| What: Unruly Performer: Andrew Buckland, accompanied by jazz performer and composer Chantal Willie-Petersen on double bass Director: Neil Coppen When: July 17 to August 2, 2025 Where: The Baxter Studio, Cape Town Bookings: Webtickets ย ย Writers: Neil Coppen, Andrew Buckland and Dylan McGarry Design: Dylan McGarry Original score: Braam Du Toit and Chantal Willie-Petersen. Sound design: Tristan Horton |
Exciting news is the full-length season of Unruly at the Baxter fromJuly 17 to August 2, 2025. The acclaimed piece, stars Andrew Buckland who is accompanied on stage by jazz performer and composer Chantal Willie-Petersen on double bass and is directed by Neil Coppen. Read on for more about the production, presented by Empatheatre, in collaboration with The Baxter, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Unruly Natures research project. Info as supplied:
UNRULY returns by popular demand for full-length season at The Baxter
Empatheatre, in collaboration with The Baxter, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Unruly Natures research project, presents a return, full-length season of UNRULY by popular demand.
Starring theatre luminary Andrew Buckland, accompanied on stage by award- winning Jazz performer and composer Chantal Willie-Petersen on double bass, UNRULY will be performed for a limited season from July 17 to August 2, 2025 in The Baxter Studio.
Directed by esteemed theatre maker Neil Coppen, this immersive storytelling performance, based on extensive academic and creative research, explores the coexistence of urban baboons and humans in the fictional town of Skemer Baai, where tensions rise following the mysterious disappearance of a baboon matriarch.
Bookings can be made at Webtickets
UNRULY invites audiences to engage with the complexities of human-animal relationships, Cape Peninsulaโs shared ecology, and the unpredictable forces of nature. Tensions run high as baboon politics divides a community seeking answers. UNRULY explores how we can understand the issue from multiple perspectives – painting in the process a rich picture of the Cape Peninsulaโs complex history and shared ecology of mountain, ocean, urban and military environments, prone to wildfires, seas surges and messy human/animal relations.
UNRULY is co-written by Neil Coppen, Andrew Buckland and Doctor Dylan McGarry. Completing the stellar creative team, the production features a new original score by Braam DuToit, working in collaboration with Chantal Willie-Petersen. Lighting design is by Tina le Roux and set and costumes by McGarry.
Buckland offers audiences a dynamic performance brimming with humour, compassion and his trademark physical theatre mastery alongside Willie-Petersenโs evocative live music.
Press comments about the production include:
โa riveting new production devised by the Empatheatre team. 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 existenceโ Beverley Brommert, Theatre Scene Cape Town
โMaybe it is watching Buckland, as Rob, break down on the floor at the audienceโs feet without the proscenium stage to shield him, or maybe it is the simple act of sitting neighbour-to-neighbour, away from the WhatsApp groups, but catharsis is palpable in the room.โ Isabel Olson, Mail & Guardian
The show has completed 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).
โWith this topic more salient than ever, the return of UNRULY at The Baxter as a fully developed theatrical work is important timing,โ says director Neil Coppen.
โWe devised this piece following research into residentsโ own lived experiences and challenges of coexisting with urban baboons on the Cape Peninsula. The feedback at our post-show discussions has been invaluable for interrogating the question, โHow should we, as humans, act towards a nature that doesnโt always behave the way we expect it to?โ The debate remains ongoing to explore solutions and understanding on both sides,โ 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 19th, 14h30 and Saturday the 26th, 14h30 shows. The dialogues will be facilitated by co-author of โUnrulyโ, and co-founder of Empatheatre Dr. Dylan McGarry.
Dylan McGarry (Empatheatre co-founder, sociologist; Artist): โI have found this project fascinating, as it reveals how myth and reality shape our interactions with each other and with the natural world. Trying to understand human/baboons relationships living in urban environments, has taught me a lot about how we as humans, struggle in these same environments, and I canโt help but think these messy entanglements are teaching us how to listen and attend to each other in more playful and tender ways.โ
UNRULY will be performed from 17 July โ 2 August in The Baxter Studio.
Age 14 +
Tickets cost R240
Bookings can be made at Webtickets
Performances are on:
Tues to Sat 20h00
Sat 14h30
For discounted block or schools bookings , charities or fundraisers contact Carmen Kearns on email carmen.kearns@uct.ac.za and Mark Dobson on mark.dobson@uct.ac.za
Credits:
Written by Neil Coppen in collaboration with Andrew Buckland and Dr Dylan McGarry
Inspired by research undertaken by Johan Enqvist (Researcher and project leader for Unruly Natures), Luke Metelerkamp (researcher for Unruly Natures project) and Kinga Psiuk (Junior Researcher in the Unruly Natures project)
Direction – Neil Coppen
Design- Dylan McGarry
Actor Andrew Buckland
Musician Chantal Willie-Petersen
Original score by Braam Du Toit & Chantal Willie-Petersen.
Sound Design Tristan Horton
About the team:
Andrew Buckland: Co-creator and performer
After tripping and falling into theatre as a student in 1974, Andrew has been active both as a theatre maker and as an actor performing in a range of theatre, film and television roles in both classical and contemporary genres. Highlights include three Fringe First Awards from the Edinburgh Festival, and the role of Sgt Pepper in the Las Vegas production of LOVE The Beatles for the prestigious Cirque du Soleil in 2008/2009. During his 49 year career he has also developed a reputation for creating an extraordinary range of cutting edge original work including The Ugly Noo, Between The Teeth, Bloodstream, Feedback, The Well Being. These plays, together with his performances in; Monday after the Miracle, Fuse, Breed, Crazy in Love, Tobacco, The Inconvenience of Wings, Endgame and Firefly, have garnered a significant list of national and international awards including the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 1986.
Between 1992 and 2017 he played a key role in the Drama Department of the University Currently Known as Rhodes when he retired and was named Associate Professor Emeritus. Andrew continues to engage strongly in the creation of new works and is also a member of the creative team which devised a new work with the Phare Ponleu Selpak Circus Company in Cambodia for the Global Arts Corps. His on screen work includes leading roles in the telenovella Legacy for Tshedza Films, Catching Feelings by Kagiso Lediga and he has also received international acclaim for his role as Gerald in the feature film The Fragile King directed by Tristan Holmes which is now released through Amazon Prime. His recent performance work in 2022/23 includes leading roles in Hold Still by Nadia Davids for the Baxter Theatre, Oedipus at Colonus for Magnet Theatre, The Life and Times of Michael K for the Handspring Puppet Company and the Baxter Theatre, directed by Lara Foot which presented at the Galway International Festival of the Arts and the Edinburgh Festival, and has since toured to St Annโs Warehouse in New York City and is due to play in Shanghai and other international venues. Firefly is a new work devised in 2021 in collaboration with Sylvaine Strike, Toni Bentel and Tony Morkel for Fortune Cookie Theatre. This work has enjoyed significant success through several seasons in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Chantal Willie-Petersen (Musician/Composer)
Chantal Willie-Petersen is an award- winning South African Jazz performer, composer, curator, educator, scholar, and activist for women’s empowerment in the field of music study. Chantal was one of three black composers in the world to compose for the Carillon
Bell commission by Professor Tiffany NG. She completed two master’s degrees in music in Belgium (Master in the Arts, cum laude) and curates masterclasses and clinics nationally and abroad. She is a multi- instrumentalist, curator, musical director, mentor, speaker, and writer. She is featured on radio and television as a subject specialist regarding South African jazz, and around discussions on music, democracy, culture, society, and performance.
Neil Coppen: Co-creator and director
Neil Coppen is a renowned and prolific storyteller and theatre-maker hailing from Kwa-Zulu Natal . Coppen has won several major awards for his writing, design and direction work including Standard Bank Ovation Awards, Nalediโs, Fiesta and Kanna Awards, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Drama 2011 and the 2019 Olive Schreiner Prize for Drama.
Some of Coppenโs most acclaimed theatre works (taught in schools and universities locally and internationally) include Tin Bucket Drum (Published by Wits University Press), Tree Boy, Abnormal Loads (published by Junkets) and NewFoundLand (published by Junkets) and his adaptation of George Orwellโs Animal Farm toured South Africa for over five-years to sold out seasons. He also directed an acclaimed online reimagining of Hamlet in 2023.
In 2014 Coppen co-founded the multi award-winning research based theatre company Empatheatre alongside Mpume Mthombeni and Dylan Mcgarry and has worked consistently as the companies head dramaturg and director on the productions Soil & Ash, Ulwembu, The Last Country , Boxes, Lalela Ulwandle, Umkhosi Wenala and Unruly starring Andrew Buckland.
In 2022 Coppen alongside visual artist Vaughn Sadie and in collaboration with a community of Oudtshoorn based arts practitioners founded The Karoo Kaarte project (supported by the KKNK). Karoo Kaarte is a large-scale public participative storytelling and archiving project whose theatre productions Op Hierie Dag (2022) Droomkraan Kronieke (2023), Die Swartmerrie (2024) and Kroon en Konfetti (2025)have won several Kanna and Fiesta awards.
Coppen recently co-wrote and directed Empatheatreโs hit play Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater which premiered at NAF 2022 and is currently touring both locally and internationally. He is currently a research associate at the University of Johannesburg.
Dr Dylan McGarry: Co-creator
Co-founder of Empatheatre, Dr. Dylan McGarry is an Educational Sociologist, Ecologist, and Artist, known for his transformative work in various fields. Currently co-directing the One Ocean Hub, an international research project focused on reshaping ocean decision-making, Dylan serves as the Principal Investigator for this project at Rhodes University. His commitment to fostering change extends to his role as the co-director/co-founder of Empatheatre, a pioneering transgressive social learning practice. Dylan holds a transdisciplinary PhD in Environmental Education from Rhodes University, which included an apprenticeship in Social Sculpture at Oxford Brookes University. His (prac)academic journey has been marked by a deep commitment to research creation, creative co-engaged research, and innovative public pedagogy through storytelling and story-listening.
Central to his work is the use of public storytelling as a means to promote inclusive forms of governance in the complex web of social-ecological interactions. His research interests encompass Transgressive Social Learning, Public Pedagogy, Theatre-based Research, Arts-based Research, Queer eco-pedagogy, Post-humanism, new Materialism, and critical African feminist approaches to co-engaged qualitative analysis.
โณ Andrew Buckland in Unruly, which will be on stage in Cape Town, Baxter Studio, July 17 to August 2, 2025. Photo: Retha Ferguson. Sponsored content. Image supplied.
