STORY 59
There is a theatre in Somerset West that has no government subsidy, no corporate sponsor, no professional staff and no paid management. It is run entirely by volunteers — people who work day jobs and then spend their evenings painting sets, learning lines, managing box office, fixing plumbing and arguing productively about casting decisions.
It has been doing this since 1947. It is one of the oldest community theatres in the Western Cape. And it built its own building.
The story begins before 1947, actually. The first operatic and dramatic society in Somerset West started performing in the Somerset West Courthouse over 120 years ago. People have always wanted to perform in this town and other people have always wanted to watch them. The impulse is as old as the settlement itself.
The society as we know it today was reconstructed after the Second World War in 1947 by Mrs Cornish-Bowden and the Hottentots Holland Dramatic Society was formed. At that time productions were hosted at the Old Masonic Hall and later the Somerset West Town Hall. The name, Hottentots Holland Dramatic Society, carries its own piece of history. By 1947 the area was already being called the Helderberg in common usage, but the society kept the old name, the original name of the mountain range, the name that the Khoikhoi herders who grazed these valleys would have recognised. It still carries that name today.
For the first twenty-five years the society was nomadic, performing wherever it could find a stage. The Town Hall. The Masonic Hall. Community rooms. Church halls. Anywhere that would have them. In the early 1970s, thanks to the efforts of Harold Wilson, Donald Munro and Claude Clegg, a loan was secured from the Municipality. The HHDS obtained the land and permission to build a permanent home.
And then they built it. Themselves.
The Playhouse Theatre was designed by architect Harry Hargreaves and built by the members of the Hottentots Holland Dramatic Society in stages, as money became available, beginning with just the basic facilities: a stage, a small foyer, kitchen amenities and toilets. When there was money for more, they built more. When there wasn’t, they stopped and performed on what they had. The Playhouse officially opened on 26 May 1973.
What has happened in that building since then is a record of a community’s cultural life across more than half a century. Comedies, dramas, musicals, dance revues, children’s shows, pantomimes. Generations of Somerset West children have had their first experience of live theatre in those 196 seats. Generations of Somerset West adults have spent nervous first nights backstage, made lifelong friends in the wings and discovered that they could, in fact, carry a tune.
Over the years the Society has supported multiple charities and community programmes within the Helderberg Basin — the Helderberg Hospice, the Helderberg Society for the Aged, the Somerset West Night Shelter, the Helderberg Scouts, Hottentots Holland High School and many others. A theatre that runs itself on volunteer labour and still finds time to raise money for other people’s causes. There is something quietly magnificent about that.
The land it is situated on the corner of Lourensford and Swalle Streets and had once belonged to the municipality. Many years later the Society succeeded in buying the land for a very meagre amount and it now belongs to the members completely.
They built it. Then they bought the ground underneath it. Then they kept going.
Some institutions in a town are there because someone planned them, funded them and decided they should exist. The Playhouse is there because people who loved theatre simply refused to not have one. There is a difference and you can feel it the moment you walk in the door.
Between You and Me:
The Hottentots Holland Dramatic Society built its own theatre. With its own hands. In stages, as the money came in, stopping when it ran out and continuing when it didn’t. I find this the most Somerset West thing imaginable, a community that wanted something, could not afford to buy it ready-made and so simply built it themselves, one wall at a time, over years. The Playhouse is the physical record of that stubbornness. The 196 seats were put there by volunteers. The stage was built by volunteers. The plumbing, at various points, has been fixed by volunteers at inconvenient hours under considerable pressure. It has been going since 1947 without a government subsidy. It will probably outlast several governments.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: eight readers a day — the room in the Town Hall that became a library, the shillings spent on books and a record that cannot quite agree on how it all began.
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