Rita was always just there. Or so it seemed. I actually can’t even remember when Rita Ehlers started at Pact (Performing Arts Council for the Transvaal) Drama, but it was after I did. One day she wasn’t there, and then the next she was. And she became a legend.
And rightly so, for Rita was all things to all of us.
A dynamo, she redefined efficiency. I used to tease her sometimes by calling her Vorsprung Durch Technik, because she could be Teutonic – speaking with that clipped English and quaint Afrikaans – and she took no nonsense.
Tact might not have been her longest and strongest suit, but honesty was. You always knew where you stood with Rita.
She was a woman of immense (and intense) integrity. A spade was a spade. If you slipped up on points of professionalism, or of professional etiquette, then you soon knew all about it.
Rita, you see, was the Afrikaans Drama Company’s company manager, and she ran it with something of a rod of iron, but always – always – tempered with her wonderfully warm personality.
With her energy, her effi- ciency and her strict sense of right and wrong came the most extraordinary and most infectious enthusiasm for everything she did, and for the theatre, which was her life.
How do I remember Rita?
Always that love of her work. She was an amazing woman. Yes, she took some getting to know. She didn’t fuss about with being ingratiating or trying to be anything she wasn’t.
She was Rita Ehlers, take her or leave her. And she played a massive role in the life of anyone who came to work at Pact and the State Theatre from the mid-1970s onwards.
In her last few years at the State Theatre, before retiring in 1998, she was my assistant in the drama department. By then we were a small administrative team, and I knew I could rely on her to do anything and everything I asked. She had so much deeply etched knowledge, experience and wisdom. I’d always been fond of her, but I grew to love her deeply in those years.
When the State Theatre’s days were over, we stayed in regular contact. I saw her a few days before she died. She was her usual bright-eyed, warm, chatty, affectionate self. No surprises there. Rita was in every way the personification of constancy.
– Peter Terry (former artistic head of State Theatre drama)