Marti Caine faces backlash for playing Sun City - archive

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/17/marti-caine-apartheid-sheffield

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Of course, it was irresistible casting. Marti Caine, popular gritty Sheffield folk heroine, as Fanny Brice - the Funny Girl battling her way out of the Lower East Side sleaze, to stardom in the Ziegfeld Follies. “Her rise to stardom being impaired only by her disastrous private life,” as the Crucible press release has it.

Caine (who shot to fame when she won New Faces in 1975) had a father who died when she was seven; a mother who gave her to the local authorities when she was nine and committed suicide when Caine retraced her; a husband she married at 17, and lost to her best friend when at last everything seemed to be going fine. With Caine’s special flair for musical comedy, and this uniquely miserable background… how could anybody be better equipped to take on Fanny Brice?

But there’s a problem. In August 1982, Caine starred in a multi-million dollar topless showgirl extravaganza - Voila - at the Sun City Theatre in Bophuthatswana, South Africa. The show was tailored around her, she spent 17 long months rehearsing and performing it. On leaving, she professed herself charmed with the place: “I want South Africans to know that when I get back (to Britain) I’ll defend South Africa and her people.”

In October 1983, the United Nations published her name in their first-ever blacklist of performers appearing in South Africa - along with other politically naive performers like Cliff Richard, Shirley Bassey, Leo Sayer, David Essex, and Rod Stewart. Caine said, “Well, that’s quite a good cast list and very flattering company.”

Even more provocatively, at the Funny Girl press conference in her home town of Sheffield, which was picketed by anti-apartheid campaigners, she announced: “I was biased against South Africans before I went, but once I got there I changed my mind. There are injustices, but I have seen worse injustices in Brixton and Attercliffe.”

Citizen Caine is in disfavour. Sheffield’s high-minded People’s Republic has in any case had a bit of a rough press recently. There were the Labour activists who couldn’t stomach the scathing home-truths of Howard Barker’s Passion in Six Days. Then there were the allegations of censorship at the Forgotten Fifties Art Exhibition. Now, the local authority-funded Crucible’s latest star stands revealed as an apartheid collaborator, in a city which aggressively declared itself an apartheid-free zone back in 1981.

Sun City (nicknamed Sin City - interracial sex is possible here) is infamous and appalling: “An Afrikaner’s paradise in a black man’s nightmare,” one performer who played there called it. “A row of plastic flowers screening a dungheap,” spluttered a local paper’s editorial on the spuriously desegregated bantustan.

When the Sheffield Anti-Apartheid Movement found out about the production in February, they set up a campaign. Caine’s contract had been agreed and signed, the Crucible was tied, and the press had wind of the news. It was too late to put pressure on the theatre into rejecting Caine.

With the press watching, the AAM - led by Paul Blomfield and Ricky Caborn, MP - adopted a publicly combative stance. Blomfield, Caborn, the leader of the council David Blunkett, and Mick Elliott (a member of both the Crucible board and the AAM), met artistic director Clara Venables (who had hired Caine) and the administrator Geoffrey Rowe: “We got an assurance from the Crucible that they would not ever again engage anybody on the United Nations register,” says Blomfield. “And from that point we changed the direction of our campaign - we’re now trying to get Marti herself to reconsider her position.”

They’ve written to her twice, urging her to take the pledge - refuse to work in South Africa again. She’s ignored their letters.

So now they’re planning to rain on her parade. Tonight, when Funny Girl opens inside the Crucible, a two-hour long “alternative show” will be staged in the car park outside the theatre - an anti-apartheid rally addressed by 20 or so entertainment, trade union and Church speakers of note, accompanied by the Paradise Steel Band. Out there with them in the car park, speaking to the rally, will be Mick Elliott, and the Crucible administrator’s own secretary, Eileen McClelland. Which isn’t all that surprising: 49 theatre employees signed a petition of protest to their management.

Caine’s main line of defence seems to have been that Equity advises performers not to play to segregated audiences. Meaningless advice in the context of Bophuthatswana, where the average annual family earnings are £300, and where one in four black kids die of malnutrition before they’re even a year old.

Meanwhile, elfin, henna-ed, bright and earthy Caine strikes everyone she works with at the theatre as a wholly delightful woman. Talented, hard-working, dying to learn, willing to change if only she’s allowed to hang on to her dignity. Clare Venables is fiercely protective about her, and wouldn’t let me near her, not even for ten minutes, in this crucial production week.

But Venables and the board have been caught with their liberal credentials well and truly around their ankles. They seem genuinely surprised by the vehemence of local opinion.

Venables explains patiently - and it’s impossible not to sympathise with her dilemma to some extent: “I’ve had Funny GIrl on my list for ages, it’s got a great score, the central character’s a woman who becomes more successful than her husband - I’m interested in relationships like that.”

Initially, the theatre board were delighted: a brilliant casting idea, they all said. And the people working with her are still saying that. “She’s going to be absolutely wonderful as Fanny Brice.”

Venables steadfastly maintains that Caine is anti-apartheid, “but not necessarily in favour of the boycott. We haven’t discussed South Africa - we’ve been too busy with the show. The main distress I feel for her is that she’s been institutionalised. They’ve forgotten she’s a human being. I’d love to work with her again - she’s a great lady, a wonderful performer. But if the same issue arose, I’d have a hard route to follow. I didn’t actually promise she wouldn’t ever work at the Crucible again. What I said was, I’m not a fool, i’m not going to make my life a misery for three or four months by doing this again.

“There are two things the AAM want to achieve: they want Marti never to work in South Africa again. Demonstrations, letters, placards waved at her in public, won’t do that. And they want to publicise their campaign - now that will work. I wouldn’t call it hypocrisy, it’s just that politics override people as people.”