Unruly, a riveting new production devised by the Empatheatre team, will be performed at the Baxter Studio from Thursday 17 July until Saturday 2 August.
The play explores the complexities of human-animal relationships, Cape Peninsula’s shared ecology, and the unpredictable forces of nature. Tensions run high as baboon politics divides a community seeking answers. Unruly looks at how humans can understand the issue from multiple perspectives – painting in the process a rich picture of the Cape Peninsula’s complex history and shared ecology of mountain, ocean, urban and military environments, prone to wildfires, seas surges and messy human/animal relations.
In addition to the obvious theme of the play, secondary threads of narrative are woven into the work’s dense texture, such as promoting empathy between divided communities, man’s destruction of nature, materialism and the liberation that comes from renunciation of all things superfluous to a fulfilling existence.
The show did two sold-out tours across the Cape Peninsula to wide acclaim last year, playing to baboon-visited neighbourhoods, as well as high schools, baboon rangers, municipal and conservation authorities, NGOs and civic groups. It was nominated for three Fleur De Cap Theatre Awards including Best Theatre Production, Best Solo Performance (Andrew Buckland) and Best Sound/Music (Chantal Willie-Petersen).
“With this topic more salient than ever, the return of Unruly at The Baxter as a fully developed theatrical work is important timing,” says director Neil Coppen. “We devised this piece following research into residents’ own lived experiences and challenges of coexisting with urban baboons on the Peninsula. The feedback at our post-show discussions has been invaluable for interrogating the question, “How should we, as humans, act towards a nature that doesn’t always behave the way we expect it to?” The debate remains ongoing on both sides,” says Coppen.
Empatheatre has developed a unique methodology for staging theatre in the round, for it to be conducive for public dialogue, conflict transformation and building public tribunals. In the previous two tours, post-show dialogues were available for audiences to process the research that underpins the script, to ask questions and give testimony from their own encounters and contexts with Wildlife/human conflict. As such we would like to offer this experience to audiences coming to the show. Audiences can join the post show dialogue in selected limited performances on Saturday 19 July at 14:30 and Saturday 26 at 14:00 shows. The dialogues will be facilitated by co-author of Unruly, and co-founder of Empatheatre Dr Dylan McGarry.
The play has an age restriction of 14 and tickets cost R240 at webtickets.
For discounted block or school bookings, charities or fundraisers email carmen.kearns@uct.ac.za or mark.dobson@uct.ac.za
