Abstract
Celebrated playwright
What is your reaction to the boycott mentality prevalent among most British dramatists, and the many pressure groups here who agitate for sporting and academic boycotts of South Africa?
This is something on which for the moment I am prepared to jettison my confusion and make unequivocal statements. There was a time when managements in South Africa had the choice of playing in a ‘whites only’ context or going into certain venues where, under the laws still operative, the audiences and possibly even the actors could have been multi-racial. At the point when this choice was still possible I advocated, and I take the responsibility (not the credit) for initiating, the boycott. Then legislation was enacted which removed that choice, and it was then a question of (a) surrendering oneself to silence, or (b) taking on the new circumstances and audiences of whites only, blacks only, or coloureds only. I decided that I was not in favour of silence, so I changed my stand on the cultural boycott; and although I have been under pressure many times, I have no intention of changing it again. You mention the sports boycott. On this I have become increasingly irritated. Because there are many people abroad who, while agreeing with me that there should continue to enter the country a free flow of ideas (because this is in fact what the South African government would keep out), say, at the same time, let’s have these ideas coming in but, for God’s sake, not sportsmen! I have come to the conclusion that this distinction involves a monumental cultural conceit. I just don't know how anybody can define what is a significant act, what is a significant thought; whether Gary Sobers on a cricket pitch is more or less important than Paul Scofield in a Pinter play. That for me looks like a conceit. My view is that a boycott psychology is a bomb psychology. One solution to the South African problem is to drop a bloody great hydrogen bomb on the country, blow the whole thing to ashes and then give a lot of immigrants from somewhere else a chance of living on that bit of parched earth. I’m not interested in that. I'm interested in the survival of what I know is still there, vital and intact.
Only one or two authors here have flaunted the cultural boycott, but it would be presumptuous to condemn those who haven’t. After all, you live in the middle of it, people here are trapped inside received information and act according to that and their consciences.
That’s absolutely right. I’ve had one enormously significant encounter about the boycott, and that was with Arnold Wesker, an initial signatory to the whole boycott declaration, who found himself assailed with doubts. When we met up, about three years ago, he asked me about the situation. I would not attempt to convert anybody, that’s not my job. People must care about it enough to ask me and then I will very hesitantly, and with due modesty, venture a statement on the realities. Arnold asked and it was therefore easy for me to tell him that there are pockets of decency, there are venues, there are groups, there are underground situations which, if he were to give them permission to do his work, would be the stronger for that; Arnold said that at this distance he could not possibly know that; but he agreed for his plays to be done on the condition that I, as a friend, should vet the circumstances. And if he had been in South Africa when his work was done, he would have been very proud.
This is an extract from a longer interview first published in Plays and Players