St Stephen’s Church

St Stephen’s Church stands on the Bree Street edge of Riebeeck Square, a long pale yellow building behind a low stone wall and a row of parked cars. At a glance it reads as a modest nineteenth century church: a pedimented front, pointed windows with white surrounds, steps up to the door. The giveaway is higher up. Set into the wall above the windows is a row of small oval openings, and along the roofline a line of buttresses each capped with a stone urn. Neither belongs to church architecture. They are what survives of the building this was designed to be, which was the first purpose-built theatre in South Africa.

The idea came from a group of British garrison officers and townspeople who petitioned the governor of the first British occupation, Sir George Yonge, to establish a subscription theatre. Yonge took it up as a personal project. He appropriated a portion of the Boerenplein, the open ground now called Riebeeck Square, passed a section of it to a committee of shareholders, designed the building himself and paid for much of it out of his own pocket. No professional architect is recorded. Lady Anne Barnard, writing on 28 July 1800, noted that the governor was so taken with the scheme that he went every day to the spot where they were digging the foundations.

An opening night was advertised for 17 November 1800 and did not happen. The theatre finally opened during 1801, and the first production for which a record survives is Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 in October that year, which ran for a week. Lady Anne Barnard described the evening in a letter of 16 October: it began with an address to Apollo written by Mrs Somers and spoken by her husband, and although she thought the play dull, some scenes were very well done. It is the earliest recorded performance of Shakespeare in southern Africa.

The African Theatre, also called the Afrikaansche Schouwburg and known locally as the Komediehuis, was run by its shareholders as a subscription house. The shares were divided between English and Dutch holders and productions were meant to alternate between the two languages, with German and French pieces staged as well. The companies were mostly amateur, drawn from the garrison and from local dramatic societies with names like Tot Nut en Vermaak and Tot Leering en Vermaak, stiffened occasionally by professionals passing through on their way east. Lord Charles Somerset kept a box. Tickets were expensive enough to keep attendance to the colonial elite, and enslaved people were permitted to go ahead and hold seats for their owners but were not allowed to watch.

The building itself was rough work behind its plaster. The walls were Table Mountain sandstone, rough dressed and bonded with clay rather than mortar, and the upper courses were eked out with half burnt brick and rendered over. It had a low pitched roof, buttresses topped with urns, the row of oval windows, and a covered colonnade of four columns reached by two curving stairways. Inside there was no pit at first, only a balcony and ornamented boxes, with a pit added in 1804. The stage was small, with dressing rooms behind it. Underneath the auditorium, at street level, the design provided for shops, workshops and storerooms. The two stairways were pulled down in 1824, which matters more than it sounds: what stands today is the building as it has been since then, not as it was built.

Theatre-going fell out of favour in Cape Town during the 1830s as evangelical feeling hardened against the stage. A correspondent writing as Philemon in the South African Commercial Advertiser in June 1836 attacked attendance as a breach of baptismal vows. Documented productions continue as late as 1838, and in March 1839 the building was sold.

What it was sold for gives the building its second life. Slavery at the Cape ended in 1834, followed by a four year period of apprenticeship that expired on 1 December 1838. On that day Dr James Adamson of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and the Reverend G. W. Stegmann, then a Lutheran pastor, held a service for the newly freed at St Andrew’s. It was Adamson’s idea to take the empty theatre and use it as a school. The building was bought the following year, reportedly for £3,484, and adapted as a church for people freed from slavery and a school for their children: classes during the week, worship and Sunday school on Sundays. A congregation formed around 1841 and the church was consecrated on 30 April 1843.

The name is traditionally explained by an incident rather than a dedication. The story is that stones were thrown at the building during a service, and that the congregation took the name of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who was stoned to death. It is worth knowing that the accounts do not agree on who threw them. The heritage register and most English retellings say dissatisfied slaves; the Dutch Reformed Church’s own congregational history says dissatisfied slave owners, or slaves according to some sources; another account says people opposed to the establishment of a church for the newly freed. No contemporary record of any such incident is known, and every source that repeats the story marks it as something said rather than something documented.

In 1857 the congregation asked to be taken into the Dutch Reformed Church and was incorporated on 15 November as that church’s seventy-fourth congregation, with representation in its synod. Stegmann was admitted as a Dutch Reformed minister the same year. This was an unusual arrangement: congregations of colour were generally placed in mission or daughter structures rather than admitted to the mother church, and St Stephen’s is often described as the only Dutch Reformed congregation named after a saint. The 1857 decision still shapes the building. Because St Stephen’s was never a mission congregation, it was not part of the mission church that merged into the Uniting Reformed Church in 1994, and it remains within the Dutch Reformed Church today.

The twentieth century nearly took it. By 1936 the building was in poor condition and there was talk of selling. In 1949 a firm proposing to put a parking garage on the site offered ten times the earlier figure, and the scheme collapsed for two reasons: the plot was too small, and the City Council refused to surrender a further nine metres of Riebeeck Square. Later the Group Areas Act raised the prospect of the area being zoned for white occupation, which would have displaced the congregation from its own church. The minister P. S. Latsky, who served here for more than twenty years, pressed the case for protection, and the building was declared a national monument on 22 October 1965.

What a visitor is actually looking at is the shell. The oval windows and the urn-topped buttresses are original to the theatre and visible from the square, and the street-level shops built into the base of the building are still in commercial use, which is a remarkable piece of continuity for a design of 1800. Inside, the stage is reported to survive and the actors’ dressing rooms have become the vestry. The auditorium itself is gone: the boxes, the balcony and the ornament did not survive the conversion, and the twin stairways and their colonnade had already been removed in 1824. The pediment and the pointed windows on the front belong to the building’s long life as a church rather than to its years as a theatre.

St Stephen’s remains a congregation of the Dutch Reformed Church, with a hundred or so members and a Sunday morning service in Afrikaans, and it is not set up as a visitor attraction. No opening hours, tour arrangements or visitor guidance are published, and there is no church website. Anyone hoping to see the interior should arrange it in advance rather than arriving unannounced. The exterior is the reliable experience, and it is best taken from the middle of Riebeeck Square, where the whole length of the building can be seen at once and the theatre details in the upper wall are easiest to pick out. A period of restoration through the 2000s, driven by a fundraising campaign in the Afrikaans press, led to the church being re-dedicated in January 2009.