Durban - The old picture this week takes in a famed watering hole in Sarnia Road, Umbilo: the Outspan Hotel.
Next to it, and it’s unclear in the old picture because there is a road between them, is the old Lyric Theatre.
The picture is from our archives, and a pasted-on caption says it was published on April 22, 1979. The caption reads: “One of Durban’s better known hotels, The Outspan, may be taken over by the railways for a men’s staff residence.”
In a post on Facts About Durban, David Baird remembers the Outspan Hotel in an article, Watering Holes of My Youth.
“Further out was the Outspan Hotel which (as the locals would droningly tell you) had the longest bar on Earth, or Mars or some such. It was always full of railway workers.”
Apparently the bar lady was forever pointing out that it had the longest bar in Durban, no doubt because she had to walk it. He remembers the curry at the nearby Willowvale being superior.
The bar would also have done great service for the Lyric Theatre patrons.
One of the hotel’s claims to fame is that the country’s first multi-racial Rotary Club met there from 1979. The new Umhlatuzana Club incorporated the old Port Natal Rotary Club and included members from the Bluff, Wentworth, Mobeni, Umlazi, Prospecton and Chatsworth.
The hotel was later converted into an old age home with the same name, which today is no longer operating. Our photographer Shelley Kjonstad says it looks unoccupied although it is believed to be used for student accommodation.
The Lyric Theatre was opened in December 1959 after its conversion from what was known as the Planet Cinema. It seated 500 people.
In 1961 Desmond Morley was appointed administrative director. He presented numerous productions, including major musicals as The King and I (1951), The Sound of Music (1959) and The Wizard of Oz (1963).
In Facts About Durban, Trevor Friend remembers the Lyric as “a small theatre that seemed to have The King and I playing there almost indefinitely (or so it seemed)”.
It’s not certain what happened to Morley, who stopped producing and went to Northern KZN where he seems to have run a trading store. He later joined Telkom as a telephone technician.
Rebranded the New Lyric Theatre in July 1974, the theatre promoted a number of indigenous works, including the first showing before a white audience of Gibson Kente’s How Long? in 1973 and Ipi-Tombi in 1974.
Durban theatre doyenne Caroline Smart paid tribute to theatrical figure Anne Butt who in the 60s and 70s appeared in and directed productions at the Lyric. She died in August 1999.
“She was associated with productions such as Man About the House, Intent to Murder, Relative Values, I’ll Get My Man and The Sound of Murder as well as Goodnight, Mrs Puffin, Murder Without Crime and the highly acclaimed Trap for a Lonely Man at St John’s which featured Eddie Winship, David Randle, Jean Anne Gunthorpe, Marjorie Nichols and Peter Turner,” Smart writes.
Smart remembers her last major appearance was in An Inspector Calls staged by the Durban Theatre Workshop Company in which Smart starred.
The theatre closed in 1981 and was then owned by Durban Christian Centre until 1986. The building does not appear to be in use now. A faded signboard where the latest productions were once advertised in lights suggest it was at one point used by the Assemblies of God.
The Independent on Saturday