As I drove to the Baxter Theatre Centre to watch Andrew Buckland deliver another brilliant performance in Unruly, my car radio was tuned to The Money Show with Stephen Grootes. Wealth manager Warren Ingram was reassuring listeners that, though the headlines might make people feel anxious about the future, “the world has always been unstable and uncertain”. Moreover, “uncertainty and instability is an investor’s best friend” — after all, such circumstances create “opportunities to buy great assets at a low price”.
No doubt this is sound financial advice to individuals: stay the course, don’t panic sell, remember that playing the market is a long-term game. But what about our collective fate? I concur with Grootes’ response to Ingram’s upbeat take on the “bargains to be had” when things appear to be going to hell in a handbasket. The veteran journalist, who has seen it all over the past few decades, shot back: “I’m not feeling like that right now. I’m feeling quite scared right now.”
Apprehension about what tomorrow will bring is one of the great themes of our time, and it is the theme to which Unruly ultimately bends its twisting and turning path. After 90 minutes of enthralling storytelling, Buckland’s character — a humiliated and grieving primatologist — describes himself sharing a cave with his nemesis, the former alpha of a baboon troop. They were simply “two male primates” sitting next to each other, no longer defined by that relatively superficial distinction between man and beast, “looking together towards an uncertain future”.
Unruly was written by Buckland along with Empatheatre’s Dylan McGarry and Neil Coppen, with Coppen also directing. The play is a creative complement to Unruly Natures, a research project exploring the relationship between people and baboons on the Cape Peninsula. Interspecies friction in coastal towns and villages has been the source of much controversy in recent years, with “pro” and “anti” baboon lobbies waging impassioned campaigns.
After numerous developmental performances in 2024, soliciting feedback from audience members drawn from these communities, Unruly has reached theatrical fruition in its current run at the Baxter (until August 2). It is a rich, immersive, sensory encounter. What was a one-man performance has been transformed into a remarkable collaboration between Buckland and musicians Chantal Willie-Petersen and Braam du Toit, with Willie-Petersen’s double bass growing from moody jazz accompaniment to an additional narrative voice. Tina le Roux’s lighting design — from spotlights to candlelight, drifting through smoke — further aids the creation of a fully realised dramatic world.
Buckland’s inimitable charisma carries us through a tale of love and violence, of misadventure and misunderstanding, while humour and pathos merge in his embodiment of multiple characters (human and baboon). The long shadow of white colonial hubris and myopia is discernible; histories of displacement are repeated. If we reframe our ecological understanding from one of competition to one of co-operation, Unruly suggests, we might get an answer to the question Buckland’s primatologist asks his fellow ape: “Where to now, old boy?”
Uncertainty about the future is also at the heart of Voni Baloyi’s conceptualisation of the theme for the 2025 Heat Festival, which will take place at venues across Cape Town from August 6-16. Working with co-curators Mary Corrigall and Nkgopoleng Moloi, Baloyi devised “Other Worlding” as a curatorial framework for this year’s event. Yet, while the theme’s gesture towards speculation — that is, towards a multitude of possibilities — might yield hope for the despondent, Baloyi’s speech at a launch event held earlier this week acknowledged its sombre premise.
The Heat Festival was inaugurated last year under the rubric of “Common Ground”, aiming “to find foundational articulations of what we call community”. This year, Baloyi draws attention to “cracks in the concept of commune, with futures splintering away from one another”. How can we agree on a “progressive future”, she asks, when we cannot agree on the “consequential past” — and when there is a “dilution of consensus” in the present?
Still, while dispiriting geopolitics and winter weather might combine to keep Capetonians hunkering down grim-faced at home, Heat Festival founder and director Corrigall has a better idea. Go out, visit galleries, watch theatre, listen to live music. Art may yet save our sapient primate species.
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