The Market Theatre

This guide to the Market Theatre in Johannesburg opens in 1976, when director Barney Simon and technician Mannie Manim found an old fruit market in Newtown and a loophole in its zoning that put it outside the country's segregation laws. You'll hear about the defiant opening night, Chekhov and Miller performed to a mixed audience as police helicopters passed overhead toward Soweto, and about attendees like Bernadette Mosala who came anyway. Stand beneath the same nineteenth-century roof, in view of the old police headquarters, as you listen.