These days Matthew Krouse can usually be found in the bookshop he runs upstairs in the David Baillie Gallery at Victoria Yards in Lorentzville, Johannesburg. With his usual, self-deprecating and dry sense of humour, Krouse seems a little bemused at the fuss being made about things he did in his 20s. Back then, he was living the life of a gay drama student newly arrived in Johannesburg from the East Rand town of Germiston, where he was born to a Jewish mother and an Afrikaans father in 1961.
He was also the target of envy because he had school colours for “art stuff” while his schoolmates were “fascist superheroes on the sports field, killing themselves for colours. I was chain-smoking with filthy fucking hands and nails, my clothing was always scrubby, I was cruising all the boys… I was real suburban trash, but I had colours for acting.”
Krouse now admits that perhaps Weekend Theatre was hamstrung by the fact that “we were severely apolitical, and that was the result of the admiration that we were giving to British and American performance culture and their performance art scene”.Krouse’s plans for theatre glory were dealt a crushing blow in 1984, when “I fucked out at Wits. Andrew got the Fulbright and left for America [to study film at the University of California] and I bummed out and had to leave.
Matthew Krouse and Robert Colman perform the banned play Famous Dead Man at the Black Sun cabaret theatre in Hillbrow, 1986. Image: courtesy of Matthew Krouse Keen to develop an idea he’d had while in the army for “a Rat Pack cabaret” based on the life and assassination of apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd, Krouse sought out his former theatre collaborator Robert Colman. Together they developed the playwhich they performed to the enthusiastic mirth of white, progressive crowds at The Black Sun in Hillbrow.
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