Pieter Toerien

Under the mentorship of Britain's theatre agent Herbert de Leon and in partnership with Basil Rubin, he brought British variety artists such as Alma Cogan and Dickie Valentine to South Africa, eventually adding Russ Conway (1964), Peter Nero (1966), Shelly Berman, Cyd Charisse, Tony Martin, Françoise Hardy and Maurice Chevalier (1967) to his list of luminaries.

Continuing with the successful business formula of signing overseas box-office attractions, he brought names such as Hermione Gingold from New York for Noël Coward's Fallen Angels and Joan Fontaine for Fredrick Knott's thriller Dial M for Murder.

From the early 1980s, British comedy actor and director Rex Garner became associated with Toerien for many box office successes, including Ray Cooney's Out of Order and It Runs in the Family, Michael Pertwee's Birds of Paradise and Robin Hawdon's rewrite of Marc Camoletti's Don't Dress for Dinner, which saw a 2013 revival in Toerien's own theatre complex to critical acclaim.

Together with designer Jan Corewyn, they transformed it with a post modern façade draped with a sculptured curtain, and named it Theatre on the Bay.

These were followed by The Sleeping Beauty on Ice, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar, which was originally banned in South Africa as blasphemous after it opened on Broadway in 1971, and which travelled to Athens in 2007.

The works of such eminent British writers as Noël Coward, Tom Stoppard, Simon Gray and Peter Shaffer have all been mounted in Toerien's theatres.