The view is breathtaking, and Pieter Toerien's offices at the Theatre on the Bay are just down the road. But Lord Charles Somerset's old shooting box is not a quiet interview spot.
We're caught between a noisy Klein Genot wine launch in one corner and loud tourists in the other. It's packed, even though there's a minimum lunch price. Your R160 gets you two courses of Irish chef Ronan O'Dwyer's five-course menu, a daring and for the most part memorable showcase of talent. Rather like my lunch companion.
HOW HE CHILLS
 Does Pilates with an instructor in the gym above the theatre
Watches DVDs in the little 20-seater theatre in his Camps Bay house
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Toerien (62) has maintained an undimmed passion for show business for almost half a century. I saw his teenage puppet shows as a Cape Town schoolgirl, and later his Marlene Dietrich show, when the top ticket price was R6. He was 20. A theatre prodigy, this skinny oddball from Pinelands, he just kept going, though his diplomat father never approved. Not even when his son was staging the works of the world's theatre greats, like Amadeus, A Streetcar Named Desire, Equus and Agnes of God.
Soft-spoken and mellow on the surface, Toerien has always been a sharp-eyed, driven perfectionist, and he got himself into choppy waters recently during the M-Net public voting auditions for the two leads in High School Musical, his December production with Hazel Feldman. When it looked as if the singer with the least acting ability was going to win - "He'd canvassed massive church support," Toerien tells me, looking stricken - the impresario did a bit of canvassing himself for the better choice, and he won.
Counteracting that controversy has been Toerien's unstinting support for the now wheelchair-bound manager of his restaurant at the Theatre on the Bay. Andrew Merryweather (27) was the victim of a beating by a private-school gang that left him paralysed two years ago. "He's made enormous progress since that day we first saw him in Groote Schuur, when he was unable to move at all," says Toerien. "He's fighting back, at work every day."
It's the kind of undaunted spirit that has made Toerien himself achieve the almost impossible - remain in business through all the bad times, with none of the government support the Baxter and Market get for their less commercially driven fare.
"I've never been a defeatist. I always just go for it, and even when the people haven't come, nothing has killed the passion," says the man who opened his first theatre in 1976, the year both the Soweto riots and TV hit SA, and kept the doors open through artistic boycotts and emigrating audiences. "I'd been lucky enough to invest in the world's four biggest musicals early on and they paid off. During the 1980s, I subsidised local productions with that income."
He's had eight theatres altogether, seven of them in Johannesburg, and still has the Alhambra, though it remains closed at Ellis Park. "We use the Alhambra for rehearsals and storage. It's very sad. The building reproaches me. There's 20 years of my life there. I have hopes of reopening it after 2010, when the environment might have become more user-friendly."
The Theatre on the Bay opened in 1988, and in 2000 Montecasino built the R120m Teatro, on the guarantee that Toerien would do all his big shows there.
Of the musicals, The Lion King has grossed the most. "It made R160m, playing to 97,6% capacity for 40 weeks, and was seen by more than 600 000 people. However, if you make 10% profit in the theatre, you're doing well. Overheads are high and margins tight."
He's taken his SA productions of the musicals all over the world - Cats, Phantom of the Opera and Jesus Christ Superstar - and is now planning an SA production of Les Misérables.
There's not a helluva lot of holiday time. "When there is, I like to get on to a boat and go somewhere." He's been on the QE2 seven times, cruising the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and taking with him a stash of political biographies, like Tony Leon's.
Ranking the Analysts 2009
