Transit to premier at new CT theatre
New Africa Theatre Association is now set to be the name of Cape Town's newest theatre as it launches the New Africa Theatre with a new play, Transit, in partnership with the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden.
Transit premières at this newly equipped theatre venue at 43 Golf Course Road, Sybrand Park, Cape Town, for a season from 15 October to 7 November 2009. Performances are Tuesdays to Friday at 7pm and Saturday at 3pm and 7pm.
The script is by Ian Bruce, internationally acclaimed writer and award winner of Groundswell. Multi-award winner Clare Stopford directs well-known and up-and-coming artists that include Mbulelo Grootboom and Sylvia Bulelwa Ntlantlu from Cape Town, Melinda Kinnaman, Peshang Rad and Christina Samson from Sweden, joined by itinerant West African music maker Aboubacar Ladji Kánte.
The plot
“Transit is about a flight from Cape Town to Stockholm via Frankfurt,” says Bruce. “It is detoured by a storm and makes an unscheduled stop in a north-east African country, destabilised by rebels. An array of Europeans and Africans are forced to wait interminably, in the claustrophobic transit area of a military airport, for their plane to be refuelled. As it happens, the interrupted journey also frustratingly puts on hold the passages of major life adjustments that each individual is going through. The longer the resumption of the flight is delayed the more they get to know about each other and the more inescapably they involve themselves, morally, opportunistically, manipulatively, even physically, in the course of each others lives. While the story definitely accommodates a descriptive clash of African and European aspirations and anxieties it becomes, more importantly for our times, a cross-continental drama of human need, resilience and possibility.”
Three-year partnership
The opening of the theatre is a culminating activity after a three-year partnership that has included skills exchanges; two theatre productions; capacity building programmes and audience development initiatives at both institutions.
Transit is approximately 75 minutes long with no interval. Tickets cost R50. Blocks of 10 or more R40, students and pensioners R30. Book now through Computicket, Shoprite, Checkers outlets and online at www.computicket.com.
