Tobie Cronje on stage. Scenes from the pantomime Snow White.

© Maxine Denys (Joburg Theatre).

The veteran of scores of movies, plays, TV-series, cabaret and the odd piano performance has just started, for the first time, acting in a soap opera. A storyline has been created specially for him in the hospital series Binnelanders (‘People of the Interior’). He is somewhat apprehensive.

We are waiting for his charge of several years now, the 15-year-old Refilwe Matsimela, who has to be taken to her boarding school, the posh Rand High School for Girls. Although she has her own room, she spends weekend nights in the bed of her mother, Philippine, who is disabled after a hit-and-run accident.

“It cuts too close to the bone”, complains Cronje, in the appropriate medical language. He is talking about the hurried way in which soaps are shot, barely allowing time for rehearsing a scene. Cronje feels he doesn’t get time to “hide” inside his character, and that as a consequence too much of himself is visible.

Cronje is also a tai-chi and Zen meditation teacher, and is always willing to give alternative medicine a try. But it is just coincidence that his storyline is that of the rather marginalised brother of the chief doctor and owner of the hospital, who appears one day out of the blue and peddles ‘new age’ approaches.

The situation is meant to generate comedy, which is Cronje’s forté. He first won the hearts of South Africans as the bumbling private eye Willem. Cronje got so famous that he was mobbed on many an occasion, unusual for someone who will be the first to admit he doesn’t have the looks of Sean Connery. Since then he has become an annual fixture in the hugely popular pantomime at the Johannesburg civic centre, playing camped-up wicked witches and silly queens.

Refilwe rushes into the kitchen, where Cronje has just finished his bowl of quinoa. The bright-eyed youngster has a row of clothes hangers with school dresses over her crooked finger. No, she doesn’t want breakfast – later she admits to looking forward to the hostel’s food, the best thing about it.

Financial father

“One day she just grew tried of my tofu and olive salads”, remarks Cronje dryly. They are clearly fond of each other; later Cronje recounts how he and his partner, the late journalist William Pretorius, tried to adopt Refilwe when Philippine, who had just started as his housekeeper, announced she was pregnant. Cronje and Pretorius were advised not to do so, since it might create endless problems in the future. Later Refilwe’s father, who does not contribute to her upkeep, was identified as a bus driver in the northern city of Polokwane. “So I became her financial father, instead of her adoptive father”, says Cronje.

We’re off in Cronje’s car, after I have pulled mine into his yard behind the security gate – the guard that every Johannesburg suburb has to have nowadays is nowhere to be seen. Cronje has his own crime story, like every South African: a friend’s car was recently almost stolen in the few seconds that the guard nodded off in his hut. In the rush-hour traffic Refilwe confesses her dream. She is not much interested in university; she wants to become a pilot, following in the footsteps of a friend who started the four-year course in Pretoria this year.

By the time we reach the old brownstone building, barely two or three kilometres away, she remembers she has forgotten something. “That’s the one drawback of going to a hostel so close to home”, says Cronje. “She easily forgets something since she knows I’ll bring it to her just as easily.” Then it’s off back home to imbibe some more dialogue. At Binnelanders they don’t require him to be on set at 7am, his call is for 10.30am, for three shoots until 5pm. But he soon begins to frown. The other thing about soaps, grumbles Cronje, is that the characters are so inconsistent, because several writers have a go at them. He has pointed out some inconsistencies to the directors, but they have been dismissive, saying nobody would notice.

Cronje misses his William, who died two years ago. Theatre managements knew that when they hired Cronje for a production, Pretorius had to be come on board as well, to act as his prompter. Cronje is notorious for forgetting his dialogue. Now he relies on healthy doses of spirulina and omega3, especially when he works on a movie, a play and soap on a single day, as happened three weeks earlier.

Non-unionised industry

Cronje shares a cloakroom with Hans Strydom, the patriarchal main character in the soap. Strydom is a lawyer in real life, and has brought his profession with him to the studio complex in the centre of Johannesburg. He has been acting as representative for South African theatre people who are hugely exploited in the non-unionised industry. Cronje is the perfect example. He has acted in 20 films, but it was only through Strydom’s intercession that, for the first time, he recently got paid film royalties instead of a one-off fee.

Their costumes for the day have been hung out on a trolley rail. Then it’s off to the Green Room for some coffee and cake. The pieces of dried cake tend to go uneaten, because it comes straight off the set every day, and the actors and production people have simply grown tired of it. There is a monitor in the Green Room, announcing in running script who has to do what. “Strange that it is all in English when it’s an Afrikaans soap”, says Cronje. Although the series has a multiracial cast, and Afrikaans is spoken by millions of black people, English is the lingua franca in the industry. He is then called for the rehearsal of the first of his three shoots for the day. As Cronje is such a professional, the director is satisfied. The four cameras are called in, and they go through the rehearsal as well. Then it is the real shoot, but after just one go, everybody is happy, and it is in the can. Everyone except Cronje, that is. “Instant acting”, he sighs. “I still have to get used to it.”

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