The building was not designed for drama. Its steel frame was shipped from Britain and bolted together on site in 1913, with soaring arches and a cathedral-like dome raised to shelter Johannesburg's Indian Fruit Market. For decades it was a place of produce and commerce; on Sundays its main hall hosted symphony concerts. By the 1970s the complex sat neglected, and a band of theatre-makers including Barney Simon and Mannie Manim began raising money to rescue it. Much of the renovation was done by the artists themselves. They kept what they could, and today a good deal of the original Edwardian ironwork and signage survives, the bones of a marketplace now sharing the site with Museum Africa. It is a theatre that still smells faintly of the work that built it.

By the time the Market opened, international pressure on the apartheid government was mounting, and inside the country the system was straining. The theatre planted itself squarely in that turbulence. Under Barney Simon's artistic direction it became deliberately non-racial at a moment when mixing across the colour line on stage and in the audience was a provocation. A stream of fierce, locally grown plays followed, Woza Albert, Asinamali, Bopha, Sophiatown, Born in the RSA, You Strike the Woman, You Strike a Rock, work that gave voice to people the state preferred silent. As one tribute put it, in providing a voice to the voiceless, the Market did not abandon artistic excellence but made a point of it. The theatre's contribution to South Africa's eventual arrival at democracy in 1994 is woven through the whole period.

Some of the boldest moments came when the theatre staged the world's classics with South African defiance. In October 1987 the director Janet Suzman mounted a multi-racial production of Othello, casting a Black actor as the Moor opposite a white Desdemona, a piece of staging that was incendiary in a country where such intimacy on stage broke deep taboos. Suzman also directed Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan, pointedly renamed The Good Woman of Sharpeville after the township that gave its name to a 1960 massacre. In 1981 the theatre presented the first Afrikaans translation of a play by Athol Fugard, Hello and Goodbye, drawing in Afrikaner audiences and proving the stage could speak across the very divides the state had built. The Market did not lecture so much as confront, and trust its audiences to feel the point.

The complex grew into three performance spaces, opening with the Barney Simon Theatre, a 120-seat room, while restoration on the rest of the building continued, followed by the Main Theatre that October and the Laager. The names attached to the place read like a roll-call of South African performance: the playwrights Fatima Dike, Maishe Maponya and Paul Slabolepszy; the satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys; directors Lara Foot, Malcolm Purkey and Yael Farber; the Handspring Puppet Company that would later astonish the world with War Horse. In 1995 the theatre won the American Jujamcyn Award. In 2014 its Main Theatre was renamed for John Kani, the celebrated actor who served as its chairperson, and whose career as a Black artist on these boards is itself a history of the struggle the building helped carry. The fruit market is long gone. The stage it became is still arguing, still alive.