Event information
The Cage is a new drama set over the course of a single day in a Johannesburg CBD office, following Jakes, a young journalist struggling to establish himself in South Africa's media industry. After the death of his estranged father, a celebrated anti-apartheid playwright, Jakes inherits boxes of manuscripts, banned scripts, photographs and archival material from the struggle years.
His investigation into the material uncovers evidence of a secret Black theatre collective that used performance to spread coded resistance messages during apartheid, with links to Umkhonto we Sizwe operations. As Jakes digs further, he finds evidence the collective was betrayed by an informer, implicating contemporary political figures and drawing the interest of a foreign collector offering a substantial sum for the archive. The play follows Jakes as he weighs exposing the truth against the personal and professional risks of doing so.
Directed by Timothy Soal and written by Bandile Sike Vee Moloi, the production is performed by Bandile Moloi, Saskia Bormans and Krys Igirubuntu. The piece engages with the commodification of liberation history, the burden of inheritance, interracial intimacy in post-apartheid South Africa, and the relationship between art and political power.
The production is rated 13+.