In just a few days, the fourth edition of the Cape Town Fringe opens in venues across the Mother City. Browse our programme, choose some favourites – and book your tickets! Remember, this is the year to go local and to go beyond.

  • Hexagon Theatre’s The Blue Period of Milton van der Spuy by Greig Coetzee is directed by Peter Mitchell and performed by Francis Mennigke. Milton is probably one of Coetzee’s most accomplished works, and questions all notions of art and beauty, within its comic framework.
  • The Book Detectives written and performed by Westley Cockrell and Stuart Cairns is theatre for the whole family. A crime takes in Fairytaleland – and it will take Fairytaleland’s top detectives to figure out the motive. With difficult witnesses and high-speed car chases, these cops have a bad day ahead of them…
The Champion
  • Makukhanye Art Room‘s The Champion is an award-winning production that tells the story of a young man grappling with the legacy of an absent father and a mother who is a grass widow.
  • Presented by the Gender Equity Unit and directed by Qiqa Nkomo, The Citizen explores the journey of various black women unpacking their citizenship in various economic, political, social, and cultural spaces.
  • AFDA’s The Couch offers a surrealist glimpse into the lives of four housemates moving into a new digs. The couch, a place of relaxation and comfort, triggers the housemates to reveal their true inner psyches and reflect on their unresolved pasts.
  • Written and directed by Wynne Bredenkamp, The Edge of the Light is a dark and intense drama, flirting with magical realism, that looks into a family with an abusive past through the only two women left in it.
  • In physical and lyrical vignettes and disconnected monologues, The Funeral is a meditation on our own fraught connection with life and death.
  • The Holy Plan B, written by Thandolwethu Mzembe and directed by Chuma Sopotela and Mzembe, is a wry and satirical look at organised religion and the consumer culture of some Christian churches.
The Playroom
  • Winner of the Market Theatre’s Zwakala Festival in 2013, The Playroom is set in a mental institution and veers from the funny to the chilling and questioning issues of leadership, positions of power within the health system and ultimately who is healing who.
  • The Singing Chameleon is an award-winning children’s theatre production that tells the magical tale of Chameleon who rises above adversity to become a hero.
  • Directed by Onida Cowan and performed Dianne Simpson, The Sisters Ugly asks where the sisters came from? Why are they so ugly? Did they live happily ever after? This retelling of the classic tale ventures into what makes ‘villians’ tick.
  • As the water disappears Nomandla is forced to find her inner strength and in the process becomes the hero that we all need, she becomes The Water Warrior.

See also…