Monkeying around: Andrew Buckland performs in Simon’s Town during the June tour of Unruly, a production aimed at helping to understand a divisive human-versus-animal battle on the Cape Peninsula. Photos: Odendaal Esterhuyse
‘Man … monkey. Monkey-man,” heaves actor Andrew Buckland before releasing a primal howl.
Nearly 70 people are sitting in a circle bundled in their winter coats. At the centre is Buckland, panting, vest soaked through with sweat, lit by a circle of candles like a town hall meeting turned seance.
In the previous 80 minutes, Buckland had woven himself through a one-man marathon, playing six characters accompanied by nothing but a cardboard baboon mask.
On this Thursday night in June, community members are gathered in a cabin at the foot of the Glencairn Valley in Cape Town — a makeshift venue for tonight’s performance of Unruly, a play created by the company Empatheatre.
It is the sixth stop on a tour through the Cape Peninsula.
Buckland makes his way offstage to thunderous applause as Dr Dylan McGarry, co-creator of Empatheatre and Unruly, graciously invites the audience to stay for a discussion.
Where in the night a few may trickle out, the room remains.
“Maybe I’m pre-empting a storm here, but if you want to also say something difficult, maybe we can try. I’m going to try my best to hold that as well,” says McGarry.
The subject at hand is the peninsula deep south’s human-baboon conflict, one so divisive that Buckland, playing the character Rob, a retired primatologist, starts the show: “The story I’m about to tell you will feature baboons,” as if offering a disclaimer for any audience member who still might want to make a dart for it.
The story does feature baboons, but more than that, it is about the people in Rob’s life as he grapples with living in this new area and his wife Sonja’s death.
Deep south communities have been contending with baboons for decades, but with suburban sprawl encroaching upon their natural habitat and a lack of provincial-level solutions, the opportunistic primates have adapted to urban foraging.
As baboons scrounge through bins, break into homes, harm pets, communities are split over their management. Some residents chase them away with paintball pellets and baboon-proof their houses, stirring outrage among others.
“It is probably the worst moment in baboon management,” says Kinga Psiuk, a junior researcher for the Unruly Natures Project, a team studying human-baboon relations whose research inspired the play.
Unsurprisingly, audience members often called for answers — but Empatheatre sought to provide something else.
“Our job is not to come up with solutions. We are a public storytelling platform,” says McGarry.
“Our job was to explore people’s true perceptions and find out — are people as polarised as we think?”
In May last year, Unruly Natures began winding through 11 Peninsula towns. Despite the high walls and gated communities, it reached 537 households, carrying out surveys in driveways and on front lawns.
Dr Johan Enqvist, the project leader, sought to cut through the hyperbole on community WhatsApps and in media reports and hear from ordinary residents. “If you collect stories and then tell stories back, it really makes people feel seen,” he explains. “It legitimises their reality.”
Empatheatre, a Durban-based company, has produced plays and organised community dialogues on subjects ranging from Inkatha Freedom Party assassins to street-level drug addiction and off-shore drilling, to name only a few.
Within this canon, Unruly is unusual — not least because it is Empatheatre’s first piece examining an issue affecting a majority white, affluent area, one which audience members pointed out was privileged.
Neil Coppen, Empatheatre’s co-founder and Unruly’s director, was fascinated by both the baboon situation’s absurdity, which lent itself to satire and physical theatre, and the admiration and detestation that these creatures, genealogically linked to humans, inspired.
“There was something about … the baboon as a mirror to humanity itself,” says Coppen.
Through six months of independent ethnographic research and interviews, Empatheatre unravelled the issue’s historical and ecological roots, grounding Unruly in more than a modern-day issue.
“People forget that artists are incredible researchers … making is a form of thinking and theorising,” McGarry says.
Buckland was a uniquely fit performer for Unruly — with a lifelong career in physical theatre and one-man travelling shows, his fame had the power to draw audiences.
“There’s no greater performer in this country that can articulate voices with a real authenticity,” says Coppen with admiration — Buckland has been a hero of his since childhood. “He’s so sensitive with his understanding of humans.”
Buckland also has a personal stake in the work. Years ago, Kate Jagger, an old student and friend of his who has since died, unknowingly built her home in the foraging path of a baboon family, with which she came to live in harmony.
Buckland’s memories of watching Jagger and the baboons cohabitate inspired the character Sonja, Rob’s wife, who spends hours on her porch playing the double bass to baboons.
One warm April day in Cape Town, Coppen and Buckland made their way to Tokai. Buckland waded calmly into a troop of about a hundred baboons and found a stump, where he spent the afternoon sitting, watching and listening.
The lament of the double bass whines as Buckland pulls the elastic strap of the baboon mask over his face and disappears into the character of Eugene. He sits perched on his chair, taking in the heavy strings and looking directly into the audience.
His weight shifts delicately as his breathing slows, astute to everything in the room. Just as the image settles, Buckland slips off the mask.
On his feet again, Buckland is toyi-toying across the circle with a group of housewives who exist only in the audience’s imagination. He shifts into Kathy, an uptight, well-meaning baboon activist, and then Henk, a stormy advocate of baboon-proofing with a thick Afrikaans accent.
Maybe it is watching Buckland, as Rob, break down on the floor at the audience’s 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.
It is precisely the effect Coppen intended, and this is where McGarry’s facilitation begins — with tension diffused, hearts in a different place than you might find at an ordinary town meeting.
As always, the audience is seated in a circle, a traditional way of African storytelling, a means of equalising power. Amid them are Unruly Natures researchers, Coppen, McGarry and Buckland — and, implicitly, the six characters he has just played. The floodlights that illuminated the stage are turned off.
“What have we done collectively?” asks one audience member.
“Who do we remove and allow in the space?” echoes another.
They speak of ecological and social grief; of the Group Areas Act, an apartheid-era law sanctioning forced removal by race, and the history of the land that a room of mostly white residents is sitting on.
That week, audience members exchanged stories — the primates’ visits to laundry lines and backyard pools, and the more tumultuous indoor encounters.
McGarry asked the audience to sit within the problem; Coppen, Buckland and the researchers listened, offering their expertise when called for and gathering a new layer of research back.
“We don’t take a show to the main stage until we’ve consulted the communities who helped make it,” said McGarry, referencing the revamped run that will soon travel through the Peninsula before arriving at the Baxter Theatre on 8 November.
Unruly becomes what the team calls democratised research — a cyclical, malleable exploration of stories shared on the driveway pavements of deep south residents, reinterpreted and offered back.
One concern is engaging every segment of these communities.
“I think we haven’t managed to go beyond a certain bubble of people,” says Psiuk.
The upcoming run will focus on reaching more of the Peninsula as well as youth and authority figures.
“We are in a little moment that you cannot get again,” says a man in the front row.
The show will be built up with music and lighting. It will reach more people with audiences on the proscenium stage. But that night, it was bare … with only Buckland and a community’s imagination to hear a story.
“It feels to me like the solution has manifested right here,” Buckland said. “Whatever the story, the act of sitting together, and seeing each other, and listening to each other, is the thing.”
It is over, but a smell of burning wood lingers in the air. The same smell was in the De Gama Park school auditorium the night before and would be in the Capri town hall the night after.