family for eight years. The rest of the cast dream of following her, and some of them probably will.
Neither rehearsals nor performances were ever free of infuriating incident. In spite of special permits written for the cast, somebody was arrested for a pass offence pearly every night and had to be bailed out the following morning. Someone else was stabbed on his way home one night. Would he be well enough to go on? The organisers also worried about a shebeen that mushroomed near the rehearsal hall, 'We can smell it but we can't find it,' one of them complained to Nathan Mdledle, who played Kong. 'For God's sake tell the woman to go away. We .don't want the police to have any .excuse to ,Stop us.' The shebeen stayed, unde- tected. Extra precautions were taken against the same thing happening on opening night. But while a charity audience glittered on the front steps of the theatre — a splendidly equipped university auditorium which allowed mixed audiences seated in separate blocks—a shebeen was doing a brisk business with the cast some- where in the shadows at the back.
Even before the audience took its three-guinea seats the atmosphere was highly charged. Socially King Kong was OK. The movement had spread to the deb belt, and clusters of pretty young girls from prominent English-speaking families were coming in to watch final rehearsals, squatting on the dirty concrete floor and chatting. possibly for the first time in their lives, with the African cast. With avid efficiency they organised the sale of first-night tickets, and drilled their 'own ex- citement into the People who Mattered. The audience seated itself late and reluctantly, but made up for it afterwards by not going home. The curtain came down on a silent house. Then it stood and cheered, while a cast as stunned as the audience took call after call. A psychologist gave this windy reason for the show's unexpected im- pact: 'It allowed a harmless area for the release of the repressed love between black and white.' Whatever it was, it hit a nerve hard. The critics used every superlative in the book (the Afrikaans press too), with the single exception of Die Burger, official mouthpiece of the Government. Their man wrote apprehensively: 'The drumbeat taps out after a dramatic silence the Morse Code dot-dot-dot-dash of the V for Victory sign. It is like a message that sounds in the midnight striking of bells, it is like a voice that calls for the red of a new morning. And red is the colour of blood.'
King Kong grew quite naturally from the rough and tumble jazz concerts that have always been part of township life, but only came out of the locations and into the white public halls five years before. The show's music has its roots in traditional African and church-choral music, and in the American jazz of the Twenties. But all of it has been processed in tvIatshikiza's mind into swinging, jangling tunes that fix themselves quickly in the memory. It was produced (in the sense that Jack Hylton will produce it in Britain) by the Union of Southern African Artists, an organisation formed to protect African musicians from unscrupulous record deals, but which extended its scope and later grew a creative arm. It was written by Todd Matshikiza, lawyer-novelist Harry Bloom, and myself. Strangely enough, the seed of the idea for a musical, though not this one, came from Wolf Mankowitz during his visit to the Union. But the gaudy, jumping whole, assembled by director Leon 'Gluckman, was more than any of its parts. Booked originally for three weeks, it ran for six months all over the country, wherever it could be accommodated. It broke theatrical records. Its songs went into the top ten and stayed. Players and musicians found themselves celebrities, and the celebrations were not ex- clusively among people of their own colour.
Now, after two years, deals and passports are fixed. King Kong is to be brought to London in February. Miriam Makeba is committed in America and the children in the singing groups —whose names: The (six) Swanky Spots, The (five) Penny Whistlers, The (four) Chord Sisters, The (three) Queens Page Boys, made rehearsal calls sound like cumulative carols—must have grown up by now. The rest will be much the same, including the show's social drag. The net- work has connected.
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